Feminists shouldn't try to stifle debate about abortion

[Bennifer]

I don't know whether this has already been posted, but there's a Deborah Orr article in the guardian that some of you might find interesting

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/26/feminists-shouldnt-stifle-abortion-debate?CMP=twt_gu

I didnt think Feminists stifled that argument

Just read that article, maybe the writer should take a look around the areas where
teen mums are 'put' mostly tipping area's where evey problem family that has been evicted from everywhere else is probabaly next door to you. The idea that someone would get pregnant to attain this 'dream life' is mad or like another poster said alot are in hostels.
alot of council house donb't allow the BF's to stay there or only a few nights a week so are forced to stay in bad area's alon at night in ususally a rough area.

sorry for rant as a teen mum myself this ignorance makes my blood boil.

Did anyone see Nadine Dorries on Newsnight last night? It was quite a poor discussion - between her and Ann Furedi of BPAS about why they've been excluded from the govt advisory board on sexual health - and it turned into a boring fight about exactly what the DoH had given as their reasons for excluding. But the interesting thing that she said was that the public at large don't want the UK to continue to be the country with the highest rate of teen pregnancies and abortions in Europe.

I was interested because at least she's finally framed the problem to which this latest flurry of anti-abortion activity is trying to find an answer. It would be interesting to know - and I hope a feminist mner can help - what the ACTUAL research says the main causes of teen pregnancy are.

I don't know if anyone agrees with me that this IS a real issue and it ought to be tackled, but that starting with access to abortion is going about it in completely the wrong way.

I suspect that Dorries has an anti-abortion agenda and that she's using the excuse of teen pregnancies to drive it through, even though reducing access to abortion will have no effect whatsoever on the numbers of teens getting pregnant. It really makes me sick to think of the way that this agenda is focussing on the behaviour of women and completely ignoring the role of men and the attitudes of society at large which contribute to the problem.

Dorries is famously anti-abortion. And has been caught lying like a good'un to serve this end.

Exactly Prolesworth - she's taking an issue about which there's a fair degree of consensus (that teen pregnancy is - on the whole - a bad thing) and proposing her own hobby-horse as a solution. When it's nothing of the kind.

I'm disappointed that the Guardian, of all papers, isn't seeing this campaign for what it is.

Humperdink - I have no idea what your second sentence means - but I fully agree that if ND was actually serious about teen pregnancy, she would furnish herself with facts and research and look at what's different in societies where the rates are lower. But she's not, is she........

SAF summed it up for me, with this: women are totally responsible for what their bodies can do but shouldn't have control over it.

Pro-choice doesn't mean pro-abortion. If it did, I'd be rampaging around insisting that all women should have abortions! Ridiculous, huh? Just as ridiculous as insisting that no women should. We are not on opposite sides of an argument about abortion, only about the right to choose it. And if you cannot choose abortion, more unwanted children will result. It's not even a feminist position necessarily, it's a position of economic and social common sense.

... unless, perhaps, the anti-choicers want to be able to dictate who has abortions and who doesn't? (Shades of eugenics.)

Yes the solution is that better women (ie ones who pretend not to have sex except in strictly prescribed circumstances and don't have contraceptive failures) confiscate our babies and bring them up as their's.

And we get put in Magdalen laundries and wash rapists' priests' clothes.

[Not v. good at cheering up SaF icon]

If all young women had a good dollop of self respect, they would probably be better at choosing when they wanted to have sex/with whom/with what protection. I'm hoping that my dds will have enough self respect to make those choices. Hopefully then, they won't ever need to take the abortion route. If they did, however, I would give them the respect of making the choice that was right for them, whatever that was.

It drives me fucking mad to hear people talk about "girls" like they were some kind of sub species. Any woman who does not think she might at some point need to face a decision about an unwanted pregenancy at some point in her pre-menopausal life is sadly deluded.

Well, yes. Out of all the women I've known well enough to know whether they've had an abortion (must be hundreds, over the years), I'm the ONLY one who never has done. I'm talking about normal, educated, British women, mostly of the white, middle-class variety. What 'girls' are all these similarly educated pundits talking about?

... Not like themselves and their friends, presumably

quite, very unpleasant.

But stickylittlefingers - that's the sort of thinking that plays into Nadine Dorries' hands - the idea that women are completely free to choose when, where and how they have sex and who with, and it's only their lack of self respect/ poor judgement/ desire for a council house that leads to them having unprotected sex and getting pregnant. Personally I think it's a dangerous fallacy.

There's rape, for a start - much discussed recently on this board - which doesn't give women much choice about their sexual activity. No amount of self respect will help you if you meet a rapist.

But beyond that, there's a huge amount of coercive pressure on young women by individual men and the messages that society at large sends them. "He says he'll dump me if I don't sleep with him" was an old chestnut in the Just 17 problem pages when I was a teen, and I don't think for a minute that it's changed now. "He says condoms spoil the sensation" was another old favourite which I don't think has gone out of fashion.

You might argue that the bucket loads of self respect you're instilling in your daughters will protect them from that kind of bullslhit - and you might be right - but think about the other messages that your girls are getting. The coverage of Michelle Obama this week has been much more about what she's wearing than what she's been saying. Which is just the tip of an iceberg of female representation that prioritises their appearance, because women's main function in life is to be attractive to men. So that men can pursue the fantasy that women are there to serve them.

Your second paragraph I agree with completely. But don't buy into the myth that women and girls have complete freedom of choice over their sexual behaviour, and it's all their fault if they get pregnant.

don't worry, I don't treats... I know they, just like me, don't have a "choice" about getting raped. I don't know percentages, obviously, but I would guess that are many pregnancies that occur not because a woman was raped in a legal sense, but that her consent was comprimised by exactly that "just 17" thinking you describe. That, I hope, I can help my dds avoid by making absolutely clear that it's total BS. I was lucky to grow up with a group of strong women, so that that kind of thinking has always been an anathema to me. Don't worry, I'm not buying into any myths. Much too educated for that!!