Monthly Archive for August, 2005

Regular readers are aware that breaking news is by no means the forte of the professional spinster aunt. My views on John Roberts probably won’t congeal until sometime after Arbor Day in 2007 (although here are some preliminary findings: JVNNIVS ROBERTVS FVCTARDVS EST), and I couldn’t give a splat for the stunningly uncontroversial BTK killer. I try, but I cannot change my twisty-come-lately ways. Which is why this morning I read with some interest a four-month-old essay referencing a two-year-old newspaper article on, what else, “unborn mothers.”

That’s right. Unborn mothers. A concept with which the Doctor’s sophisticated readership is undoubtedly already familiar, but which, I confess, kind of startled me, yokel that I am.

The story so far: some dudes in Israel are — or at least they were in 2003; for all I know they could be running a sports bar by now — working on a method to harvest ovarian tissue from aborted human fetuses for the purpose of sprouting eggs for in vitro fertilization. The goal is to eliminate the middleman, i.e. the sentient egg donor–or as some sentimentalists may euphemize, the “woman”– who can cause problems down the line, in favor of an aborted fetus egg “donor” with no pesky legal standing. Pro-life hijinks ensue.

A 2003 Guardian article quotes the stern objections of several professional fetus-fetishists. The remonstrances fall into two categories. One, the procedure is “sickening” because the “dead baby” cannot give consent. Two, the offspring of an aborted fetal “mother” would “have enormous psychological problems.”

Lisa Guenther brushes aside these godbag gripes. Writing in the March/April issue of Radical Philosophy, she says (I pararphrase), “Forget about the children! What about the feminists?” She is understandably troubled by aborted fetal “motherhood” — for non-fetus-fetish reasons that I’ll get to in a minute — and is bummed by the insufficiency of feminist thought to address her concerns.

“Can we coherently defend,” she asks, “a woman’s right to terminate pregnancy without relinquishing a feminist position from which to critique the use of aborted fetuses in certain experimental procedures?”

Here’s her sticky wicket: suppose you are a pro-choice feminist in whom the idea of aborted-fetal-motherhood induces vomiting. How to argue against it? If you confer upon fetal tissues sufficient personhood to render them immune from egg harvesting–i.e., turn them into legally recognized entities from which consent for the procedure must be, but of course cannot be, extracted — do you not also weaken the case for abortion as an option for fully-realized adult human women?

Guenther, in pondering the biological and cultural status of “mother,” also attacks the whole woman = uterus = biological destiny thing, with satisfying results, one of which is this: using aborted fetal ovarian tissue for IVF ultimately undermines the choice of the woman who has made the decision to terminate said fetus. Her decision — or more broadly, her status as a human being — is made irrelevant if an instance of reproduction occurs as a result of this procedure.

Dr. B has argued that the reproductive state is the default for women. This notion is so distasteful to the spinster aunt ethos that I have resolutely dug in my heels on the opposite side, but lately I am finding this position untenable. Whether or not Dr B’s statement is biologically true is a discussion for people who did not snooze contentedly through Bio 105, but there’s no denying that it is culturally true; patriarchy places the burden of what Guenther calls “the much-vaunted ‘future of the species’” entirely on women as a class. She writes:

“The absence of viable eggs is only a shortage” and the shortage is only a problem “if women are thought to have natural rights and/or obligations to produce offspring. When considered in this light, the proposed procedure of growing eggs from the ovarian tissue of aborted fetuses collapses the meaningful distinction between woman and mother, which is otherwise maintained by access to a decent range of reproductive choices. In so doing, it reinforces the reduction of women to mothers and of mothers to their reproductive organs which feminists have fought so hard to contest.”

Man, if only there were a cure for reproduction. The sooner “mother” and “woman” go splitsville, the better.

[Cross-posted at Bitch.Ph.D.]

Such occurrences are distressingly intermittent, but once in a while a specimen of glad tidings swims against the current and flops ashore on my desk. I allude to the recent email bulletin from Danielle Tierney of Planned Parenthood, which put me in possession of spirit-cleansing news. To wit: last Thursday the Austin City Council was the first in the nation to pass a “no refusals” amendment to its pharmaceutical services contract with Walgreens. This means that enrollees at Travis County health programs will get their dang ol’ birth control then and there, regardless of the individual pharmacist’s personal misogynist godbaggery, though it may require the intervention of a store manager.

That’s good.

It doesn’t mean that Walgreens city-wide, or anywhere-else-wide, have to comply. In fact, only nine stores are affected.

That’s bad.

My pal René (who writes award-winningly about music for the Illinois Times and really likes old buildings) despises Walgreens with an icy fervor because of the unmitigated and deranged glee with which the corporation buys up beloved architectural landmarks, obliterates them despite public outcry, and erects in their places cheap ugly crap. It is no surprise that what lies within is also cheap and ugly and crappy.

I know because I was forced to darken the cheap ugly crappy stoop of a Walgreens yesterday, on accounta the hippy-dippy People’s Pharmacy was out of my prescription. I will do so again only if the building is on fire and there are blind orphans inside, and then only if the blind orphans owe me money. The experience was, on every level, crushing.

For the interior of Walgreens smelleth as a festering scrap-heap of deep-fried vinyl. So dense is its concentration of cheap crap from China that the store is orbited by clouds of particulate matter–candy wrappers, cigarette butts, small children– that cannot achieve escape velocity. And the pharmacy clerks–it took no fewer than five of them to bring my drug deal to a conclusion; who knows how many it takes change a light bulb– are quite the little rays of sunshine, too. Their skin is grey. Their shoulders are hunched. Their expressions are hollow and dull, lacking even the smug spark of pure evil one so often sees flashing in the eyes of petty bureaucrats at the DMV. Their collective worldview appears to be that of the dying slave for whom the last puff of hope has long ago wafted into a pitiless aether.

Can I just say that if you’re gonna wear a white lab coat in an effort to exude an air of clinical authority, how about washing it once in a while? Jesus.

[cross-posted at Bitch. Ph.D]

Sydney (thanks, Sydney!) sent this in about a hundred years ago.

Moonrise Over The Abandoned Trailer And Piece-Of-Shit Basketball Hoop. South Austin, August 16, 2005

I hate to be the bearer of only moderately good news, but there may be a flicker of hope for the feminist cause. There’s that BBC talking head, Michael Buerk, who’s making a big idiotic stink about how women now apparently rule the world, and those morons who spoofed the Feministing site, and now some Australian dudes are whining about “sexist” TV ads. Apparently men can dish out the pie, but they can’t take one in their own face. The Australians are calling the ads "discrimination." Quoth The Advertiser:

“There was a storm of protest last year over a Volkswagen Polo ad in which a female driver sniggers when she sees the crotch of a male courier in her side mirror, which carries the message: "Objects in mirror may appear bigger than actual size."”

And an ad that shows “a woman striking a man over the head with a spanner.”

What’s a “spanner”? I’m assuming it isn’t fluffy.

Anyway, somebody ship some dictionaries to Australia! It’s totally lame to confuse mockery by an oppressed class with discrimination.

And you know, it chaps my hide, and chaps it good, when men resolutely ignore that the essential non-humanity conferred upon women by patriarchal tradition substantially weakens their already pretty untenable women-have-taken-over position. Not to mention when they ignore the readily-available statistics showing women as the primary population living in poverty, or showing women as the primary victims of systemic violence, or showing women as earning an average of 25% less than men, or showing women as exploited commodities in strip clubs, or showing a laughably miniscule percentage of women in high political office or in the upper echelons of the corporatocracy.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that these dipshit fucktards are all obviously feeling threatened by whatever small steps forward women’s movements have managed to take recently. So, boo-yah, more or less.

[Thanks for the link, Deana]