Selfish Women Who Don't Have Babies

But I repeat myself; of course women who don't have babies are selfish.  Not having babies is a selfish thing to do.

Can I just say how fucking sick I am of hearing that resentful undertone of blaming childless women for, like, pretty much everything that's wrong with this country?  On its face, the claim is that *abortion* is the problem.  Abortion and/or "anti-family policies", depending on who you ask, which tends to be code for contraception funding, no-fault divorce and same-sex marriage rights.

This has come up twice in my reading today, both times via Right Wing Watch (and much love to RWW for being one of the main sources of material for this lil blog of mine).  First off was former-Senator Frothy Mix, claiming that the reason Social Security is having issues is because of abortion:

“The reason Social Security is in trouble is because we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees, well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion...these demographic trends are causing Social Security and Medicare to be underfunded.”

Damn those selfish women, having fewer babies - or having them on their own time instead of whenever they happened to get pregnant (1/3 of women who abort say it's because they're not ready for a/another child), or choosing to stop having children (60% of women who get abortions are already mothers, and 38% say they're aborting because they've completed their childbearing) instead of emulating Michelle Duggar's 18-child family.  If not for them, we'd have more workers and therefore more money in Social Security!  Although he's actually wrong; one in three women will have an abortion at some point in her life, but the total number of pregnancies (not counting miscarriages) that end in abortion is actually closer to one in five, not one in three.  Not that facts have ever stopped these assholes, but I'm still a fan of them, so. 

Shortly after that, there was the email from Tea Party Nation - I see that the Teabaggers are totally just a fiscal conservatism movement, yes, not synonymous with the current conservative movement at all, of course, and it's totally not about race or abortion or gays or any of those social issues, nope, just the taxes. /sarcasm - claiming that White America is dying out because of "public policies promoting infertility".  Like, for example, those focusing on:

...reducing unwanted pregnancies, delaying child bearing to further career goals and even promoting childlessness and promoting adoption as a better option.
Child bearing has become something distasteful to many women, an unwanted and painful experience to be avoided rather than embraced.

This is even less subtle.  The problem is clearly stated: women are avoiding childbirth instead of embracing it - well, white women, anyway, which are the ones that matter here, as the guy who wrote this is clutching his pearls over the fact that immigrant populations supposedly have a higher birthrate than white people - and trying to further their career goals and not have unwanted pregnancies.

Let me just repeat that for emphasis: this guy is outright saying that reducing unwanted pregnancies, furthering one's career goals instead of giving it all up to have babies, and childlessness are the problem, and that [white] women should be embracing the baby-making in order to keep Real Americans™ from being outbred by those undesirables brown people "immigrants, both legal and illegal."

And yet I notice that, despite rather unsubtly leaning on the premise that women in control of their fertility is bad for the economy/Social Security/white supremacy, neither of these shitballs actually really talks about women and what this would mean for us.

Because neither of them, it seems, is willing to recognize that the point of view - I hesitate to call it policy, as it's a bit nebulous for that - they're advocating comes at a very real cost to the people upon whose bodies they would see their ideals enacted.  Women's bodies, to be precise.  It's to be expected from the Religious Reich, I suppose, yet another attempt to enforce their morals on women's bodies without ever mentioning women at all, making it all about everyone who's affected except the women themselves.

Let me set this straight:  Women are not the problem here.  Not the childbearing ones, not the childfree ones.  A person may choose to have children for selfish reasons, or may choose to not have children for altruistic reasons.  Pressuring women to make a mass exodus from the workforce and put aside their birth control and have as many babies as god gives them will not fix this country, or this world. 

Of course, it would provide a nice, steady supply of expendable labor for corporations to squeeze every last ounce of profit out of.  And it would keep a solid 50% of the population under firm control and keep them from making trouble.  But if you think those are benefits, you are clearly on the wrong damn side of this war.