General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSLAVERY for the World's Females is what what The Devil (Trump/GOP) supports...
Evidence (as if we needed more): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/22/us-un-resolution-rape-weapon-of-war-veto - US threatens to veto UN resolution on rape as weapon of war, officials sayRepublicans and the "evangelicals" who prop them up and whose "laws" are as dangerous and sociopathic as Sharia Law if not worse, believe that female humans are just sexual and reproductive slaves - not only in the US but Worldwide. That harkens back to (and actually before) the days of slavery in the US, where slaves were "bred", raped and forced to bear as many children as their owners wished. They had NO choice about when or whether to have sex, with whom, why, or how and NO choice about whether to become or remain pregnant or how many children they bore. They were SLAVES. And what the Republican-Evangelical crowd want for females in the US and around the World is the same thing. The first link in this OP, which details The Devil's attitudes about this, basically says JUST that: "females should be raped if men choose for whatever reason and in any circumstance and forced to bear any resultant child"
Reproductive Rights and the Long Hand of Slave Breeding
I suspect, said I, that partisans would say, If she doesnt agree, she is free to leave.?
Right, which means she is coerced into childbearing or coerced into taking other measures to terminate her pregnancy, which may or may not be safe. Or she relents and says Yes, and thats by coercion, too.
Scratch at modern life and theres a little slave era just below the surface, so were right back to your argument.
Pamela Bridgewaters argument, expressed over the past several years in articles and forums, and at the heart of a book in final revision called Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom, presents the most compelling conceptual and constitutional frame I know for considering womens bodily integrity and defending it from the right.
In brief, her argument rolls out like this. The broad culture tells a standard story of the struggle for reproductive rights, beginning with the flapper, climaxing with the pill, Griswold v. Connecticut and an assumption of privacy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and concluding with Roe v. Wade. The same culture tells a traditional story of black emancipation, beginning with the Middle Passage, climaxing with Dred Scott, Harpers Ferry and Civil War and concluding with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Both stories have a postscripta battle royal between liberation and reactionbut, as Bridgewater asserts, Taken together, these stories have no comprehensive meaning. They tell no collective tale. They create no expectation of sexual freedom and no protection against, or remedy for, reproductive slavery. They exist in separate spheres; that is a mistake. What unites them but what both leave out, except incidentally, is the experience of black women. Most significantly, they leave out the lost chapter of slave breeding.
I need to hit the pause button on the argument for a moment, because the considerable scholarship that revisionist historians have done for the past few decades has not filtered into mass consciousness. The mass-culture story of slavery is usually told in terms of economics, labor, color, men. Women outnumbered men in the enslaved population two to one by slaverys end, but they enter the conventional story mainly under the rubric family, or in the cartoon triptych Mammy-Jezebel-Sapphire, or in the figure of Sally Hemmings. Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually exploited. Yes, many of the founders of this great nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US depended on human beings not just as labor but as reproducible raw material is not part of the story America typically tells itself. That women had a particular currency in this system, prized for their sex or their wombs and often both, and that this uniquely female experience of slavery resonates through history to the present is not generally acknowledged. Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm Xs distinction between the house Negro and the field Negro, erases the female experience, the harrowing reality of the favorite that Harriet Jacobs describes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
We dont commonly recognize that American slaveholders supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade; that they did so to protect the domestic market, boosting their own nascent breeding operation. Women were the primary focus: their bodies, their stock, their reproductive capacity, their issue. Planters advertised for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen.They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and had their physicians exploit female anatomy while working to suppress African midwives practice in areas of fertility, contraception and abortion.Reproduction and its control became the planters prerogative and profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins or jump out a windowabortion by suicide, except it was hardly a sure thing.
This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Toms Cabin that my eyes fell upon while we were preparing to arrange books on her new shelves: If we could get a breed of gals that didnt care, now, for their young uns would be bout the greatest modrn improvement I knows on, says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice flows.
The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the building blocks of Bridgewaters argument, which continues thus. If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.
2naSalit
(86,054 posts)NYMinute
(3,256 posts)He has no compassion or decency.
Response to CousinIT (Original post)
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femmedem
(8,188 posts)The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds family planning around the world, with a goal of making contraception available to an additional 120 million women by 2020. https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Development/Family-Planning
Up until 2013, the foundation directly funded abortion as well. In 2014 they did stop funding abortion, but that is hardly the same as hoping to enslave poor women as breeders. Additionally, by funding organizations like Planned Parenthood that offer abortions, even though their gifts don't go directly to abortions, they free up more of those organizations' funds for abortion services.
Response to femmedem (Reply #4)
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ehrnst
(32,640 posts)With our partners, we support national governments that have committed to the goals of FP2020 and are leading the development and implementation of their own country-specific plans.
Foundation support includes assessing family planning needs, particularly among the poorest and most vulnerable populations; identifying access barriers and funding gaps; developing and testing interventions; sharing evidence-based practices; promoting accountability through real-time performance monitoring and data collection; and fostering coordination among governments, partners, and donors.
We also work to increase funding and improve policies for family planning, create public-private partnerships to expand contraceptive access and options, develop innovative and affordable contraceptive technologies, and support further research to close knowledge gaps.
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Development/Family-Planning
So how often does "Billy boy" meet with Trump to talk about "forced pregnancies?"
ehrnst
(32,640 posts)Bernie is a member the 1% for crying out loud, and made a lot of that from selling his books on Amazon and at Walmart.
The Clinton Foundation is responsible for 75% of the world's population with HIV/AIDS getting affordable medications.
But hey, "off with their heads!" sure blows off some steam.
SunSeeker
(51,369 posts)Politicub
(12,163 posts)How can any country not condemn rape as a weapon of war? We're no longer heading into a hellscape; we are already here.
The right has another flank in the war against women: Frontline this week had a documentary about abortion clinics in the U.S. and how much they have changed in the past 36 years, when the producers first made a documentary.
Since then, the right has gotten more deceptive about tricking women into high-pressured sales tactics at "crisis pregnancy centers" to not consider abortion as a choice. The centers profiled by Frontline did not promote contraception either, saying it led to promiscuity. These places aren't for women. They are for men to control women, and they use women to staff them.
After a birth, there is a pregnancy house (in what used to be a convent) where the mother can stay with her baby for six months, then it's out on the street or back to the arms of an abusive partner. The clinic director said that they don't track what happens after the women are cast out, other than saying there needs to be more nuns.
I was angry after watching this. I knew this kind of thing is happening; what I didn't know is the scale of the women-as-birth-vessels movement: there are three clinics that provide abortions in either the city of Philadelphia or the state of Pennsylvania (I forget which), and more than 150 crisis pregnancy centers in the city alone.