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March 23rd, 2006

Progressive Women: Red-State America’s Dangerous Insurgency

Des Moines Register ~ by Rekha Basu
Abortion law a wake-up call to safeguard rights

[S]he (the rape victim) has been the victim of one violent act. Should we now ask her to be a party to a second violent act — that of abortion? (I wonder who “we” is? The state? Doctors?) Abortion … exploits the mother, destroys her rights, destroys her interests, and damages her health, and does so by killing her child. It isolates her in her pain by placing all of the blame for the loss of her child upon her.”
Interesting that those doing the blaming are also lamenting the blame placed.
The task force has been accused of being stacked with pro-life members who ignored scientific testimony. There is no acknowledgement, for example, of a fetus’ inability to survive on its own outside the womb.
As for the patronizing “for her own good” line of reasoning, it’s the newest way to deflect the point that a woman, not the state, should decide what happens to her own body.
In South Dakota, the state is represented by a Legislature that’s 84 percent male.
Feminist progressivism went with other nonconformist positions: Pacifism, nudism, birth control, abortion, eugenics, all on the agenda of a radical and sometimes anarchist Left that argued in the same breath for emancipation of women and that of the masses. In 1927 Margueriite’s Your Body’s Your Own, preaching “malthusianism,” sexual selectivity, an end to “bestial copulation” and to the propagation of congenital ills, TB, and veneral disease, provoked the ire of all right-thinking folk, not least the League of Fathers of Large Families. Slogans like “grow but do not multiply” and “multiplication means war” were clearly subversive.

So, repressive laws were abrogated only in 1967, and even then anti-natalist propaganda was banned. Until that time or, at least, until after the second world war, contraception was practically nonexistent. Women, Henriette Nizan remembers, tried to be careful, some men practiced coitus interruptus, herborists sold little sponges on a thread that could be dipped into smelly liquid like vinegar, or pomades containing quinine, supposed to prevent conception. “There were also condoms. I’ve never met a man who used them’.
The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s,
Eugen Weber.
Hardcover ©1994. pg. 78

Posted in Red-State America | By Willie Buck Merle

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