Do you think it is necessary to have good analytical and critical thinking skills be a feminist?

[QuentinSummers]

Lots of current "feminist" thinking seems not feminist at all and I wondered if it's because people are not abe to apply critical thinking skills to arguments like "Any choice a woman makes is a feminist choice".
Wondered what you all thought?

[IAmAmy]

I find it telling when anti-abortion people pose these kinds of hypotheticals - the underlying assumption is always that women are moral idiots who will abort on a whim for the most capricious and shallow of reasons - just like the floozies we are!

Very true. It shows their own misogyny, and is also used to derail and attack abortion rights by using these ridiculous examples they pluck out of nowhere.

[DonkeySkin]

by prioritising our own wellbeing in deciding, for our own usually very sound reasons, not to carry a pregnancy to term

Just wanted to correct something I wrote above: while women often abort for financial, relationship or or other circumstantial considerations, not wanting to be pregnant is in itself a sound reason to have an abortion. Pregnancy is a huge and dangerous undertaking, and not wanting to go through that is reason enough to have an abortion - we don't need a further justification.

[IAmAmy]

Abortion should be a weighty decisions based on ethical principles - not just I don't want my baby coz x.

It should be every woman's right to have the control over her body to be able to have an abortion if she wishes. No woman should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against her wishes.

[QuentinSummers]

then make a case for a female dictated moral discussion surrounding abortion

Trusting women to choose whether or not continuing a pregnancy is right for them is a moral decision. Suggesting women can't be trusted and legislation is required to prevent them having abortions willy nilly is immoral

[VestalVirgin]

Pregnancy is a huge and dangerous undertaking, and not wanting to go through that is reason enough to have an abortion - we don't need a further justification.

Exactly.

No one would make nearly as much of a hassle about a man not wanting to donate a kidney.

No one proposes that people should be forced to donate blood and/or organs because some racist men might decide they don't want to donate blood or organs to black people. Or to people with Down syndrome.

[7Days]

We do come up with the criteria on our own. Thats why we call it pro choice. Each individual woman makes her choice, according to her morals and her situation, and decides how much she is willing to sacrifice for this potential life. It really isn't up to anyone else to decide on the morality of it.
You may as well enforce compulsory coastguard service for everyone, no exceptions. Coastguards do an amazing and neccessary job but no way am I, with my particular frailties, responsibilities, and fears, going to take it on. And it's no one's business why

[QuentinSummers]

What about men not wanting to donate sperm? There is a massive shortage of sperm donors in this country, lots of women desperate for a baby via donatio , think of all those potential children lost, men should have to donate. Frankly, suggesting men should decide what to do with their sperm just because it concerns their testicle is inadequate.

[quencher]

@Nellooo I enjoyed reading that article very much. It's absolute up my street. Not, because of the writer but the people he argued against. It holds the very belief that I have, and it's those that can actually cause change. It has basic understanding of society and people. It understands both the individual, science and social constructs and how they operate not as concrete block of views that are unbreakable.

I would love to comment on every each point made, but that would bore the thread off.
Let's just say that the writer did contradict themselves when it came to understanding relativity and absolutism about the issues they were arguing for. For any one who wants to change a society, they have to believe that every each one of them is relative. By doing that, it makes you believe that it's possible to deconstruct social constructs, theories and ideologies that we hold.
We all know, the world is not stagnant. People are evolving, society's social constructs are changing. We know this, because if it wasn't the case, we would not be discoursing how to dismantle patriarchy. Or even how to tackle capitalism or racism. We also, know that the only absolute, theme that runs through it all is power, held by men. The power men hold is deconstructable Which makes it relative in its essence. If we don't believe in change, why do things?

They also, lost me when the complaint against minority groups holding the power for which meaning of a word that oppressed them should derive. I completely agree with counter argument. This same argument would be helpful for women trying to explain feminism and its effects. For a man to say they understand, and should be able preach to women about what feminism is and how they know best would be called mansplaining. Telling us women what it means. If you notice the writer didn't mentioned this but focused more on racism and how one group should not have power over a word , it's meaning and the interpretation of it.

Above all, postmodernists attacked science and its goal of attaining objective knowledge about a reality which exists independently of human perceptions which they saw as merely another form of constructed ideology dominated by bourgeois, western assumptions. I do agree with argument that science has been used to justify means of oppression by the oppressors. To deny this and then think of it, as not a plausible argument was wrong by the writer. The very justification of racism came from science. To say that the same can't happen now or isn't happening would be wrong and naive. Some are being done knowing and other unknowingly. We don't have the full grasp of science.
My issue is, evolution. how can we know that what we are saying now is absolute or concrete? We can't. To believe that is to stop any change we will try to make. I don't think it's ok for feminism to be ok with absolutism. It would destroy the very nature of the arguments that will ever be put forward to try and help us.

One of the things the writer pointed out, was the power the oppressed now have. The dominance they have over discourse and the stifling of freedom of speech. Usually, this sort of speech comes from those of the dominant group who still want to justify why it's ok to oppress.
At no point did the writer point out equal discourse. Based on history, again, i would say, usually those with power tend to dominate debates. What they also, do is use their freedom as a means to oppress further. In this case it would be done knowingly because they do recognise that what they are saying goes against the new reason or a way other way of thinking. It does become a conundrum to whether allow the oppressed be told what it is they are and not given the same platform to voice what they are and should be?

[DonkeySkin]

user1490125033, you seem to be operating on the assumption that women owe our reproductive labour to other people and society by default, and if we don't want to perform this we need a damn good excuse. It is actually the other way around: every person owes their existence to the woman who gestated and birthed them; it is society that owes women for the labour of reproducing others, and we need no excuses for choosing not to do this.

[Fauchelevent]

Great thread and great posts from all the big FWR names ;) bit of a derail going on right nw i must say. I don't have a lot to add at the moment but it is (or was) a great thread.

[PencilsInSpace]

Fucking hell, didn't take long for user's agenda to start showing

I agree, apart from that it's an excellent thread.

[quencher]

@DonkeySkin
In doing this they betray that they don't think that women have the moral capacity to be entrusted with deciding what to do with our own bodies and the potential children they can create, when actually, we do, and we demonstrate this not only by regularly deciding to carry dangerous pregnancies to term, but also by prioritising our own wellbeing in deciding, for our own usually very sound reasons, not to carry a pregnancy to term. The decision that one's own life and happiness needn't be subordinate to a potential life is a moral choice - it's one that recognises human female lives as valuable in themselves.
No human being has the right to live off the body of another without that person's permission. In the case of embryos and foetuses, they are not even persons yet. I assign more moral value to the pregnant woman than to the embryo or foetus that lives entirely off her body, therefore she is the highest moral arbiter of the 'rightness' of abortion.
This^I totally agree with.

If you don't want men to decide what that criteria should be then come up with your own. But 'I am a women and therefore whatever involves my body takes place beyond categories of right and wrong' is inadequate, frankly.
One of the biggest reason for infanticide has been due to patriarchy and not women. with China and India dominating in selective breeding. To argue that women should rely on what is morally right, makes a mockery on why women should not hold the right to choose if they want to keep the foetus or not. Your whole basis for the argument is morality, but morality is relative. How I define it could easily be different to yours. How ascribe could be different to yours. Why should the men hold the power to dictate this and individual women can't?
With China, the one child policy not only affects the choices women can have on how many children they want, whether they would love to keep a second pregnancy or not. But also, because culturally, it's a society which favours men. By default, couples are choosing male children over females. Abortion is not the problem. The society which dictates it is.

@user1490125033
Justifying reasons why a parasite is much more important to the host body. If someone came into your house to visit and by law they cannot leave when you want them to. The law would change to make sure you can evict them. Even squatters don't have that much right. For any advantage they take, the law clumps down on it.

[Nellooo]

@quencher glad you enjoyed it!

I certainly don't agree with everything she's written, but I enjoyed the takedown of faffy pm thought and the possibilities offered to the left for a much needed change of tack.

[quencher]

@Nellooo I liked the simplicity of the article. Reading about Michele Foucault reminded me of my late teens when I hated him for saying feminism will one day become irrelevant. It's a phase in human history.
When I read it, I thought he was demeaning feminism and how could anyone say something like that. Its not a phase. It's part of our life and emancipation of all women.

I then read Angela Davis who put it better. A light bulb moment for me and it made sense what he said. I still laugh at my self every time I come across his name. I would have put in the category of mansplainers if the category existed then.

As Adichie would now put it. You want to get to a point where feminism would be irrelevant because it's not necessary to fight for the rights of women. When we are all equal, politically, socially and financially.

So yes, if it feminism achieved it goal. It should become irrelevant.

[Prawnofthepatriarchy]

I'm guessing you're not from mainland Britain, *DonkeySkin. Here women have had access to safe, legal abortion since 1967 and, despite intermittent attempts by small groups to stop or limit it, there is no appetite for change. We also have free contraception, available even to under age teenagers. Should a woman wish to continue a pregnancy, lone mothers have access to housing and welfare. I would say that, insofar as it's possible, women in the UK (apart from Northern Ireland) have reproductive autonomy.

The situation in other parts of the world is very different, though most European countries have similar policies to ours. I think it's the Netherlands which has the lowest teen pregnancy rate, thanks to very frank sex ed which includes discussion and examination of consent, plus freely available contraception.

The position in America is dismal. As in so many social issues, religion makes America an outlier in reproductive health.

[Prawnofthepatriarchy]

My DF was a GP and told me that every woman who came to him for an abortion referral had thought long and hard before she came to him. They'd talked to the father, to their friends, to their DM, sometimes all of them. They came expecting condemnation or a fight. He just said yes. In only two cases was this not true. The first was a girl he perceived as being bullied by her mum. He got the mum out of the consultation room and talked to her alone. The second was a trophy wife who wanted an abortion because she and her husband had booked a very expensive holiday and she didn't want to spoil her figure. He referred her not because her reason for wanting an abortion was serious but because he felt she would make an absolutely dreadful mother to that poor child.

Someone I turned down sexually tried to upset me by saying the whole city knew my DF was an abortion monger. I said this was true and that I was very proud of him.

[Prawnofthepatriarchy]

P.S. I should add that he had more than 25 years in practice, so he had a very wide experience with a large number of women. He was a junior doctor before the Abortion Act and saw the cost of illegal abortion too. A woman desperate to end a pregnancy will risk her future fertility, even her life. He used to say "I'm a doctor of medicine, not theology".

[VestalVirgin]

The second was a trophy wife who wanted an abortion because she and her husband had booked a very expensive holiday and she didn't want to spoil her figure. He referred her not because her reason for wanting an abortion was serious but because he felt she would make an absolutely dreadful mother to that poor child.

That's a good point. The anti-choicers never seem to think about the fact that IF there were so many, many women who want abortions for silly, stupid reasons ... then that'd mean that those women would make horrible mothers.

Or perhaps they do think about it and just think of women as walking uteruses who should churn out babies for Christian fundamentalist couples to adopt. Handmaid's Tale style.

[Prawnofthepatriarchy]

There's a book about weird statistics one of my DS read which said that, I think it was in the 1980s, there was a sudden drop in youth crime in American inner cities. All sorts of theories were proposed, but one likely cause was that it was roughly 20 years since Roe v Wade, when abortion became legal. This idea was given weight by the fact that the youth crime rate dropped earlier in states that legalized abortion a couple of years earlier.

If true, this is an illustration of the wisdom of women seeking abortion. They knew they were in no position to have a child, and they were right.

[YetAnotherSpartacus]

The second was a trophy wife who wanted an abortion because she and her husband had booked a very expensive holiday and she didn't want to spoil her figure

I guess I don't have a problem with this. Either you are pro-choice or you aren't and if you don't want children then you don't want them...

Who said she was a trophy wife?

[MorrisZapp]

Strange bedfellows indeed. Not only am I on the side of the Christian right wing on trans issues, I've had a kicking from parents of children with disabilities on here because I support abortion rights for absolutely any reason whatsoever. So my feminism makes me disablist.

[Prawnofthepatriarchy]

You're not alone, Morris, if that's any comfort. Most second wave feminists take both of the same positions. I can never understand why parents of children with disabilities condemn pro-choice beliefs. Their children aren't harmed, surely? We all make different choices, choices that make sense to us.

[VestalVirgin]

It is especially strange as pro-choice feminists actually aim to abolish the discrimination against children with disabilities.

In many countries, there is an explicit exemption made from the illegality of abortions if a child would be disabled - not just a lethal disability, but something like Down syndrome, too.

That gives a very clear message that disabled children are considered to be of lesser worth.


Just acknowledging a woman's right to her own body, on the other hand, does not make any distinction between fetuses, and enables any women to give birth to a disabled child if she so chooses.

[BertrandRussell]

Yes, I'm in that strange group too........

[birdsdestiny]

Thanks vestal, that has really helped me to clarify my thinking on this issue. I work with disabled children, and have at times has to defend my stance on this.