I don’t actually think it is in the interests of feminism or the pro-choice movement to cling so rigidly to outdated notions of “life.” It no longer helps our cause to try to argue that the fetus is not “life.” The reason for this, as people have noted, is that technological advances, like sonograms, where you can see feet on a fetus in the first trimester, have made those claims clearly and patently hollow to even ardently pro-choice people who have seen the black and white staticky fuzziness take shape into human form. How can we possibly claim that the moving creature, with feet and toes that we can see, is not “life”?
It seems to me that the pro-choice movement doesn’t need to cling to these ideas, or this rigid ’70s-era idiom, to make its central argument acceptable to the larger public. The idea that a woman should control her reproductive choices is still a vivid and moral one even to a population that understands full well that a fetus is a baby-in-progress.
Can we admit that a woman has the right to choose, while also acknowledging what we see on sonograms? Can we say “embryos” and “fetuses” do represent some form of “life” without conceding a woman’s absolute control over the womb that bears them? A person who has had an abortion knows, and in fact has always known, and experienced very intimately this charged ambiguity: An unborn fetus that is wanted is a “baby,” and an unborn fetus that is not wanted is a “fetus.”
I think the new technologies, and the new demographic realities, in which unwed mothers need protections, demand a more imaginative, honest rhetoric. Paradoxically, I think in the long run it will only help the ongoing fight for reproductive rights, to evolve with the times, to trailblaze a way of thinking that encompasses the ambiguities we know, and can see, are there.
In other words, let's embrace the truth that what we're killing are babies... and to hell with those who think this is a bad thing.
Let's embrace baby killing and be proud about it.
We're pro-killing of innocent humans and we'll be in your face about it.
And if you're not on board with that openness, then clearly you're a fanatic and a radical and in fact, immoral.
The sentence I bolded above in the excerpt tells the tale. Controlling her reproductive choice (killing her unborn child) is a vivid and moral choice. And if you see a problem with that thinking, you must, logically, be immoral.
Welcome to wickedness.












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