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Sunday, June 25, 2006

Gut reaction: My own stereotpyes and prejudices

I was reading snippets from an abortion-advocacy editorial, and my gut response is "Thanks for assuming that having a uterus means I'm a selfish, ignorant slut."

As much as prochoice women seem to assume that opposing abortion means wanting to keep women in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant, my gut response is that a man who supports abortion wants women in the bedroom, naked, spread-eagled, and tied to the bed. And that the woman who wants abortion available wants to be that woman, that her entire sense of worth stems from having some man put his penis in her.

Do any other prolife women have that gut response?

Even of BOTH stereotypes were true, I'd rather be an incubator than an inflatable sex doll. I'd prefer to devote myself to nurturing new life than to devote myself to a string of orgasms. And I can't shake the image that prochoice women would rather be the doll.

And I wonder how much that stereotype is tapping into something. After all, prochoicers keep insisting that if you're prolife you must be anti-sex. Therefore, to them, the whole point of abortion must be that it facilitates sex.

And where does the idea of the eros/thantos dichotomy come into this?

I was quite a sexual libertine when I first became a prolifer. I became more conservative after seeing the damage that casual sex does to people -- to women in particular. One kind of damage I saw sexual "liberation" doing to women was putting them on the abortion table. So we started with "Abortion is an awful, dreadful thing," as a premise, and "Therefore having sex with a woman when you're not prepared to support her through a pregnancy is wrong" grew out of it. Cheap sex is bad because it leads to the abortion table, not vice versa (abortion bad because it arises from cheap sex). And I wonder if there's a degree of "All sex is good. Sex sometimes leads to abortion. Therefore abortion is good." in the prochoice worldview.

Just pondering. I'd especially like to hear from converts.

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