Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Jill Filipovic of Feministe says

Too many women are dying in the United States while having babies. Amnesty International details the American maternal health care crisis, calling it part of a systematic violation of women’s rights. Funny how “pro-lifers” aren’t exactly latching on to the cause.

She said it here.

A month later, and another report on the same subject showing the same results, this time from the presumably non-human-rights-activist University of Washington, and we’re still not hearing from “pro-life” groups.

Goodness! You’d think “pro-life” was some kind of euphemism for “use pregnancy to punish any woman, married or not, for having sex.” Also known as “the wages of sin.”

I’ve mentioned this repeatedly in the past but unlike the euphemism “pro-life,” the pro-choice label is apt. The point of being pro-choice is to support women’s reproductive decision whether the decision is to become pregnant or avoid it, to terminate an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy or to carry a wanted pregnancy to term. (That’s why, for instance, Planned Parenthood is both the biggest provider of contraception services and pregnancy termination but also the biggest provider of prenatal care and post-partum care. That’s why, for instance pro-choice advocates oppose both efforts to limit access to birth control and abortion in the U.S., and opposed to force abortion in, say, China.)

This is why you’re hearing calls for reducing maternal mortality from pro-choice groups, and hearing diddly squat from “pro-life” organizations.

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus, who works in a municipal (I think) legal justice system and volunteers to help pregnant minors obtain parental-notification exemptions for abortions has the rundown on just how her state’s (and very likely most states’) rape-victim exemptions work. Or rather don’t.

I’m not saying that there aren’t some stone cold stupid obnoxious young boys out there who are getting their counterparts pregnant. I know there are. When girls who were knocked up by age-appropriate boyfriends come in, the boyfriends come with them (and make out in court). Girls who come in alone, I assume, didn’t have a boyfriend; they had an abuser. Now, technically, there’s a rape exception in the notification law. If you have been raped, you do not have to go through the judicial bypass — you get a bonus abortion, no paternalism attached! But because, lord knows, women are big fat liars about rape, and because women will resort to desperate measures to acquire medical care that we all know they don’t really need (what they need is a baby), a girl can’t just say she was raped and get a free bypass. She has to report her rape to the police. And since the police are going to tell your parents anyway, well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

I can’t conceive of any possible scenario where a girl reports her rape to the police, but hides her pregnancy and subsequent abortion from her parents, the police, the investigators, the judge, the jury, and the attorneys. I suppose it is possible, but is it probable? Is it reasonable? We don’t trust these girls with the decision to have or not have children, but we think they should be capable of maintaining an intense secret after a horrific trauma and during police and attorney interrogation?

So the exception for the bypass law is, in this case, completely self-defeating. For a girl to meet the criteria for the exception, she will no longer need the bypass. Which again shows you the intent of the law, and the exception: neither were ever instituted with the intention that they be used. Additionally, knowing that the rape exception was only added after intense public pressure illustrates its function quite clearly: the rape exception is to make politicians look like something less than paternalistic monsters, while preserving the paternalistically monstrous power to deny all young women (including rape victims) the right to access desperately needed medical care.

She said it here.

When I was a teen peer counselor back in the days before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade my home state had a variety of too-clever-by-half laws that defined things like 10-month review processes for pregnancy terminations. It was part of the insult legislators routinely added to add calculated insult to often very-real injury.

This sort of unusable rape “exception” suggests only that they’re more sophisticated, not that they’re any less clever-by-half, nor any less interested in insulting and injuring.

It’s still not ok.

Summary: Are boyfriends really “most likely to disappear” when their partners become pregnant? Fact or cultural gender messaging? And who’s decision?

Echidne of the Snakes, while doing an otherwise pitch-perfect job of countering anti-choice slippery-slopery, hits one hypothetical that seems like it might be a flat note:

If she gets pregnant, the boyfriend most likely disappears…

She said it here.

Is this true? Are boyfriends most likely to disappear when their partner gets pregnant?

Just considering a second possiblity from the considerable range of reactions I’d think the boyfriend would be at least as likely to propose marriage as disappear.

Unless, of course, by “disappear” Echidne (who’s hypothetical involves underaged, underprivileged Salvadorians) means “murdered by the girl’s family members in an attempt to defend their family’s ‘honor.’” Which, come to think of it, maybe she does mean.

Based on my own peer-counseling experiences as a teenager in southern Appalachia before Roe v. Wade was handed down relationships involving pregnancy where generally much tighter between the boy and girl themselves than between their families. And when pregnancies were discovered it tended to be the families of both teens that created the separations. And enforced them. Against the wishes of either teenager.

Anyway, what’s your first, second or third-hand experience with this sort of thing? Are boys and/or men really “most likely to disappear when their partner gets pregnant?” I mean, maybe they are! Even though I don’t think so. I’m not going to trust my cultural messaging (which would be similar to Echidne’s) nor can I trust my own non-trivial but also not statistically significant anecdotal experience (which would be that disappearances aren’t “most likely” and when they do occur are often enforced rather than desired.) Instead I just really don’t know.

Which is why I’m asking.

—-

For the record the rest of Echidne’s post really is cool and well-worth a read.

Sadie of Jezebel says

We got a number of distressed emails about a recent piece in Details. Possibly because the description read, “Getting tricked into fatherhood by a woman hell-bent on getting pregnant is much more common than you think.” Good to know!

Deceptive, baby-hungry women have always been a staple of male-mythology; punching a hole in a condom is the sort of thing we like to do between maxing out guys’ credit cards on shoes and sleeping with their best friends. So it’s not shocking that this particular urban horror story should make the lad-mag rounds just in time for Halloween.

Read the quote in context here.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure there are as many women who perforate condoms in order to get pregnant with their unwilling partners as there are men who do so to get their unwilling partner’s pregnant, i.e. some but not very many and certainly not enough to warrant a “words of warning” article in Details. (I mean… seriously, in the average Details readers dreams do women want to have their babies!) Sadie puts it in perspective:

For every Cosmo-wielding nutter this guy dredged up (and I’d really like to see the email he sent out requesting quotes from “friends”) he could have found ten thousand who found the idea not merely abhorrent, but insulting and frankly incomprehensible.

Of course, to the author it makes total sense

For the record, one needn’t be “pro-life” to recoil in horror at the implications of one adult using actual pregnancy as a ploy or, worse, punishment against another. It is absolutely and unequivocally a woman’s right to choose whether she will keep a pregnancy to term. It is not, however, the right of any party to chose parenthood for another without his or her competent decision to do so. And while some religious denominations might be sanguine about it, the idea of one person potentially creating a third human being for use as an instrument against another strikes me as brutal, thoughtless, and deeply alienated from the condition of being human. And can I just say it’s also a lousy, lousy reason to have sex. I don’t mention it as often anymore but this is the sort of thing I mean when I say I’m a prudish libertine: mutually agreed-upon sex is great. Mutually agreed-upon procreation is also great (as can be mutually agreed-upon sex for procreation.) Sex to make someone an unsuspecting parent, though, is just ewww!

But the above paragraph is a digression: Details- and perhaps Cosmo-reader fantasies notwithstanding, the likelihood of one adult partner attempting to make an involuntary parent of the other is vanishingly small when compared with, oh, say, the chances of both parties being confronted with the possibility of an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy do to failure to use contraception either correctly or, for that matter, at all. It would be lovely if Details, and its sister (in spirit if not in fact) publication, encouraged deeper introspection in that direction.