We women have failed the young ones
The consequences are dire, I'm afraid
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Following on from last week’s nostalgia fest about how cool it was to be young in the 1990’s, this week I plan a lament. For all of the freedom and fun we had (by ‘we’ I mean young women blessed to be in the West), it did not seem to translate into us becoming happy, wise middle-aged women, able to impart our hard-earned lessons to young women.
In that regard, we have completely failed. Gen X liberal women have — on the whole, there are exceptions — completely missed the forest for the trees.
And deep into the dark forest we have gone as a result.
This is definitely one of those essays that risks alienating everyone on my subscriber list. I warn my conservative subscribers to turn away now — for I am about to defend a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy. This really is for those who are conflicted, confused, former liberal left types! But for so many men and women who are alienated from the liberal-left, the right to choose nonetheless remains a bright red line, and an emotive one at that.
I have lived and suffered every aspect of this question. As a university student in Ireland in the 1990’s, I had to travel to England to terminate a pregnancy in a private abortion clinic because abortion was illegal in Ireland. In my thirties, I gave birth to a baby and I also had several miscarriages which involve the same procedure as a termination of a living pregnancy. I understand the fear, the heartache, the determination, the suffering and the joy attendant to the female anatomy. I know this subject, inside and out.
I have always been, and remain, pro-choice. I fully understand that conservatives have profound and legitimate concerns about the practice. But I simply do not see how women can have full bodily autonomy without the ability to safely terminate an early pregnancy.
But it is blindingly obvious that two key things have changed, vis-a-vis abortion rights, since the liberal-left lost its senses, long before Roe was overturned last year:
1. Abortion became an issue for fiery, young, and not very smart young women to cosplay at being feminist civil rights heroes; a way to signal how edgy and fierce you are, thus bringing down the quality of the debate to subterranean idiocy levels (see, abortion themed jewellery). Sorry, but not even when I was a socialist with a shaved head and an attitude would I have shown such crass contempt for a profound moral issue.
2. Liberal-left women — again, generalising — have opted in to the idea that you can change your “gender,” that boys and men can be women simply by saying they are women, and thus be granted an all-access pass to our mental, emotional, intimate spaces. Liberal women have shown themselves willing to support the erasure of women in language and in law. This is an existential threat.
These two realities have greatly shifted my perspective on the abortion question (which really is not up for debate in the UK, but continues to roil American politics) — to the point where I have abandoned my former allies on the liberal-left and feel no sympathy for the politicians and pro-choice activists who have spent the last year melting down over Republican efforts to restrict abortion, state by state.
This week I watched Peter Boghossian interview Posie Parker, real name Kellie-Jay Keen. And she really hit the nail on the head when explaining why she is willing to work with people who are anti-abortion.
“If you’re a Democrat, you might have to vote Republican. As long as somebody says, ‘I know what a woman is, I’m willing to stop the sterilisation of children,’ I think you have to go for that politician…I can’t think of anything more important.”
When Boghossian asks specifically about abortion, she replies: “the feminists absolutely love that I’ve said this, but I definitely think that in the short term, reproductive freedom is something that is worth sacrificing in order to stop cutting up kids bodies. And fundamentally, if you can’t stand upon truth…what can you do? You can’t do anything if you don’t know what the truth is. It’s like the old parable of building the house upon the sand. Nothing works if you can’t tell the truth.”
She is absolutely, devastatingly, sadly, correct.
The reality is that the Democratic Party have transformed themselves from a run-of-the-mill centrist party into a party that rests on three pillars: abortion, tran-sing kids and critical race theory. Now, it’s pretty clear to me that tran-sing kids and critical race theory are the misbegotten offspring of toxic totalitarian ideologies, a hideous 21st century hybrid of Hitler and Mao. So if they can be so wrong on two of their central issues, maybe it’s time to take a look at the third?
The other sad reality is that the Democratic Party is forcing liberal (formerly liberal?) women to decide between the right to terminate a pregnancy and the right to protect children from the medical and psychological harms of the trans ideology. There is no possibility that they will allow us, mature liberal women, to have both. We must decide which matters more.
This to me is not a difficult choice. Remember how I said a few weeks ago that we must be blunt? This is a blunt as I can make it: though I regret that adult women may be harmed in the process, as state regulation of adult women’s medical practices is never a good idea, as an adult woman I understand that protecting our existing children from having their penises flayed and their young breasts cut off is far, far more important than evacuating the contents of a uterus became it is ‘not a good time’ to have a baby.
To women of child-bearing age, I’m sorry that some of you are being put in difficult situations in such a vulnerable, emotional time as an unwanted or unviable pregnancy. Many, if not most, of us Gen X women understand what that is like. But your interests on this specific and unique issue must be put aside in order to protect the elementary, middle and high school kids who are being actively groomed to mutilate, sterilise and poison themselves. Washington state democrats just passed a bill that critics say will allow the state to take away children whose parents refuse to allow them to “transition.” I repeat: if you don’t give permission for your son to be castrated, you could lose custody of your child. In an emergency such as this, the right to terminate a pregnancy becomes something of a luxury issue.
Eternal shame on the so-called liberals who forced us into this nightmare.
As an elderly woman (in years, but not in spirit), I had my finger poised to delete, debunk, and/or terminate your post. As it happens, it is the only solution to preventing the grotesque and permanent mutilation of children. The numbers are not there to override the young ones who have no experience with motherhood or the full actualization of womanhood, so it remains with the more mature to hold the line, bar the door, prevent the Trojan horse of transgenderism to be confused with feminism and liberty. Please continue to use your voice and platform to persuade those who listen that your position is the only rational one. This is my hill to die on.
I have struggled with the morality of abortion for nearly three quarters of a century. We know that most fetuses are viable human beings after 20-25 weeks (and that keeps getting shorter due to advances in medical science). They are sentient beings even before that. Thus, at some point, abortion is taking a life - murder, if you will.
However, if a mother cannot love her baby, what kind of life is being taken? It is cruelly unfeeling to expect a mother to love a child born of rape. Further, while "thou shalt not kill" sounds absolute, it really isn't: we execute prisoners; we cheer the Ukrainians as they kill Russian soldiers.
My personal conclusion is that abortion is too fraught with emotion and too entangled with personal morality to be the subject of any law. This is for the mother (and the father, if involved) to decide. No matter how this is decided by the states or the federal government, there will always be exceptional circumstances that make the "legal choice" wrong for some mother / child.
I have no such qualms about banning the "transitioning" of youths. We KNOW that most children's minds are still developing throughout their teenage years. We KNOW that we don't know the long-term effects of puberty blockers, but the evidence so far signals potentially dire consequences. We KNOW that this is not really a moral issue, this is protecting children from themselves.
I truly rage when I hear some teacher or - worse - union boss say that teachers or guidance counselors or ... should help children make these decisions and hide them from their parents. As a matter of law, a parent is responsible for actions of their children (e.g., the recent arrest of a mother in VA whose child shot a teacher). How can I, as a parent, be responsible for my child's actions if someone else has changed that child in fundamental ways, and hid it from me?
If an adult wants to transition - fine. But until they have reached maturity, children need to be protected from themselves. In most states children must be 16 to drive, or 18/21 to drink. I would argue that transitioning should be delayed at least that long.