Topic: Anna Smajdor: pregnancy is unjust

[Pandora]

Lawrence Auster blogs:

At its core the demand for free contraceptives is not about sex. It's about equality between the sexes. And this for feminists and liberals is a sacred cause and the very meaning of America and the reason why they will allow no compromise. Viz:

1.  Society is a collection of equal persons, all having the right to equal freedom.

2.  But remaining traditional social arrangements still render women--half the human race--significantly less free than men.

3.  Therefore the attainment of sexual equality--equality between the sexes with regard to everything in life, particularly with regard to sex itself--is society's highest priority.

4.  In order for the sexes to be equal with regard to sex, women should be at no more risk of pregnancy and its inconveniences than men are.

5.  In order for women to be at no more risk of pregnancy than men are, society (whether in the form of Georgetown University, or some health insurance company, or the taxpayers) must provide all women in America with free birth control.

Apparently, there are some doubters.  Never fear; along comes the feminist Left with proof:

Dr Anna Smajdor lectures in ethics at the University of East Anglia. She has written a paper ("The moral imperative for ectogenesis") on the issue of fertility.

She believes that pregnancy is unjust, because it might impede women's "other interests and aspirations". So, rather than encouraging women to have children in their 20s, she believes a more just solution would be for scientists to develop "ectogenesis" - childbirth through artificial wombs:

    In short, what is required is ectogenesis: the development of artificial wombs that can sustain fetuses to term without the need for women’s bodies. Only by thus remedying the natural or physical injustices involved in the unequal gender roles of reproduction can we alleviate the social injustices that arise from them.


And again:

    The fact that women have to gestate and give birth in order to have children, whereas men do not, is a prima facie injustice that should be addressed by the development of ectogenesis.


Having gotten this far, Anna Smajdor then lets loose on pregnancy itself:

    Pregnancy is barbaric

    There has been a conceptual failure in medical and social and ethical terms to address the pathological nature of gestation and childbirth


Inevitably, part of her argument against pregnancy is the loss of autonomy experienced by women in having to consider the well-being of the foetus:

    The final point to make here is the well-known one that, for expectant mothers, the fact of encompassing another life in their bodies often takes a serious toll on their autonomy. Pregnant women are routinely expected to subsume their appetites and desires into those that would be in keeping with the well-being of the fetus. ...Respect for one’s bodily integrity, something that most men may take for granted at least in a medical setting, is by no means assured for women even in societies that pride themselves on concern for ethics and autonomy.

[John Florida]

   The stupid it burns.

[Pandora]

It's evil.

[Alphabet Soup]

Hey Anna - shaddup and get me a sammich.

[John Florida]

Hey Anna - shaddup and get me a sammich.

 Are you nuts I wouldn't even be in the same state as that idiot never ming the same room,you could catch something from her.

[Glock32]

Huxley's Brave New World is proving to be the more accurate dystopia than Orwell's, though there's elements of that one too.  In BNW fetuses are grown in artificial wombs just like this.  Some are deliberately infused with alcohol to stunt the development of the fetuses' brains, rendering them mildly retarded and docile -- these form the caste of mundane laborers in BNW. I'm astonished how prophetic that novel was. A society of overbearing technocrats managing everyone's existence, keeping them placid with an all-purpose recreational drug and mindless entertainment.

But yes, the stupid is painful. You could say the overarching theme of all these various utopianists is the idea that they can bend reality to their will.  They have already murdered millions in pursuit of those ends, and we've seen ample evidence in the past few years that they've lost none of that bloodlust.  Every day some new argument emerges from the shadows, emboldened that it can now face the light of day, an argument to lay the academic and philosophical foundations for their next big genocide.

[charlesoakwood]

If they think it is so it is so.

Soma, I think.  Yes, we were reading them both in high
school and it seemed the most plausible of the two.

[IronDioPriest]

We can at least rest assured in this: sooner or later, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs will wash this all away, and render such people as useless and irrelevant as they now believe children to be. A society that can facilitate people who concern themselves with gender equality and GLBT rights is a society that has too long been separated from the need for survival.

When they wreck it all, and survival is thrust back to the top of the list, their world comes to a harsh, cruel, sudden end, and in an instant, they'll know that everything they spent their lives caring about was an utter waste. So even if they take the rest of us down with them, I can take some small comfort in that.

[Pandora]

Every day some new argument emerges from the shadows, emboldened that it can now face the light of day, an argument to lay the academic and philosophical foundations for their next big genocide.

In the meantime, they're openly working to eliminate the need for mass murder by advocating against fertility, and killing the family.

Just lately, two "thinkers" made their case for "after-birth" abortion; the one we're currently discussing insists women need to be freed from the burden of pregnancy and then there's a certain Laura Rosenbury, who, in a piece for the NY Times, writes that she wants ....

... family law to change so that it no longer privileges marriage - not even the most liberal forms of marriage. She believes that family law should focus on our relationships with friends.

Because, you see, one cannot be completely autonomous within marriage.  I don't believe she misses the point, that one is not supposed to be completely autonomous within marriage, that to be so presupposes the idea of marriage, it's that she despises it.

The Left has been trying to kill the nuclear family for decades, almost a hundred years.  Seeing how well their theories worked with Blacks, they've moved right on to the rest of the West.

[Alphabet Soup]

Every day some new argument emerges from the shadows, emboldened that it can now face the light of day, an argument to lay the academic and philosophical foundations for their next big genocide.

In the meantime, they're openly working to eliminate the need for mass murder by advocating against fertility, and killing the family.

Just lately, two "thinkers" made their case for "after-birth" abortion; the one we're currently discussing insists women need to be freed from the burden of pregnancy and then there's a certain Laura Rosenbury, who, in a piece for the NY Times, writes that she wants ....

... family law to change so that it no longer privileges marriage - not even the most liberal forms of marriage. She believes that family law should focus on our relationships with friends.

Because, you see, one cannot be completely autonomous within marriage.  I don't believe she misses the point, that one is not supposed to be completely autonomous within marriage, that to be so presupposes the idea of marriage, it's that she despises it.

The Left has been trying to kill the nuclear family for decades, almost a hundred years.  Seeing how well their theories worked with Blacks, they've moved right on to the rest of the West.

Which circles us around to the point where I originally weighed in. My snarky admonishment to anna wasn't about the food - it was about issuing orders. She reveals herself not as a free-thinker (as she would like to believe) but a prisoner of her own prejudice. Like most leftists, she feeeeeeeels that she is defining utopia when in fact she is designing another totalitarian regime.

JF: Would it have been better if I had barked, "Anna - shaddup and fetch me a beer!"? 

[Weisshaupt]

Monty Python's The life of Brian - I want to be a woman

Its symbolic of their struggle against reality.

[Pandora]

These people simply refuse delivery of the fact that all things have an innate nature.  Period.  This is not a "social construct", it is reality-recognition.  And, by definition, discriminatory.

***********************

That damn old nanner is not dancing again.