Female Sin = Female Pain as Punishment

July 14, 2018 9:11 AM

The Trump administration’s policies on family separation and abortion are driven by one view: A woman’s pain is fitting punishment. Last spring, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress worked together to pass a bill that would have gutted the Affordable Care Act. That piece of legislation doubled as an ideological manifesto: By letting states waive insurance protections for women who’ve been pregnant, given birth, survived a sexual assault, or experienced domestic violence, the GOP laid out a medical framework that treated women’s bodies as inherently sick, aberrations from the norm.
posted by MovableBookLady (11 comments total)

This just disgusts me. Everyone should have to read this and then maybe they'll stop accusing women of hyperbole when we say that the GOP hates women and wants to punish us.
posted by triggerfinger at 9:39 AM on July 14, 2018 [19 favorites]

The anti-abortion movement isn't about preserving the sanctity of life. It's about believing that only they should have the authority to decide who deserves to live.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:09 AM on July 14, 2018 [14 favorites]

Conservative views on women, pain, sex and death were formed by ancient views on slavery and serfdom, which currently affects the entire labor force as a persistent cultural relic. Sex was controlled to best determine pedigree of both owners and slaves, as women became the first owned human property. Death is outlawed as a viable way to avoid slavery because the owner gets to work someone to death first. To prove the point, "end of life" laws are currently opposed by Evangelicals as they consciously but inconsistently deny health care, perhaps not knowing why. The same holds for abortion, where Evangelicals deny any financial support for a newborn they demand but don't even want. Even when liberals hold out both options to support the decision to have children, conservatives view this as two sins at once. Pain was once applauded by almost all churches in America when the painkiller ether was invented by a dentist in the 1850's. They said that God wanted us to feel pain, but didn't need to mention that pain was always the method of coercion by masters. The dominant religious view today is that a human should be an owner's responsibility, and everything they do reflects that assumption. Any bind they create for others is consistent with their worldview to never be responsible to each other for our own benefit, because the caste system first started in the mind before chains were ever invented for fresh captives.
posted by Brian B. at 11:20 AM on July 14, 2018 [31 favorites]

It occurs to the cynic in me that outlawing abortion and not teaching methods of birth control (other than abstinence) have something in common: an expedient way for men to get their genes into future generations. E.g. if abortion isn’t an option, then the first man to impregnate a woman gets her birthing services for the next year. Otherwise, there’s always the risk that she will terminate his offspring in favor of someone else’s (never mind a women’s right to choose whether having a baby is even something she wants to be doing at the moment...)

And abstinence goes out the window in the context of rape or even marriage. So if you look at women more like baby-making machines than humans, and if you think that might makes right and that the world operates on the principle of survival of the fittest, then the policies make perfect sense. All of the religious stuff is just pious packaging aimed at shutting down critical thinking long enough to get the babies into existence.
posted by mantecol at 1:46 PM on July 14, 2018 [6 favorites]

This is also an excellent way to slow down (and, possibly, even stop) social change. Tired of competing against women for jobs? Angry at having to keep your behavior within polite and respectable norms? Sick of hearing about how you should step up on the emotional labor front? Furious that women don't give you sex on demand or care very much about pleasing you? We have a solution! With a two-front attack on women's reproductive freedom, just one instance of unprotected sex can chain a woman to you for life, force women back into the home, and make it infinitely harder for them to do pesky things like eclipse you in higher education, protest, write letters to the editor, or run for office. Think she's going to leave you and you don't want to be single? Well, one well-planned seduction (or non-seduction, wink, wink, nudge, nudge) and she'll have other things to think about - like how your health insurance is way better and how hard it will be to support and tend to a tiny screaming person, especially if laws requiring child support are conveniently weakened or not enforced.

It's also worth pointing out that if we destroy the right of women to choose whether or not to have abortions, we are also abandoning the rights of women to choose not to have abortions. I can see this coming into play in dozens of horrific, bigoted ways - against the poor, people of color, those deemed "mentally lacking," or just straight-up eugenics, including ethnic groups deemed historically or genetically "inferior." The price for supporting children a women already has might be abortion or sterilization in exchange for receiving public assistance, especially if the recipient is a woman of color.
posted by dancing_angel at 11:40 PM on July 14, 2018 [14 favorites]

@dancing_angel forced sterilizations were a thing in MANY parts of the US up to fairly recent times, African American, Native American and Puerto Rican women being particularly affected. As well experimentation leading to the invention of The Pill was largely done on Puerto Rican women. This was not a secret at the time. Puerto Rico was considered ‘over - populated.’
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 11:55 PM on July 14, 2018 [4 favorites]

Every time they say that the next Trump appointee may make for "the most conservative Supreme Court since the 1930s" I think of the 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling that established involuntary sterilization as constitutional, which according to Wikipedia has never been explicitly overturned.

There was a recent documentary No Más Bebés (No More Babies) about Mexican immigrant mothers who were sterilized while giving birth at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center during the late 60s and 70s and the consequent unsuccessful Madrigal v. Quilligan class-action lawsuit.
posted by XMLicious at 1:00 AM on July 15, 2018 [4 favorites]

California was still sterilizing prisoners until a few years ago (which makes me believe it's likely still happening).

California's Prison Sterilizations Reportedly Echo Eugenics Era
Nearly 150 women were sterilized in California's prisons without the state's approval, a practice that critics say targeted inmates who were seen as being at risk of serving a future jail term. Those numbers represent data from 2006 to 2010, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting, which first reported the news.

Doctors performed tubal ligation surgeries on at least 148 female inmates at two facilities, reports CIR's Corey G. Johnson, with another 100 cases possibly taking place between 1997 and 2010.

then:

California governor signs inmate sterilization ban
[September 25, 2014] California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that bans prisons from sterilizing inmates without their consent, his office said on Thursday, after media reports and a later audit showed officials failed to obtain consent from dozens of incarcerated women.

posted by lazuli at 7:03 AM on July 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

California was still sterilizing prisoners until a few years ago (which makes me believe it's likely still happening).

Yeah, I dont believe this kind of shit has stopped. The very article in the FPP mentions that an HHS official "considered" testing a quack theory of "abortion reversal" on an undocumented teen against her will. This is what they do. They dehumanize non-white people by calling them "animals" (or women by calling them sluts) and then they can do their "medical experiments" on them and no one cares. Sound familiar?
posted by triggerfinger at 12:08 PM on July 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

"By letting states waive insurance protections for women who’ve been pregnant, given birth, survived a sexual assault, or experienced domestic violence,..."

Very bleak disturbing stuff. Deeply misogynistic, at best, and probably a whole lot worse than that. :(
posted by Pouteria at 12:19 AM on July 16, 2018

There may be nothing the patriarchy fears more than the loss of pregnancy as a tool of control for women. Anything that helps women avoid that tool (birth control, abortion, other legal rights, sex ed based on consent) is therefore dangerous and must be stopped.

And although I'm pretty sure we all know this here at Mefi, it is not and never has been about sweet little babies. It's about all the ways that bearing/having those babies pin women down, weaken their health, destroy their ability to find and keep renumerative work, and otherwise keep them in their place.
posted by emjaybee at 2:58 PM on July 16, 2018 [6 favorites]