If only women could be replaced with wombs on wheels...

Trish Wilson links and comments on this guy who dislikes it when a woman actually has the audacity, the audacity I tell you, to consider something as piddly and worthless as her own life when making reproductive choices.  The issue at hand is one Amy Richards, whose stuff I've actually read alot of--she's a hard-working feminist writer.  When she found out that she was pregnant with three (!), she decided to have a procedure called selective reduction, where two of the fetuses were removed so that the other could grow alone.  I read the article myself, and I found it refreshing in its straightforwardness, as does Wilson.  Hell, I thought she was a little too hard on herself, actually giving into the the enormous social pressure enough to spend time considering having a whole litter of babies that she had managed to conceive.  Now, I don't want children, but if I did, I sure as hell wouldn't want three.  I can't imagine that I would think about whether or not to do it as much as she did--I can tell you right now, if I found out I was pregnant with three on a Friday, my legs would be up in stirrups on a Monday. 
I am an evil, educated, selfish bitch for thinking this, according to ol' Hugo. 

At this point, I thought I was reading a not terribly clever satire of 30ish East Coast career women, their elitism, and their incessant anxiety about becoming "just a mom".
 
He singles out a quote where Amy Richards points out to her hemming and hawing boyfriend that she would have to give up her life in order just to carry the triplets, much less raise them.  To actually consider not giving up your life to a pregnancy, much less children, is the height of selfishness, apparently.  Trish is really nice to this guy--I want to kick him. 
I mean, it's a real cost/benefit thing, isn't it?  And to this man, it seems like it should be obvious to the pregnant woman that the cost--her life--is far from too much to pay.   A woman's life and autonomy are so cheap and worthless, that it's just downright petty to consider them when making an abortion choice.  (Technically, not an abortion, actually.  As much as the pro-lifers want to pretend that abortion means killing a fetus, the word is used to mean aborting a pregnancy.  Richards continued with her pregnancy, and did not get an abortion.) 
This guy made me angry.  I should avoid anti-choice people, particularly men, since the very fact that they think they have a right to use the force of the law to make women comply to their wishes means that they believe on one level or another that women's bodies are naturally subject to men's authority.  And usually, even more so if he has ejaculated inside her a time or two, or even more.  Luckily, Hugo is up front about that belief:

But as I get older, and spend more time with children, and think about becoming a father myself (Lord willin'), I find it harder and harder to accept the old pro-choice bromide that men "have no say in what a woman does with her body." When I was younger and irresponsible, I liked that line. Pro-choice rhetoric thrust all responsibility on to the woman; I, like other young men, was off the hook.
 
I find it interesting that he feels that whether or not a man is pro-choice or pro-life is naturally dependent on what choices he wishes the woman he's having sex with to make.  When he didn't want to be a father, women need to have that abortion option.  Now that he wishes to be a father, he doesn't want his girlfriend to have that option if he impregnates her.  He claims that he liked women having all the responsibility when he was younger, but I doubt that he would have felt that way if a woman in his life had chosen to go ahead and have a baby.  His feelings haven't changed as much as he thinks.  If he got a woman pregnant, he still wishes to have control over what she does, but what he wants her to do has simply changed is all.
In a later post, he does what a lot of men who want the law to help them exert control over women's bodies do--he professes to really care about making men better and more responsible to women so that women under male control don't suffer as much as they used to. 

But I am also angry at a legacy of male betrayal, irresponsibility, and abandonment. I've been saying for years that the struggle for abortion rights is rooted in (among other things) a profound disappointment in men.
 
Once again, we are reminded that women's choice is about men, and not about women at all, except for those deluded enough to think that their own lives are important enough to be considered when making reproductive decisions.  He even attacks Amy Richards's boyfriend for not doing everything he could to control her better (he assumes, of course, that her boyfriend, being a man and smarter and all knows better than she that a heartbeat means that it's a baby).

I wish we knew whether the boyfriend in the story (Peter) offered to marry her. (Oh, I could blog a lot about the Peters of the world. I'll deal with him in an upcoming post. But if I saw three beating hearts on a sonagram, you'd have to take me away in handcuffs. Perhaps this is just grandiosity, but I'd like to think that I would have fought far harder for those kids. I suspect the Amys of the world pick the Peters carefully. He is a compliant fellow indeed.) But it's not at all clear that Amy would have accepted his offer and kept all three of her babies even if he had!
 
Apparently, women are naughty bitches because men don't marry them and get firmer control over them sooner.  I'm sorry, I meant, apparently women don't know the right thing to do because men don't take responsibility and marry them and show them.  Well, he blames her and her devious non-marrying self anyway. 
The rest of the post is the same nauseating, it must be all about men because women just aren't substantial enough to have any influence crap that you usually get.  He decides to psychoanalyze her and decides she doesn't want to give up her career and her health and her ability to go to the bathroom by herself for a few months because her father wasn't in her life.  As we all know, a man who would abandon a pregnant woman like that would have been a positive influence on her if she had just found a way to dig him up or something. 
By the way, not all of us pro-choice feminist types who think nothing of using everything science and medicine can come up with to improve our lives are fucked up because men didn't imbue us with enough manly man man influence growing up.  I have a dad--he doted on me as a child, I assure you.  I had a stepdad and all sorts of men around me growing up.  Still, I funnily am one of those sad head cases who thinks that my life in itself has meaning, despite my functioning reproductive system.  In fact, some of those same men have alot to do with why I think this, since they loved me and raised me to think that I was, in fact, worth something.
Also, I've met men in my time who don't have dads, either, and strangely they seem to have the same sort of attitude as Richards.  They don't think about it much, it's not like they know him, so it's not like they feel like they're missing something.  I've heard this off men, who manage to think this even though I can assure you they weren't on the receiving end of lectures about how they don't need a man to take care of them from their single moms. 
And I've also know women who were mentally disturbed enough to get an abortion instead of giving up their futures despite the fact that their parents were still married and they saw their dads everyday.  Will wonders never cease?
Okay, done venting.  But really, sometimes I'm even pissier with guys who think of themselves as liberal and progressive and feminist even but then start shooting sparks when women actually exert some of the autonomy that's been so long in coming. 

Note:  Amy Richards has an article in this month's Bitch Magazine where she talks about the son that she had from this pregnancy.  It's a sweet article--mostly about how being a mom has helped remind her that it's wise for all of us to refrain from defining ourselves by just one thing, be it parenthood, career, whatever.  This amazing selfishness she supposedly has doesn't come off it at all.  In fact, I was rather surprised to find out how much of the hard work she does for feminism goes unpaid. 
If we can manage to overcome the desire to judge women's character solely by their dedication to their reproductive functions, it's amazing how many women that are usually scorned start to look like really good people.