For how many years have assholes like Amanda Marcotte dismissed and derided anti-feminists, conservatives and libertarians as wanting to SUBJUGATE AND CONTROL WOMEN'S REPRODUCTIVE CHOICES - those monsters!
Let's get down to the damned bones here. They are liars. They want to subjugate and control our reproductive choices AND our right to bear children (and most certainly our right to raise them) and control it but good. The excuse is sometimes that childrearing is oppressive to women, but now with the World Wildlife Federation promising that TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT of all MAMMALS will be EXTINCT within 20 years - due to the existence of human life in insupportable numbers - they feel more than justified in attempting to gain control of world governments in order to enforce their communist (openly communist) agendas, enact communal kitchens, take my children and your children away at birth to be raised by ecopsychotics and lesbians, to only allow a quota of babies to be born each year but not to be raised by the people who bore them.
And these same people have the utter gall to point us to dystopian shit like "The Handmaid's Tale" and caution us of the dangers of Christianity and conservatism? Are you KIDDING ME?
http://directionlessbones.wordpress.com/2008/12/27/controlling-birth/I'm starting at the end here, but this doesn't matter right now. I'm starting with one proposed real-life plan to enact the radical feminist/ecopsychotic agenda that is not in the least atypical except that it uses LESS COERCION than many other forms of voluntary and involuntary human extinction or reduction which they universally support. Remember, this is one of the more *moderate* plans.
THIS IS THE MODEST PROPOSAL.
That mockery of a sentence is basically me saying: controls on reproduction may not be all that bad. It may be that the best situation for society is, speaking very broadly, one in which people do not operate with an expectation that they automatically have the right to have children.
Aww, didn't see that one coming! I wonder why they keep mocking us for saying that they wanted to REMOVE THAT VERY RIGHT?
The principal reason is that more people require more land, more energy, consume more plastics, more minerals. The number of humans is way beyond the planet?s capacity to support at our current level of consumption. I think this is one good reason for people to make a personal choice not to reproduce. But personal choices may not be enough.
Therefore controlling your reproductive choice, which they claim to be against, will now be acceptable. Because down is up, black is white, slavery is freedom and war is peace.
She starts by attempting to reasonably clear away some possible objections to this modest proposal to remove the right to bear and raise children.
Her first example of a possible objection is not one that normal humans wishing to have children would normally raise; it is one her ilk would raise. That such policies might discriminate against blacks, gays, the poor, etc. Because it is not horrifying to suggest that the government TAKE CONTROL OF OUR REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS AND CAPABILITIES AND COMMANDEER OUR CHILDREN; it is horrifying that they might enforce it UNEQUALLY.
Yeah, that was MY first concern, how about you?
She feels that so long as whatever plan is proposed is applied EQUALLY to all people will eliminate most preliminary objections to this sort of Orwellian oppression.
Then she says she wants to make sure it's not too COERCIVE. Even though she just said individual choice will not be enough and it has to be applied to everyone; it's not going to be coercive, so don't worry. Let's see how voluntary and un-coercive these Orwellian plans to control your body and your life might be.
So I?m talking not forcible sterilisation of people judged ?unfit?. What am I talking about? As I said, I want to go somewhere in between coercion and individual choice. What I want is a shift in cultural assumptions, cultural norms, in the structures (education, marriage, adoption services, the retail of contraceptives, etc.) by which society facilitates some options and inhibits others. I think we should aim for a culture in which, firstly, the production of children is seen as a public matter, not a private one, and in which, secondly, the production and raising of children has been separated from the issue of biological linkage.
A rough sketch (and this is just one possibility, not a definitive statement) might be something like this:
Around the time of puberty, as a kind of ?rite of passage?, adolescents get reversibly sterilised.
Oh, thank God. That's not very coercive; I'm sure that so long as it is applied equally to everyone, few people will object to being sterilized at the age of 12 or so, subject to big brother approval to reproduce.
The oddest thing there is that one of their biggest nemeses of the decade has been Sarah Palin, who never proposed outlawing abortion (and certainly not birth control) but suggested that we adopt a VOLUNTARY CULTURE OF LIFE which ENCOURAGES birth control and birth over abortion. But I digress. We're going the other way now and proposing sterilization of 12 year olds as a rite of passage.
I?m not much of an expert on the different sorts of procedures, maybe only men need do this since I imagine it?s a less invasive operation. Or maybe contraceptive hormones are made available in chocolate bars, or something.
Ok, that part was funny. Chocolate bars. She's not fucking kidding.
The point is, people are as a rule indefinitely sterile.
Yeah, there's nothing frightening about that; despite that feminists have been telling us it's all about CHOICE for the last hundred years.
This would have an opt-out, obviously: if people don?t want to, they don?t have to. But it?s like with organ donation: if you require an especial effort, then only a minority will do it. If you encourage and facilitate, only a minority will not do it.
I think she underestimates the numbers of normal human beings - or grossly OVERestimates the prevalence of psychotic radfems and ecological loons. Either way, it's essential to her plan that only a small minority of people "opt out" and that's going to come down to force, just like it does in China and anywhere else where you try to stop people having children and control their entire lives.
Then some group of people make it known to the relevant administration that they want to raise a child. The group could contain any number of people (well, obviously in practice there?s some kind of ceiling), male or female or not, sleeping with each or not.
This too is actually pretty funny. Or it would be if she wasn't serious and if most ecofeminists didn't believe in Orwellian reproductive control.
If there are children without carers, they get allocated immediately. If not, they go on a waiting list.
So...why would there be so many children without carers? She's making a huge mistake here - assuming that a population that is mostly sterilized voluntarily at 12 who opt out and then decide to have children will...what, abandon them? Don't most people keep their children? Why would children born to most people be "without carers" when they aren't now and this is a population that is ostensibly not having very many children at all to begin with? Wacko.
Society negotiates, based on democratic decision and expert testimony a yearly (or monthly, or whatever) quota of new babies.
Spot all the things wrong with THAT sentence. Experts? In this shit? What the hell experts is she talking about? Experts on global management of BABY QUOTAS in a sterilized population? Holy shit.
I imagine that this might in many cases be very low, if that society was making a concerted effort to withdraw from the wilderness, reduce energy consumption, etc. Based on this quota, people on the waiting list are given IVF or artificial insemination or whatever, and one among them becomes pregnant. The wait would probably be a good way of making people ?cool off? and see how committed they really are.
Or maybe a fuck of a lot more people would "opt out" than you could possibly imagine, because no one wants the government in their damn uteruses? Because most people don't want to go ask their local COUNCIL if they can or can't get pregnant?? And when they DO decide to, why would they need IVF? Do you seriously think MOST people wouldn't end up, oh, I don't know, fucking to get pregnant? What the hell?
There would probably be a screening process like what we have now for adoption: does this group seem to be genuinely attached to one another, are they responsible people? Now it?s certainly true that any process like this will reflect the rest of society. If the average person hates gays, then that will be reflected in difficulties, or even an outright ban, on gay parenting.
Again projecting her own worries on the rest of us.
If society is hugely divided by class, then any requirement of ?being able to care for a child? will weigh more heavily on the poor. If society blames women for children, then women will be scrutinised more harshly. So I think this has to be seen in the context of a socialist or communist society without widespread bigotry and oppression. Some hope, eh? But if we?re being optimistic?
Yes, most of us dream the impossibly optimistic dream of abject Stalinism and outright government control on our reproductive capabilities or our desires to start a family. Damned optimism's gonna kill me.
Families like this would (until we get artificial wombs, and no doubt even after that in some cases) have one ?mother? and a collection of ?parents? - they would almost certainly have a far higher ratio of adults to children that nuclear families tend to.
That's a hell of an assumption. Left to themselves people tend to pair off and have children; why would women suddenly decide they want a bunch of other people in their damn kitchens and houses while they have a baby, taking control and charge of their families?
No one individual would be loaded with the concentrated responsibility of childcare.
This is the crux of the matter when it comes to radical feminism; of course the eco-psychosis comes into play hugely, but all radical feminist visions for reproductive control by the government mandate HOW people will take care of their children. Stay-at-home-mothering is certainly not a choice anyone makes; it is something women are involuntarily burdened with, and god knows they don't love their children and WANT to be with them. This girl is totally clueless.
There would probably be some people who decided to breed ?the old fashioned way?, outside of the waiting list system.
Or, you know, almost ALL of them.
There might even be some accidental pregnancies from people who opted out of sterilisation. As long as they could show that their children were well-looked-after, they would be allowed to
Well gee, that's mighty fucking white of you.
and as long as they were only a small minority they could be quite easily factored into the quotas.
So it's back to force again - forced abortions, forced infanticide, forced sterilization, and mandatory quotas on how many babies are even allowed to be born. Great plan.
Anyway, that?s my bit of science-fiction about taking procreation out of the private sphere.
Quite a worthy goal, wouldn't you say?
I won?t deny that such a process is open to abuse:
It never occurs to this numskull that it IS abuse in and of itself. That ANY such oppressive schemes are INHERENTLY and GROSSLY abusive.
it represents some loss of power by individual parents to society.
SOME loss? Did she read what she even wrote?
That could have downsides.
Yeah, it COULD.
And it would mean giving up a whole mythology of what the family is, what children are - that they are ?mine?, ?my flesh and blood?. But equally, we should note that 1) there is a far more widespread problem now of people being forced to have children
Citation please? When? Where? Who? How?
2) more social oversight of children has the potential to protect children from a lot of the shit they suffer from parents, and socialise them more openly and more freely
Ok another flawed premise. First she names human beings as mere consumers of resources and fails to recognize that people are enormously huge PRODUCERS of that which human beings consume. In fact, we produce more than we can consume, isn't that right? There is more than enough food for everyone; it's just that the ecopsychotics want it put in the damn cars instead of into people. More than enough everything; that ain't the problem sweetie. But from that flawed premise that is ubiquitous in today's society, that humans are mere useless lumps of flesh that EAT SHIT UP and turn it into shit, we move to this other flawed assumption - that parents are the CAUSE of most childhood misery instead of, as we can much more accurately observe, the ALLEVIATION of most childhood suffering.
How can people with such bizarre ideas of the human race propose solutions to imagined problems?
3) it reduces the chances of catastrophic social breakdown, famine, and mass extinction.
I'm too tired for that one right now. And there is a lot more coming on this topic, but this is a hell of a start.
This is your MODEST proposal. We'll see what more we find in the seedy, filthy underbelly of ecofeminism as we go, eh?
