From the post I am replying to:
"When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society - so when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that either by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged."
Mattie Brinkerhoff. The Revolution, 4(9):138-9 September 2, 1869Now, that quote is one that Google will find for you in very many places ... pretty much to a one: anti-choice brigade outlets.
Here's a source I like to quote:
http://www.rtis.com/reg/bcs/pol/touchstone/summer00/04abort.htmWHAT THE FOUNDERS OF FEMINISM REALLY THOUGHT ABOUT ABORTION
(Part One) by Barbara Finlay, Carol Walther, and Amy Hinze
Anti-choice groups try many different tactics to discredit pro-choice arguments. One interesting example can be found on the website of the Brazos Valley Coalition for Life (BVCL). They display a page entitled "The Founders of Women's Movement All Opposed Abortion: Authentic Feminism is Pro-Life" (http://www.respectlife.org/articles/a029.htm). The BVCL lists quotes from our feminist foremothers and implies that women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were actually "pro-life." ... We decided to research these quotes and report their true context to the faithful readers of The Touchstone.
... Mattie Brinkerhoff
BVCL website says: "'When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society -- so when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that either by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged.' (The Revolution 3(9): 138-9 September 2, 1869)" This quote appears not only on the list promoted by the BVCL but also on many anti-choice web pages across the web. (Evidently they all copied the quote from the same source, because all repeat the same mistake made above; the quote is not from volume 3, but from volume 4.)
(note: the error seems to have been corrected on the source site:
http://www.feministsforlife.org/history/foremoth.htm)
However, no other information is available on Mattie Brinkerhoff. She apparently had no other publications. She is not mentioned in the most thorough texts about the women's movement. In fact, the article in which this quote appeared was not an article at all, but a letter to the editor. This raises the suspicion that whoever compiled the BVCL list had to search through a vast number of early feminist publications to find anything that could be interpreted as anti-choice.
Brinkerhoff's letter to the editor of The Revolution, a feminist newspaper published by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, is in response to a previous letter that suggested motherhood was the only proper endeavor for women. Her letter details the harm of this belief. The central point of Brinkerhoff's letter is that men should not be able to control women's reproduction. She attributes the incidence of abortion to the fact that women in the 1800s did not have the right to refuse to have sex with their husbands or the ability to obtain birth control.
Brinkerhoff stated that women should be able to decide when they want to bear children. She wrote, "We are forced to ask, by what law shall we decide when woman is sufficiently developed in mind and body to be a good mother? Before what tribunal shall she be judged? Does not reason answer, the council chamber of her own being?" ... In order to achieve this, Brinkerhoff advocated "making the mother...the owner of her own body, in short, the controller of her own destiny." ...
This example shows the lengths to which the anti-choice movement will go to find arguments that support their position. Even when they expand their definition of prominent leaders of the early feminist movement to include a woman who only wrote a letter to the editor, in these cases they are unable to find a quote that truly supports their stance on abortion.
Hmm. "pllib" suggests that there might be interesting conversation with "pro-lifers" <quotation marks in the original>. Me, I'm wondering what "
pllib" might mean. Not wondering too hard, when I see what pllib writes.
"... by keeping the debate about abortion focused on Roe v Wade, we are unable to move beyond Roe v Wade (assuming that it will not, and should not, be overturned), and find a common ground that would be better for women, their unborn and their born children, and their families than the current public policy stalemate."Oh, hell. I'm so bored with writing commentary on this kind of crap that I'm not even going to bother. Wake me up when someone proposes that what pllib and his/her ilk can do with their bodies and their lives should be governed by what "would be better" FOR ME than what pllib thinks would be best
for him/herself, and I'll show up for the demo that would undoubtedly be organized to protest this violation of pllib's fundamental human rights.
"Public policy stalemate"? When did that happen? Last I heard (me being north of the border and all, where we don't have any such problems), abortion was legal in the US, subject to various unconstitutional restrictions though it is. Stalemate? Wishful thinking on pllib's part I'd say ... or a desperate attempt to persuade somebody that some sort of compromise -- oh yes, "common ground" -- with the brigade of would-be rights violators is needed for some reason.
Me, I'm always looking for common ground with people who want to violate my fundamental human rights. (You can turn sarcasm off now, or just keep it on since it may be needed again soon.) Oh yeah, and I'm always up for a good compromise when it comes to other people's rights; make me an offer, and I might be willing to bargain them away too.
In
this thread, pllib says (post 35):
"Why do women choose abortion? Most choose abortion out of desparation - they lack the support, emotional or financial, to carry them through a pregnancy or to support their child. Their choice of abortion is not really a 'choice'."Again ... one does get too bored to comment after a while. But someone needs to point out to pllib, and anyone else trying to portray women, and women's choices, in this patronizing, trivializing manner that it is currently estimated that 43% of women in the US will have at least one abortion in their lifetimes. When you add in all the women with unwanted pregnancies that they carry to term (whether by choice or by lack of choice), and survey human history and geography, you quickly and unavoidably realize that unwanted pregnancy is quite simply a fact of women's lives, and that whether a pregnancy is wanted or unwanted will depend on a myriad of factors that can seldom be reduced to such simplistic equations as pllib offers us.
Unwanted pregnancy + guaranteed annual income just does not = wanted pregnancy.
To suggest that it does, or should, is to deny that women have, and are are entitled to have, slightly more complex goals and aspirations than to secure the minimum material conditions needed in order to bear and rear children. Women have personal, educational, occupational, social and a variety of other goals and aspirations with which unplanned childbearing and childrearing are very often not compatible. And like everyone else in whose lap life does not drop everything they want without effort or sacrifice or foregone options, women often have to make choices.
Yes indeed, it would be nice if women who wanted an unplanned pregnancy to lead to childbearing and childrearing had the material conditions to make this not just possible, but good, for both themselves and their children. It would also be nice if, oh, everyone who wanted to go to university could do so, regardless of financial resources.
Why should anyone's options, in matters of such importance to their future well-being, be limited by lack of those resources? Why should childbearing, a choice some people might like to make in their own interests and in fulfilment of their own goals and aspirations, but find themselves unable to make without extreme hardship, be different from the choice to go to university that some other people might like to make in their own interests and in fulfilment of their own goals and aspirations?
Are the pllibs of the world demanding free tuition for everyone capable of attending university or college?
"It is the unjust structures of our society - the lack of economic opportunity, universal health insurance, the still not equal rights of women in our society ... that lead many women to choose abortion."Yeah. And all those things also lead many people to choose insecure employment that does not enable them to support themselves, let alone a family, decently; to choose to drop out of school and be doomed to a life of insecure, ill-paid employment (if any) and all the negative effects of low income (relatively poorer physical and mental health, premature death, etc.).
Why can't we just argue for more equal access to benefits that would enable EVERYONE to have a better chance of achieving his/her goals and aspirations -- educational opportunities, health care, decent housing, protective labour legislation ... one could go on and on -- ?
Why do these issues need to be tied to women's reproductive rights in such a way as to diminish the basis of those rights -- WOMEN'S HUMANITY and women's ability/entitlement to make choices for themselves -- by reducing them to accounting problems?
I know why, of course. I've heard that "transparency" has been voted word of the year for 2003. I'm sure the judges didn't have "pro-life liberals" in mind when they made the selection, but "transparent" is certainly the best word I can think of to describe them.
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