All right, so I’m not a woman. But I do have a wife and three daughters. That’s three daughters, not eight. In an earlier time, I’d have more kids than I want. My wife would have had little control over her body. (Boys will be boys). It would have been worse for my friend’s wife. She was so sick during two of her pregnancies she would have died. As it was, she had to have an IV drip twenty-four hours a day to make up for the extreme vomiting she tolerated during pregnancy. Without birth control, she and her husband would had to choose between a Platonic relationship and death.
Until the condom, the diaphragm, the Pill, the IUD, and all the subsequent variants of hormonal fertility control came along, anatomy really was destiny — and all of the world’s societies were organized around that central fact. Women were born to bear children; they had no other life options. With a few rebellious or well-born exceptions (and a few outlier cultures that somehow found their way to a more equal footing), the vast majority of women who’ve ever lived on this planet were tied to home, dependent on men, and subject to all kinds of religious and cultural restrictions designed to guarantee that they bore the right kids to the right man at the right time — even if that meant effectively jailing them at home.
Birth control ended needless deaths, and it freed women from the roles social conservatives like Rick Santorum would re-impose on them, if given opportunity. With birth control, Robinson, says
came the possibility, for the first time, to make a vast range of other choices for ourselves that were simply never within reach before. We could choose to delay childbearing and limit the number of children we raise; and that, in turn, freed up time and energy to explore the world beyond the home. We could refuse to marry or have babies at all, and pursue our other passions instead. Contraception was the single necessary key that opened the door to the whole new universe of activities that had always been zealously monopolized by the men—education, the trades, the arts, government, travel, spiritual and cultural leadership, and even (eventually) war making.
Personally, I’m sick of treating the episcopacy of the Roman Catholic church with kid gloves. The pedophile scandals of the last 20 years was enough to deprive them of any moral authority they once claimed. But the stupidity, yeah, stupidity of the Catholic hierarchy deserves no quarter. The Council of American Bishops picked this birth control fight:
American bishops at first opposed having hospitals and schools connected with them pay employee health costs for contraceptives. But when the President backed off from that requirement, saying insurance companies can pay the costs, the bishops doubled down and said no one should have to pay for anything so evil as contraception.
Wills is one of the few well-known, liberal intellectuals who has written about about Catholicism. He left the seminary before entering the priesthood, but remained a staunch Catholic. In his blog at the New York Review of Books, he takes apart the current controversy.
The bishops’ opposition to contraception is not an argument for a “conscience exemption.” It is a way of imposing Catholic requirements on non-Catholics. This is religious dictatorship, not religious freedom… what matters here is that contraception is legal, ordinary, and accepted even by most Catholics. To say that others must accept what Catholics themselves do not is bad enough. To say that President Obama is “trying to destroy the Catholic Church” if he does not accept it is much, much worse.
Catholics who do not accept the phony argument over contraception are said to be “going against the teachings of their church.” That is nonsense. They are their church. The Second Vatican Council defines the church as “the people of God.” Thinking that the pope is the church is a relic of the days when a monarch was said to be his realm.
Requiring Catholic organizations to provide health insurance that covers free birth control, in other words, offends only a minority of the Roman Catholic Church, not the Church itself. It doesn’t go against Catholicism.
For the last 30 years, we’ve been on the defensive in the culture wars. It’s time we go on the offense.
…I would be leaving the church over this issue.
I’m serious. Access to birth control is a VERY dear issue to my heart, not just for my personal reasons, although it starts there, but for the reasons cited – it is our freedom and a huge part of the sexual revolution that people like Santorum want to reverse. It’s a big part of why women can choose to have smaller families if they want, or no children at all. It’s the reason women with health issues pertaining to childbirth and pregnancy and reproductive issues can have a long and healthy life.
Any woman who stands on their own two feet thanks to birth control, and any man who supports such women, and who is still a practicing Catholic, should seriously consider severing all ties. It’s past time. It is a non-accountable (as the sex abuse scandal shows), anachronistic patriarchal bassackwards organization. It should be driven to extinction.
Every time a Bishop speaks on this issue, the next shout from the crowd should be “sex abuse.” They have lost all authority on any moral issue, nevermind one that has been already decided by 98% of the population as not being immoral but integral to women’s health, wellness, and potential.
First, I’m taken aback by your “boys will be boys” comment as if women couldn’t say no. Are you suggesting that any unplanned pregnancy even within marriage is essentially the product of a rape? When you say your wife wouldn’t have control of her body are you hinting that you wouldn’t respect her desire not to, you know, engage?
Also, Wills is wrong about how Catholic teaching works, whether we like it or not. Teaching comes from The Vatican, which doesn’t take polls. I’ll be the first to defend an individual Catholic’s decision to not abide by Vatican teaching, but let’s be honest about what the teaching is and how it comes about.
I’m happy you’re willing to jump to us widdle girl’s defense, but how in the heck did you read rape into that?? Yikes. Calm down. Good lord.
As to the other…the Catholic Church is threatened by female power, and it wants to crawl back into that medieval womb that spawned it in its current form, and therefore, it is incapable of changing with the times. Hell, how long until they apologized for their bloody and horrible inquisitions??? The year 2000, in fact.
I want to see the Catholic Church gone, personally. They are a force of great harm in this world. How many HIV infections would not have happened if the RCC had early on embraced birth control and pushed for it in some of the poorer area of the world it has great influence?
How many Irish women suffered in bad marriages because divorce was illegal til the mid 90s? That was a DIRECT result of the grip of the RCC on that country.
Eff the RCC. I can’t wait til it’s dead and gone and buried. Bye bye. Exeunt stage right. You won’t be missed.
come up with a more sophisticated, less troll-like reading of my use of “boys will be boys,” if you put on your thinking cap.
As far as Garry Wills goes, you should read a bit about him before you decide he’s wrong. He knows exponentially more about Catholic teaching than you to dismiss out of hand. For example, he belonged to the Jesuit order and eventually chose not to enter the priesthood. He knows the history of the church. He knows canon law, which I’m guessing you know nothing about. He’s a practicing Catholic and has been writing about Catholicism at least since 1964. His Wikipedia entry shows that he’s written 12 books on religion in this century alone. None of this means he’s right, but it does mean it’s not a simple as you make it out to be.
The Roman Catholic Hierarchy continues to make itself irrelevant. Two other issues which won’t go away: 1) why cannot a woman be a priest? and 2) why cannot a priest be married? (the married Slavicorthodox priests are married with children–and far more effective in holy work than the Romanchurch priests.)
of how scared the RCC is of women’s power.
I agree with you.
One reason I’m not radically anti-Catholic is that beyond the hierarchy there are so many people who do good, humbly and fairly. There are a lot of good priests out there and a lot of good nuns. Here’s one of my favorite examples of a Catholic charity.
I think that the Catholic prohibition on priestesses is out of touch with a modern society, but I support their ban on marriage. A priest is responsible for his flock. If he also has a flock at home, he is forced to choose loyalties, and I’m not so sure it’s ideal to say the least. To me, it’s just not obvious.
fn 1. I am Catholic, and I reconcile the issue by reminding myself that the American bishops are human, and therefore just might be wrong about all of this stuff. I sure think that they’re wrong — and why should I leave my religion because *they’re* wrong?
fn 2. What do you have to support your claim that the Slavicorthodox priests are more effective in holy work? My bet is nuttin’, but I’m all ears.
… isn’t a naturally healthy human state and given the evidence, it doesn’t appear that the religious caste handles it well at all. Being centered on one of the biggest aspects of the human condition is pretty important for someone who’s going to tend to my personal well being.
I have been trying to avoid posting on the more hotheaded posts, but the dynamic is fascinating.
To recap, I was, and remain, appalled by the initial HHS mandate, on grounds of freedom of conscience. The late Senator Kennedy was right; that he was probably specifically addressing abortion is beside the point. At the same time, the use of indirect rather than direct means is a time-testing strategy of accommodating first amendment concerns about government policy. I am therefore content with the Obama compromise (and amazed that the “compromise” was not in the first draft).
Anecdotally, it seems that my view is a common one among Catholic parishoners. People remain sensitive to perceived anti-Catholicism, which has been on a bit of a tear these last few weeks. But the heat about the mandate itself has largely drained away.
Among the USCCB, of course, the issue has not drained away. But the view of that particular group aligns most closely not with Catholics, but with the Protestant, evangelical, socially conservative religious right. This has been the case, generally, for many years– an alliance forged in the anti-abortion culture wars. But as in the other “sex” issues, the views of Catholics tend to break away from the views of the bishops, rather than with them.
It is as always a source of sadness and disappointment that politics and media cannot accommodate the fact that views of the Catholic Church– that is, of Catholics– is not coextensive with the views of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.
An autocratic, male-dominated religious institution still claims authority to speak on behalf of the “Catholic Church”, and the laity yield that permission when they continue to participate and perhaps more importantly provide financial support for that increasingly disconnected leadership.
The attacks here have most certainly not been against individual Catholic believers or even the laity. If particular Catholics are undisturbed by observations that their leadership has aligned itself with “the Protestant, evangelical, socially conservative religious right” (which, by the way, has LONG history of real and explicit anti-Catholicism) and unable to admit the betrayal of the Catholic laity that this “alliance” represents, I suggest that it is the Catholic laity who should be the focus of your concern.
It is not the job of “politics and media” to “accommodate” the apparently widening gulf between the USCCB and the Catholic laity. That task falls most appropriately to the USCCB and the Catholic laity itself.
on many issues. Yet I fail to find that you have renounced your citizenship and moved abroad in order to make such disapproval. And, obviously, that disapproval must also mean that you disapprove of the United States in all respects, and in every way.
It is not for you to simplistically define an entire population of people as a monolith in accordance with your own prejudices, and then set forth standards as to how individuals must disprove your prejudices by leaping to denounce whatever thing you decide requires denunciation.
I said nothing “renouncing” anything, nor did I say anyone must move anywhere or do anything of the sort. Nor have said anything about any “monolith”, nor have I “set forth standards as to how individuals …” nor anything of the sort.
What I said is that whatever it is that separates the USCCB from the laity is a matter for the USCCB and the laity to sort out.
It is YOU, on the other hand, who react with exquisite sensitivity because “politics and media” aren’t sufficiently accommodating to the dysfunction in the Catholic church.
I really don’t care what you or any other Catholic do about YOUR problem with USCCB. I adamantly oppose your relentless efforts to make your problems mine.
If you don’t want the women in your world to use contraceptives, that’s between you and the women in your world. If you don’t want women to have ANY authority in your church AT ALL, that’s between you, your church, and the women involved.
Your comment is totally over the top.
It has been a strange issue. We may be on different sides, but I think we were both blind-sided by it. There are legal issues, health issues, and religious issues, all of which have been hashed out. Personally, I never realized there was this much of a fault line here. The Sara Robinson article I quoted kind of puts the issue into larger perspective.
Catholics of my generation really haven’t faced much, if any, discrimination, but my grandmother’s generation and to some degree, my mother’s generation did. I’ve heard my mother refer to “black protestants,” anti-Catholic protestants. I remember my grandmother talking about “mixed marriages” between Catholics and Protestants.
That article reflects a different issue than the one that I found troubling, in that it is about contraception.
As has been helpfully pointed out here, most Catholics do not agree with and do not abide by the bishops’ position on birth control. I have suggested that many Catholics are, by reason of history abroad and in the US, intensely suspicious of government-led directives to cause the bishops or anyone else to change their position, irrespective of whether we agree with that position. It is true that Catholics of our generation have not experienced the discrimination of our grandparents’ generation. But we also recognize why there exist Catholic parochial schools and hospitals in the first place.
It has long been the case that the USCCB yells away to nobody in particular on these “sex” issues. What got people exercised was the realization that many other, more trusted, Catholic organizations– for me, the Catholic Healthcare Org.– were also objecting. Indeed, these were the very folks that the president approached and satisfied with his alternative, thus mostly defusing the issue.
organizations and Catholic organizations also supported the measure. I think I saw this on ThinkProgress, but can’t find the link now.
It’s also somewhat weird that the Bishops haven’t made much of a big deal about state-mandates such as in the ACA. This has been going on across the country. In 2001, six moderate Republicans sponsored a bill for birth control coverage.
I’m not sure Catholics are opposed to government-led directives for historical reasons so much as they are, like many Americans, opposed to “government directives.” Period.
Polling seems to be indefinite at this point. There are polls to suggest a draw in terms of the legislation prior to the compromise. There are polls that suggest strong support prior to a compromise. Most people, like you, also support the compromise. See Polling Report.
The organization that is the go-to quote machine here is the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Dolan. But that organization tends to deal with issues that have taken on a national scope, rather than purely local issues.
In Massachusetts, it turns out that the mandate was actually opposed by the Catholic Conference–( a Massachusetts version of the USCCB) but passed because the Catholic Conference could not get any support from Governor Romney. It was 2002, and the Catholic Conference was not exactly in a position to flex political muscles, and Romney probably thought, correctly, that he could run them over.
Anyway, I thought it worthwhile to note that, the GOP reaction to the controversy has been absurdly self-defeating, which many of you predicted. I thought that this issue opened a big door to people like Brown to throw a wedge into Obama voters over an issue of conscience. I still think it did.
But the GOP attempt to exploit the wedge made this an issue about the availability of contraception, period, rather than the availability of free contraception forcibly paid for by someone else in violation of their conscience. Their positioning on the issue is absurdly self-destructive.
So, in sum: I still think the initial policy was in error, and potentially opened a crack in the Obama coalition. I am pleased to note that the Obama climbdown and left-wing reaction to it happened as I thought, and did not do much to repair the damage. However, the damage done by this “own goal” is now more than outweighed by the self-inflicted damage done by the GOP.
________________________________________________________
I disagree. I think that Catholics are particularly sensitive to government directives that are evidently directed at Catholics. The reason that there are a great many Catholic parochial schools is because public schools taught that the Catholic Church was the “whore of Babylon” seeking to destroy the United States and that individual Catholics were loyal to a foreign power seeking to enslave the American people. The founding of Catholic schools then caused our government to realize how terribly important it is that no government money ever find its way to Catholic schools, resulting in the enactment of “Blaine Amendments” in various states. Similarly, Catholic hospitals were founded because “establishment” medical institutions were unwilling to provide care to the largely immigrant Catholic population. (A lot of Mt. Sinai Hospitals were founded at the same time, for similar reasons.) So I think the initial reaction from the left, which seemed to suggest that these institutions exist at the pleasure of the government, and should be thankful for the privilege, was rather profoundly insulting.
However, as noted above, I underestimated just how much of a troglodyte position would be taken by the GOP.
Busing in Southie? 😉
I just don’t understand this. We have a minimum wage law, and the workers could go out and buy birth control with the money provided by the employer. We have a minimum insurance coverage, and the workers could go out and acquire birth control with the insurance provided by the employer.
What makes one so much different than the other?
n/t
You really don’t see the difference? There is no requirement to buy birth control or subsidize it for other people when workers are paid with money, they can take that money and go out and buy a pizza instead. When people who don’t like or use birth control are paid with an offer of free birth control, that’s useless and offensive and screws them over.
My coworkers get family leave as a result of having a kid. I don’t intend to have a kind but I’m not going to receive like compensation that I can spend on pizza instead.
Not everyone will take advantage of every benefit compensation. This has no bearing on what minimum insurance standards should be for employees.
but we don’t just accept every money grab without argument and opposition, do we? If we want to spend our own money on pizza instead of giving it to drug addicts and movie stars, we make our case, we don’t just accept being mugged by the bully.
I agree that not everyone needs all the benefits and most people won’t use their insurance, they’ll pay in more than they get out. That’s fine, because anyone of us might need more than we pay in. The question is, what should the minimum standards be, what should everyone pay for in case they might need it, and what should people pay for themselves if they need it. Not everything is in the first category. Stomv seems to think everything should be covered, and we should never be able to buy ourselves any pizza unless everyone else can buy just as much pizza.
… point in your first paragraph. Your second paragraph seems to agree with me completely. As I’ve said before, there are two aspects here. First is the question of what should be in a minimum standard, and second and what constitutes a legitimate exception to a minimum standard. You seem to be making the first case much more than the latter. In the first case, the technocrats and doctors have weighed in. You disagree, and that’s great, but you’re still subject to the standard just like lots of people are subjected to standards to which they disagree. That’s life.
We don’t have to accept being paid in free birth control, or free aromatherapy or free pizza, for that matter. We can protest and say, hey, that violates my religious beliefs, or that is bad public policy that makes the world worse and is unfair to lots of people. Pay me in cash, thank you, and don’t make me subsidize birth control and abortion or whatever it is that offends me.
I still can’t believe you guys are letting stomv’s point sit uncorrected, as though someday we won’t be paid in cash at all, and we will just be paid in free access to stuff the government says we need, and you guys will say you don’t see any difference. Come on! It’s the difference between freedom and slavery. Slaves were paid with free health care provided by the master, and given some food and shelter and the master said “that’s life”, but they would rather have been free, paid in cash and allowed to participate in a free market.
Slaves couldn’t leave the job.
It’s pretty simple – there are minimum standards to all kinds of things – insurance included. It is right and just that such standards exist in our system. It is expected that people will disagree with standards. Everyone needs to follow the law nonetheless. You’re free to argue about standards and influence what they are, we live in a democracy after all.
any job we take we are going to have to be paid with free birth control and abortion, unless we leave the country.
It’s frightening that you can’t seem to see what is wrong with stomv’s assertion that there is not so much difference between being paid in cash we can spend how we want, and being paid in birth control and other stuff we don’t want.
I know there are minimum standards. I think there should be minimum standards of health care available to all people provided by the government, but those standards should be uncontroversial truly minimum standards that 95% of us agree we want covered and are willing to pay for other people to get even if we don’t need it. Contraception and abortion aren’t health care and we shouldn’t be forced to pay for them. If you want to contribute to private organizations like planned parenthood to provide access to poor people, I guess for now that’s your right.
Everybody needs health care, whether they admit it or not. A large majority of Americans feel that contraception and abortions are part of health care. Our elected government has therefore made that a mandate. Sorry, that’s just the way it is.
There is nothing wrong with anything stomv wrote, nothing needs to be corrected. Many of us (I suspect stomv as well) would rather see health care (including contraception and abortions) paid for directly by the government — that’s a perfectly fine way to get employers out of it.
Whether paid by public funds, employers, or individuals, health care is needed by every American. We currently devote a greater share of our GDP to health care than any comparable nation, and our GDP is the largest in the world. We are not nearly first in any outcome-based measure. We are spending more and getting less than we should. If your health care were funded directly by the government, rather than being provided by your employer and inflated by your health insurer, you would remove your health-care costs from your compensation.
Meanwhile, you don’t think contraception and abortion should be covered. I don’t think chiropractors should be covered. Too bad. All three are covered — deal with it. I don’t like my tax dollars paying for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan either — too bad.
… you are free not to partake. You aren’t free to ask employers to violate the minimum standards they are bound to by law. As general principals, these apply pretty much in any country you want to live in. If that makes you think you’re the equivalent of a slave, I can do nothing for your irrational beliefs.
As for what the standards should be? That has been decided. You’re free to disagree about what is and isn’t healthcare, but you don’t get to make the decision by yourself. Go ahead and complain if you want to try and change it. You might want to edit out any mention of slavery while you do because it’s a pretty laughable (if not offensive) tangent.
See it becomes slavery when its taken to the point that stomv can’t see any difference about, the point when we are paid not in money and wages to spend ourselves, but paid in services provided by our masters who tell us what the standards are. Remember this started with stomv’s question:
So I go and answer him, thinking he’d had a little brain fart and would quickly admit his mistake. This, mind you, is in response to a very clear point, that centralmassdad was appalled at the violation of freedom of conscience, clearly referring to forcing people to subsidize deeply significant religiously offensive things that they really don’t want to have to contribute to. He asks, what makes paying people in MONEY different from giving them some specific product for free. I think he was thinking, crazily, that freedom of conscience is violated just as much by paying people money, since they can go spend it on birth control, but that’s ridiculous. The key difference is that when people are paid in money, THEY spend THEIR MONEY on birth control, and I spend MY money on stuff I want, not on abominable birth control for them! Duh, brain fart, right?? That’s a big difference. Just because BC is legal for individuals to buy doesn’t necessarily violate my conscience, or at least not as much. It bothers me how it affects society and I think it is bad public policy, but as you note this is a democracy and the majority think it should be legal and people will do what they want with their bodies.
There are distinct lines: illegal – legal for married couples – legal for individuals – subsidized by private organizations – subsidized by local governments – subsidized by state governments – subsidized by the federal government and now completely paid for by the federal government. Next will be tax credits and bonuses to encourage people to take them, and after the final line will be a mandate to take them, and if a woman wants permission to get pregnant, she’ll have to get a “parenting license” good for one child, to be allowed to go off her mandated birth control.
Any one of those lines might be where someone feels their conscience is being violated by crossing it. I disagree with libertarians who think that as long as they aren’t paying for something, they can’t complain, and as long as they are paying for something themselves, we can’t complain. There is nothing special about the “public financing” line, it is just a convenient line to draw in many issues, and it is usually respected and understood, not mocked with irrelevant points about how we all pay for war, etc. Grow up!
… so I didn’t read any further.
Thanks for playing.
It is like slavery when people are paid not in cash they can spend how they want, but in services provided by the government. I mean, entirely paid in the form of services, not paid in cash money at all. Having minimum standards and access to some mandated services does not make me feel like a slave, because I am also paid in enough cash that I can spend how I want. But stomv is saying that he can’t see the difference as all between being paid cash and being pad in services, which is like saying he can’t see the difference between slavery and freedom.
It does wonders for your credibility
(Comment not read again.)
would you say that being paid entirely in access to minimal standard services like health care, housing, food, and not getting any wages to spend how you choose, is freedom? It is not slavery, because we’d be able to change jobs?
If you aren’t going to read the comments and try to get the point, and see that I’m not saying that having to pay taxes or insurance is like slavery, then, well, then all the rest of us will call you a doofus doo doo head and you won’t know.
The government is often in the business of defining stuff. We want that, too. Would you prefer every chicken you ate to be a gamble with salmonella? Would you prefer to have to comb over insurance policies to make sure they were adequate before accepting a job? Do you intend to inspect airplanes yourself?
What did I say that inspired those questions? Of course I think there should be government services to prevent salmonella and make sure things are safe. And I want to get rid of employer health care and make basic health care free for everyone. Basic health care should be stuff that 95% of us agree should be provided for everyone, inoffensive sustainable affordable proven stuff. It shouldn’t be open ended and all inclusive, it shouldn’t attempt to make us immortal and omnipotent.
Are you guys doubling down on stomv’s idea that there is no difference between being paid in money that we can spend on what we want, and being paid in government giving us whatever the government says we need?
For most of us with health care coverage, the employer does not foot the bill completely.
“Giving” is an oversimplification worth thousands a year.
…at least for me. The whole thrust of this contraception discussion is that the President and HHS Secretary tried to find a way to have contraception available FOR FREE to the consumer. I’ve been asking all along why this of all things should be completely free. Maybe I should just ask what the standard copay rate is for contraception as maybe I’m making bad assumptions. In my experience prescription copays run $10 (give or take) per 30-day supply. Food quickly comes to mind as a life necessity costing much more. If this were simply a matter of treating contraception equally relative to other prescriptions rather than specially I for one would not have made all the comments that I have on this issue.
“…why this of all things should be completely free.:
Because the doctors and technocrats looked at the data and concluded that the system would benefit if this were part of a minimum standard.
Also, I’d not, that when you work to get salary and benefits, neither salary nor benefits are free.
access to birth control is so central to a woman’s place in this society, and their ability to good health and control over their circumstances, it warrant the same sort of consideration that free cancer screenings do.
Hey, when you can be responsible for the consequences in your belly after having a night of unprotected sex, come back and argue. Til then, you can take my word for it that birth control and family planning is extremely and most basically important to women. (And even so-called reasonable copays get f*cking expensive if you have to spend that money once a month, every month, for your entire life reproductive life. Never mind that I don’t find today’s copays remotely reasonable, especially after paying hundreds a month in effing premiums to boot.)
$10 copays??? Are you high dude??? Seriously. Try again. You really need to stop digging a hole here…
If so, fine, I can stand corrected, but what I said IS my experience. This sentence: “Hey, when you can be responsible for the consequences in your belly after having a night of unprotected sex, come back and argue.” has a couple of problems. First, I wouldn’t have a night of unprotected sex because I’d either do it protected or not do it all (so far the latter consistently), assuming of course that I DON’T want the consequences, which leads to the second problem which is the father bears responsibility too so while the consequences aren’t anamotomical it’s not as if there aren’t any.
Those non-anatomical “consequences” you refer to for the father absolutely pale in comparison to the impact on the mother. For all too many men, there aren’t any consequences of fathering an unwanted child at all. Women bear an enormously unequal burden — economic, emotional, professional, biological, social — of unwanted pregnancies.
It is comments like this that exemplify what I mean when I refer to your sexism. I’m sorry, Christopher, but you really don’t get it. Several of us have tried to explain it, and I for one am weary of trying.
…that I found Mr. Lynne’s comment about the system benefiting to be the most persuasive that I have heard.
I at least assume that if I father a child I have a moral obligation to assure the mother’s well-being and help raise the child. It’s those who would get a woman pregnant then abandon both her and the child she is carrying who are the true sexists.
It doesn’t sound to me as though you’ve really listened to the experiences of women with anything near the respect that you show for various institutions. I encourage you to start there, rather than pursuing this further with me.
I’ve listened to plenty of women, thank you very much. Public policy affects all of us and thus we all get a voice. Not agreeing is not the same as not listening.
This is why I said I was weary of trying.