A raging feminist

I don't know if I've told you this, but Salon's Broadsheet is one of my favorite blogs to follow, especially stuff by Kate Harding, who can be vicious in her coverage of sexists around the world. This story from her posted last night took me a few reads to get through, there was so much in there.

First of all, CW and I had a discussion about someone getting fined for having sex in a war zone, specifically. He was thinking the fine was actually for her being pregnant while at war - that would be rendering herself unfit for duty; unable to complete her job. That would be like a man getting drunk and falling down some night and breaking his leg or something - unfit for duty. I'm not 100% on this, my understanding was that she was fined EXPLICITLY for having sex. Then I see that there is, or was, a ban on sex in Iraq.

Seriously? How stupid is that?

Secondly, and this is her main point, why can't federal employees have access to a a legal medical procedure through their health plan? Because some people don't think abortion is a medical procedure. I was one of them. I thought it was murder. But in the last year or so, I've absolutely changed my mind.

The reason is biology. Mammals abort their young when their isn't enough food or something (or for lots of other reasons).

More recently, scientists have accrued abundant evidence that "bad" mothering is common in nature and that it is often a centerpiece of the reproductive game plan.

You know what this is? Humans thinking they are different from animals. I mean, we are right, We've got cities and technology, duh. But all that has come up in just the last few hundred years. And underneath the cell phones and wireless Internet, we're animals.

Also, CW and I had a few pregnancy scares in college. And by scares I mean he was in one stall int he women's bathroom in my dorm and I was in the other peeing on a stick and the two of us had clenched jaws while we waited. We had no money, thousands of dollars of debt, and no college degrees to get a job with. I was leaving to spend four months in Ireland. When you find yourself in that position, all of sudden abortion as murder becomes much less black and white.

That's why it's not unfeasible for me to see that when a woman finds herself pregnant and, for some reason or another, cannot support a baby, aborting that offspring is a reasonable and appropriate response.

But no. Some people have decided it's not. So a significant population of women in this country don't have access to safe abortions (which, I remind you, were deemed legal by the Supreme Court). And if a restriction against federal tax dollars funding abortion passes in the health care reform bill, an even broader population of women, middle-class women who opt into the government option like the feds want them to, won't be able to get a legal medical procedure if they want it.