Of course, it is crucially important to defend reproductive rights. Some people, however, do it in such a clumsy, unintelligent way that it would be better for them to stay silent. Here is one example:
Previous to the woman’s liberation movement, men had a secure source of inferiors, right there in his home, and everywhere around him. Women were always right there, to be subservient.
He knew they were inferior, because everything showed him that — they were smaller, they were weaker, they were always pregnant and burdened with children, he could beat them up whenever he liked — and further, his religion and his culture told him they were his inferior. Plus, thanks to all that child-bearing, they kept dying on him. And, thanks to the laws he had written, all the money they made belonged to him.
But then women fought for changes in the laws, and some of them worked to create these medicines, and now what’s happened? They’ve changed the world! They don’t have to have ten or fifteen babies! They can get educated and get jobs! Lots of them have decided to start ignoring the priests and not do Natural Family planning! Lots of them don’t believe the Mens who tell them
Natural Family Planning actually works! (Spoilers: It doesn’t.)
Why would women do such a thing?
And why does it make (some men) so angry?
Simplifications are very seductive because they make the world sound very easy to comprehend. They are, however, completely stupid and never lead to any useful activism. Anybody who has ever paid any attention to the fight over reproductive rights has surely noticed that anti-choicers are not exclusively or even overwhelmingly male. There are crowds of anti-choice women and crowds of pro-choice men. It is simply not possible to create a neat gender divide along the lines of one’s attitude towards reproductive rights.
The post doesn’t end here, however, and, as always happens in such cases, begins to make a case in favor of keeping women “barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.” Any contribution to gender wars, including when conducted in order to advance the rights of women, ends up promoting anti-feminist goals. Here is an example:
For those of you who have never been a mother, I’ll just make this clear: a child takes all of your time. A child needs every bit of every hour of your time. That’s every hour of every day and every night. Two kids need 48 hours of your 24 hours. And so on.
Leaving aside the extreme condescension towards childless women, please consider what this statement implies. If a child has such a profound need of all of the mother’s time, it only follows that women with children should not be allowed to work. Or study. Or leave the house at all, lest their children suffer from their mothers’ absence. Maybe we should chain women to their children to ensure that “every bit of every hour of their time” is spent staring at the kids.
But wait, there is more. The post collapses into a celebration of the patriarchal family model:
If you’re lucky enough to have an extended family around you (I wasn’t), which is the way humans are meant to raise kids (see Mothers and Others by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a book I cannot recommend highly enough) this work of raising a child, and it is work, dear reader, it is the hardest work you will ever do, however much you may love your child, and I love mine more than anything, but don’t fool yourself about what you’re getting into, it’s work, with an extended family around you, the work will be a bit easier, but it’s still work.
I’m sorry for inflicting this horrible writing on you, by the way. If you do manage to get through this breathless sentence, you will see that it suggests the restoration of a patriarchal family. This blogger writes first and thinks never, so she fails to realize that the moment you make your relatives responsible for raising your children, you cannot make any reproductive decisions without taking their interests into consideration. Surely, a woman who finds it such an insurmountable task to raise her own child, cannot be permitted to make any decisions without the input of the relatives who end up paying for her choices.