if you have never done so, to imagine, as best you can, how it would be to live under constant threat of your body embarking on a process from which there is no escape save gestation and giving birth, or interrupting said process, at the very least, at the cost of considerable physical discomfort, and with the risk of serious illness, injury, or death.
I don't think we are capable of truly comprehending this, but with a little effort, you should be able to get just a hint of the horror.
Women cannot run away from pregnancy. They cannot pretend they do not remember the encounter, they cannot employ magical thinking that it is not really so, not really theirs, changing their phone numbers or leaving town will not work. The pregnancy leaves town with them.
They can, if they have the money, buy their way out of it, but not as easily as men can. The money must be used to purchase a medical procedure, which they and only they can undergo.
If they do not have money, the effect on their lives, and the life of the child, can be devastating.
In the US especially, a man who impregnates a woman is considered to be taking care of his responsibilities if he sends money. It is not required that he go without sleep for the better part of a year, while maintaining whatever work he can get. He does not have to stagger out into the cold dawn to wait for a bus with the baby in his arms, or figure out how to haul baby, large box of diapers, case of formula and diaper bag onto that bus and through the streets.
It is not he who makes the call whether to forfeit the low wage job in order to take the baby to some grim waiting auditorium, to spend the day, baby in arms, in a hard plastic chair, in hopes of receiving some form of medical treatment, which more often than not, will include a prescription for a medicine that cannot be purchased without spending at least part of the rent money.
All that he needs to do is send maybe enough money to buy the diapers every week, and that's it. He is said to be doing the right thing.
Over 90% of people living in poverty in US are mothers and their children in situations where the father has chosen not to make even that financial contribution.
Being a father is not, if the ladies will excuse me, depositing sperm. Sending a check does not make one a parent, and while it may be enough to satisfy one's conscience, and more than society demands, it does not make one a parent. The parent is the lady standing there at the bus stop, in line at the food stamp office, trying to ignore the ache after nine hours in the hard plastic chair, it is she who cleans up the various effluvia of infancy, she who knows how much the rent is and how much she is short, and just how many boxes of diapers the check you sent purchased.
Now the society wishes to increase the burden placed on our sisters and our daughters, by denying them even the most rudimentary control over the most basic and primitive of biological processes of their own bodies. And that is the fundamental principle, their bodies are their own. Not the state's. Not any man's.
Oppression of women, keeping them shackled to the bonds of reproductive biology is the oldest and most effective method of social control known to man. It is also one of the most debilitating and harmful practices that any society can engage in, and while our sisters undeniably suffer most from it, our children also suffer, as do we. It impedes our progress as a species, and limits our own futures, again, not in the immediate and physical intensity as our sisters, but in a way, it may in the long run, damage us more, because it erodes our souls.
