From: matt@smoke.brl.mil (Matthew Rosenblatt)
Newsgroups: misc.legal
Subject: Re: Pre-Sex Contract
Summary: It ain't easy to be a girl.
Keywords: Guilty
Date: 18 Dec 92 15:41:12 GMT
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Lab, APG MD.

In article <1992Dec17.210620.8318@netcom.com> aldridge@netcom.com 
(Jacquelyn Aldridge) writes:

>Will Steeves <goid@zooid.guild.org> writes:

>>It's not that simple, Lana.  *David* may not want children (perhaps never),
>>but a vasectomy might be a bit TOO extreme, especially if he should decide 
>>in the future that he wants to have a family.

>>Indeed, as I was explaining to Larry Billings, asking Freedom of Choice For
>>Men supporters to go out and have vasectomies makes about as much sense as
>>telling women who don't want to get pregnant, to get a tubal ligation.

>>These operations are more or less *irreversible*, so rather than force 
>>people who don't to be parents RIGHT NOW, into a situation where they will 
>>NEVER	become parents, why not try to offer men and women a comfortable 
>>degree of reproductive freedom.  Women currently have this freedom, 
>>why shouldn't men?   [Will Steeves]

If a man wants the kind of reproductive freedom that the ladies and
girls currently have, he should have been born a girl.

>	Women's freedom is bought at a price. The back up to birth control
>is abortion or birth. And in this benighted society abortion is a
>physically invasive procedure, not a pill. Very profitable for the mostly
>male population of doctors. Instead of a late and heavy period a woman has
>to find the resources to gain an abortion, knowing that the fetus is
>growing and developing every day. Miscarriages are mourned, how different
>is it to have an abortion?  Men don't have the grief. If a man doesn't want
>a child it is still for him an intellectual consideration. Most women can 
>envision in detail the stage of development of a fetus. Has it hands and
>feet, lost it's tail yet, have a face.   [Jacquelyn Aldridge]

Miss Aldridge is on to something here.  Leading feminist Andrea Dworkin
puts it this way:

   "There is the fear of having murdered:  not someone, not real
  murder; but of having done something hauntingly wrong.  . . .
  She has been having children in her mind, and getting her value
  through them, since she herself was a baby.  Little girls believe
  that dolls are real babies.  Little girls put dolls to sleep,
  feed them, bathe them, diaper them, nurse them through illnesses,
  teach them how to walk and how to talk and how to dress -- love
  them.  Abortion turns a woman into into a murderer all right:
  she kills her allegiance to Motherhood First.  This is a crime.  
  She is guilty: of not wanting a baby."
      -- _Right-Wing Women_ (New York: Perigee, 1983), p. 74.

>	So, give it a break. The guy wants a contract that states that he
>has a choice over what a women does if she gets pregnant. Why should he
>have the right. He can control his own destiny, he doesn't have to engage
>in sexual practices that will get a woman pregnant.  [Jacquelyn Aldridge]

That's what I say.  Good article, Miss Aldridge!

					-- Matt Rosenblatt
                                        (matt@amsaa.brl.mil)

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