This board is not a representative sample of the country as a whole. We're richer, whiter and more educated. And maternal outcomes vary immensely by income, race and location. So there's a very good chance that few of us here will have personal stories to share about friends or relatives who died in childbirth. But that doesn't negate the statistics.
It's true that this board isn't representative of all America. I also realized -- after asking who knew someone personally who'd died as a result of pregnancy /childbirth -- that the answers are skewed in that the question
cannot include a control group. I was trying to gauge how real pregnancy /childbirth deaths are -- and I was trying to eliminate the "friend of a friend of a friend" or "read it somewhere on the internet".
What I ended up with -- I think -- was three people who personally knew someone who'd died ... and a lot of "almost died" stories. Those "almost died" stories
are total wins; those are the women who "back in the day" would've died from pregnancy /childbirth. Modern medicine for the win. Is it perfect? No, but the vast, vast majority of women live through pregnancy /childbirth.
I don't recall anything in our vows or our marriage license saying that I became less than a fully functional adult when I agreed to marry DH. Marriage should be a partnership between two full and complete people, not an arrangement by which either has to surrender their own rights on the altar of their relationship.
And, as such, each person
does give up some freedom to become part of a team /to reap the benefits of a lifelong partnership -- it's something that happens naturally when you promise to stay with that person always, come hell or high water. You're thinking of one person being the boss of the other -- that's not what I mean at all. Here's a real-life example of a perfectly healthy marriage in which some freedom was lost:
Twice in our 29 year marriage, my husband has been offered a good job in another state. With each offer, it would've been a big win for him -- more money, better job -- and if he'd been single, he could've rented a U-Haul the very next day and headed out of town saying, "Bye, Y'all, I'm outta here!" But as a married man, he's part of a team, and he has to consider me too. In each case, him taking the job would've been a big loss for me: my job, my seniority, my pension. In each case, we decided together what to do -- but, as I said, he gave up the freedom to jump at what was best for him when we married. Incidentally, in both cases I turned out to be "the winner" -- he turned down both jobs. Why? In both cases we decided that me leaving the pension system would have more than negated the extra money he would've earned /my job was more secure than his. But, yeah, in this situation
he lost some of his freedom in that he had to consider "the team" before he could accept what would've been good for him.
Plain and simple, pro life is about power. It is about thinking you should have the power to decide what women do with their bodies. It is about being pro birth, not pro life.
No, pro-life is not about being the boss of other women; it's about speaking for the babies who have no voice of their own.
Back to the question, probably not a feminist. I believe in equality for women and men.
Equality, yes. Feminism, no. As I said in my first post on this thread, feminism -- in actual practice -- seems to be more about putting men down (and other women too) than bringing women up.
No. He chose to take responsibility for any child he helped create before he had sex.
That's the male equivalent of personal responsibility /the male equivalent of "use your birth control properly and every time" ... but Biology makes it a bit less evident.
For some reason this makes me think of a student of mine from years ago. She was a senior, and it was the week before graduation. She came to my classroom BOO-HOO CRYING. I mean, crying to the point that she was shaking and could barely speak. I thought she was injured somehow because she was crying so hard.
Once she calmed down a bit, she explained that she'd known for about two weeks that she was pregnant, and her boyfriend had just told her -- the jerk told her casually between classes -- that he would not be able to help her financially with the baby because he was already helping his previous girlfriend who was raising his first child. I told her that wasn't HIS CHOICE, that the child had legal rights to his support, and that I'd get her together with the school social worker, who could give her more details about how to initiate that process. She was AMAZED. She had no idea that she had rights, that the child had rights.
Poor thing started crying all over again, but this time it was with relief. I find it hard to believe that any woman -- well, she was a girl -- would "let a man off the hook" so lightly /excuse him from 18 years of responsibility.
Why is his responsibility held differently from her’s?
Biology -- some things can never be equal. And it's hers, not her's.