The Aristocracy of the Abortion Advocates

December 21, 2011 by 49 Comments

Perhaps I was too naively raised on Tolkien, Lewis, and all the rest, but as a child I took for granted these two truths: That a man would have enemies and that his enemies would be frightening. He would, I assumed, have to muster up some semblance of courage to fight them.

It is with surprise – and a vague disappointment, even – that, while I certainly find an enemy in the pro-abortion movement, their most striking characteristic turns out to be not frightfulness, but snobbery.

The pro-abortion movement represents an aristocracy far before they represent any coherent ideology. They’ve devolved into such a desperate spiral of inside jokes, memes, slogans and bitter rants that the average human being is immediately excluded from their ranks. The current tactic of Planned Parenthood and Co. is not to fight the culture wars, but to remain so out of touch with humanity that their opponents are embarrassed into submission. It is not a battle plan, it is a pose.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized 49 Comments

  • http://twitter.com/EyeEdinburgh EdinburghEye

    “It is with surprise – and a vague disappointment, even – that, while I certainly find an enemy in the pro-abortion movement, their most striking characteristic turns out to be not frightfulness, but snobbery.”

    Why should this surprise you? There are two main groups in the pro-abortion movement:

    Pharmacists and other medical professionals who force women to have abortions by denying women contraception – both the Pill and Plan B. (Plan B deniers are active pro-abortionists, since a woman only gets Plan B if she has a definite reason to think she might be pregnant if she can’t stop herself from ovulating in time.)

    Men’s Rights Activists who think it’s their right to decide on abortion for their pregnant girlfriend/wife if they don’t want the baby.

    Both groups are closely akin to the pro-life movement, in that they both believe it’s their right to decide for their inferiors what they will or will not do.

    Prolifers just tend to be snobbish about women, of course…

    • Aldespertarelclarin

      No, you’re wrong. The Pro-life movement defends the right of a new human being.
      There is a scale of rights, and the first one on the list is LIFE. Then you got CHOICE.
      You can’t use choice over LIFE, unless YOUR life is threatened, THEN, you can CHOOSE to end another’s human being life.

      • http://twitter.com/EyeEdinburgh EdinburghEye

        “The Pro-life movement defends the right of a new human being.”

        The prolife movement is demonstrably uninterested in preserving life – 60,000 women a year die because they don’t have access to safe, legal abortion, and the prolife movement in the US is one of America’s active homegrown terrorist movements.

        The prolife movement is demonstrably uninterested in preventing abortions: the only proven-successful method of preventing abortions is ensuring that everyone has free access to contraception and all children get age-appropriate & explicit sex/relationships education in school.

        The prolife movement appears solely and completely obsessed with denouncing women for having abortions, demonising medical personnel for performing abortions, and offering as a fake justification that they’re only doing these ugly, horrible things to women and to healthcare staff because they love fetuses.

        • Marc Barnes

          Those WHO stats are a joke. You’re gonna have to address the complaints listed here http://www.c-fam.org/docLib/20100602_WHO_FINAL.pdf in chapter II before you can throw around numbers, and you’re going to have to realize that those numbers you use are largely deaths from unsafe LEGAL abortions. That’s an issue right up the pro-choice alley, what with the lack of cleansliness and proper hygiene standards attributed to most abortion clinics, the lack of transparency demonstrated by such organizations as Planned Parenthood, and the disgusting behavior of butcher shops like the one we saw in Philidelphia. It is not something you can pin on pro-lifers — “Our facilities suck, therefore there are lots of deaths, therefore those that oppose abortion hate women.” What?

          “the only proven-successful method of preventing abortions is ensuring that everyone has free access to contraception and all children get age-appropriate & explicit sex/relationships education in school.”

          hahaha prove to me that increased contraception leads to decreased abortion.

          • http://twitter.com/EyeEdinburgh EdinburghEye

            “Those WHO stats are a joke.”

            You’re entitled to laugh uproariously at the idea of sixty thousand women dying each year from illegal abortion. It makes you look like a distorted, ugly caricature of a human being, to take such amused delight in women dying, but hey: you don’t mind that, I suppose no one who actually has to watch you need either.

            “and the disgusting behavior of butcher shops like the one we saw in Philidelphia. It is not something you can pin on pro-lifers ”

            Actually, it is. Pennsylvania is a strongly prolife state. Prolifers ensured that the low-income immigrant women who were abused at Kermit Gosnell’s clinic had nowhere else to go. If a woman needs an abortion, she should be able to go to her local hospital and get either D&C or a medical abortion there – promptly, safely, for free. Prolife opposition to women’s healthcare is exactly what lets that butcher shop in Philadelphia flourish for so many years.

            “hahaha prove to me that increased contraception leads to decreased abortion. ”

            Any country in which women have safe, legal, easy access to contraception and a culture which encourages both women and men to use contraception unless they intend to conceive, is a country with a lower abortion rate than one in
            The country with the lowest abortion rate in the world is the Netherlands, which has been striving to prevent abortions by exactly this means for over three decades.

            (Ireland, which prolifers love to cite, simply exports all abortions to mainland UK or other EU countries.)

          • Daniel Sheehan

            “Prolife opposition to women’s healthcare is exactly what lets that butcher shop in Philadelphia flourish for so many years.”

            What allowed the Gosnell clinic to flourish was the refusal of state health authorities to subject abortion clinics to the same scrutiny as other outpatient surgical facilities. That was because of pressure from the pro-choice lobby. When former Gov. Rendell ordered the state to institute inspections of abortion facilities again, in reaction to the Gosnell case, inspectors discovered dangerous conditions elsewhere.
            We have no shortage of abortion facilities in Pennsylvania. We have two in my own city. One is clean and professionally run and the other was filthy and judged dangerous, with unsterilized instruments and blood spatters on the walls. (This was not related to the economic status of the clientele, either. Both clinics serve inner-city poor).

    • Rugratmd

      What doesn’t surprise me is that you trolled yourself in here right on cue. Bravo!

  • Jay E.

    Ouch… that was well put.

  • Nick

    To help the people who haven’t given the topic of abortion much thought yet, the entire debate boils down to two main priorities:

    1. The woman’s ability under the law to choose to have an abortion
    2. The child’s protection under the law, to be as protected from life-threatening harm as any other person.

    Both science and reason are at play here. Let me explain:

    Pro-choice advocates are rationally correct in saying that, if abortion is outlawed, women DO lose some control over their bodies, whether to give birth or not, and the responsibility to choose motherhood or not.

    Pro-life advocates are both scientifically and rationally correct when they assert that the developing fetus IS human, and that in any society that holds to a universal legal right to human life (not dependent on age, race, ability/disability, health, socioeconomic status, intelligence, etc), a fetus must be protected by law and afforded the same rights as any other human being. Anyone who says the fetus is NOT a separate human being in a continuum of development to the time of death takes a highly irrational, un-intellectual position, and is vastly, nauseatingly, ignorant of the overwhelming hard evidence to the contrary.

    Therefore, people and lawmakers must decide whether either 1. A woman’s complete control over her body, or 2. A child’s life, is more important.

    • http://twitter.com/EyeEdinburgh EdinburghEye

      Given that when lawmakers make abortion illegal, the only result is illegal abortions – and more dead women – the choice is obvious.

      Go with preserving both life and liberty: pro-choice.

      Or be prolife and campaign for women to die.

      • Nick

        Thank you for your reply. I have three questions and a point to make though.
        1. Does illegal necessarily equal unsafe?
        2. Should the values of life and liberty also extend to the unborn? Why or why not?
        3. Also, (and please correct me if I’m wrong) but do you believe that there is a kind of weighting system for human life… as in, yes, the fetus is a living being but the mother is worth more? (Unless you subscribe to the philosophy of hard nihilism, any argument you make for a weighting system on life is likewise utterly stupid at best, due to the argument’s corollaries.)

        And, finally, the point I must make. As a logic statement, while a percentage of mothers who visit illegal abortionists do not die, ALL of their children do (except in very rare cases). Therefore, it follows that the rate at which children are dying of abortion is ALWAYS greater than the rate at which mothers are dying, so abortion (whether legal or illegal) is a proportionately greater risk for the health and safety of children than it is for mothers. In this case, abortion is more of a children’s health threat and less of a women’s health threat, no matter the circumstances.

      • http://intimategeography.wordpress.com/ Barbara

        You’re linking together three events whose causal relationship is tenuous at best and thus your argument is weak. Making abortion illegal will do simply that, make it illegal for anyone to procure or perform an abortion so that one incurs some sort of legal penalty for doing so, (generally falling more heavily on the doctor than the woman.) To suggest that this would lead to the death of women is making a huge stretch in logic with very little base in reality. You’re presuming you can predict how every single woman is going to react in the face of a crisis pregnancy in a situation where abortion is unavailable as a failsafe. The reality is in a society such as ours, where women have social advantages and where single motherhood doesn’t carry the kind of stigma against women it used to, its just as likely that, in the event abortion becomes illegal and is inaccessible, more women facing a crisis pregnancy will put their children up for adoption or seek help from social services, charities and CPC’s.

        The fact is, Edinburgh, abortion is not a procedure like a heart-transplant or a tumor excision. It is far more ethically complex since there is a separate being inside the woman’s body who is killed in the abortion procedure (usually in a most brutal manner, via dismemberment or being delivered and then stabbed in the back of the head with scissors). You may try to divert attention away from that fact by demonizing pro-lifers, attributing “evil” motives to them which they don’t have, by spouting off screed after screed against the Catholic Church and any religious, ethical, medical or political group who tries to draw attention to it. You may try to send the discussion off on all sorts of tangents about birth control and conservatives and rare hard-cases and sentimentalism, but you will not succeed in erasing that morally problematic fact.

        There are only two logical defenses of abortion rights:

        1. That the unborn child is not a person and thus deserves no consideration in the decision.

        2. That the unborn child is indeed a person, but the right of the woman supercedes it, thus she has the right to end its life.

        Every pro-lifer has heard your arguments before, a million times, in a million ways. We’re all familiar with every single nuance of them (though there really isn’t much nuance to speak of). Frankly they’re eye-rollingly boring and don’t convince anyone here or in the pro-life movement. I kindly invite you to grow a pair, stop avoiding the issue and engage with the center of the debate, the humanity or lack thereof of the child and its rights or lack thereof or kindly remove yourself from Marc’s combox and go post on Jezebel for awhile where you can commiserate with fellow Women’s Studies graduates on how evil us conservative, fetus obsessed, troglodyte woman-hating pro-lifers are.

        • Nick

          Hey Barbara! That’s kind of harsh. I respect Edinburgh, since at least she’s finding statistics and answering questions.

          For anyone who wants to get into these debates… DO NOT DO SO, at least until you know that you know the other position 100% or are willing to learn. It’s always more nuanced and complicated than you’d think. And then, for us Christians (and Bad Catholics ;) proceed as prayerfully, humbly and compassionately as you possibly can, never trying to bash others over the head with truth but instead illuminate and learn more about the Truth.

          • http://intimategeography.wordpress.com/ Barbara

            Hi Nick

            I was a bit harsh toward the end there. The thing is, I have been reading her responses to Marc’s post for several days now, and I’m frustrated with her. She doesn’t discuss or even try to address the issue of the child involved. If she would say something like “I believe the child doesn’t become a person till such and such time” then we could debate that, then at least I’d know she was intellectually honest in her position. I may think she’s wrong, but at least we’re in a proper discussion and argument. All she does is dodge and duck, bashing pro-lifers, accusing them of positions they don’t hold and of evil motives which they don’t have.

            I’ve yet to hear one pro-choice advocate, one, discuss the matter of the child. Even if they think the child doesn’t matter. They don’t. They talk about evil pro-lifers and conservatives and birth control, but not the baby, never the baby.

          • Nick

            Sometimes I also feel that people (on both sides of the debate!) don’t know Jesus, or don’t truly have a relationship with Him. They don’t know and haven’t experienced the full, overwhelming, unconditional extent of His love and mercy… in a relationship with Jesus, the sin of pride disappears, it’s OK to change your mind to conform to Truth, and through prayer you can see the world through His eyes and understand the grief it causes Him and all of Heaven when we even have to discuss abortion.

            Children are truly gifts from God the Father, to show us our simplicity in His presence and to be our friends and loved ones throughout our lives. Even if they come at times and in ways we may think are “inconvenient”, they often grow up to be the most loving, caring, generous people who will support you as you get old and give you someone to talk to, even if it seems like there’s no one else around. Strong families make for great memories of time spent together, which really matter much more than the amount of money you could save by not having them.

            For everyone reading this (you too, Edinburgh! ;) pray… even if it’s just a few words to ask God if He’s listening and if He cares about you. Trust me, you’ll be very glad you did! :)

      • Tess

        Only in the twisted logic justifying the killing of unborn persons could it be said that abortions preserve life and liberty.

        Sigh… This argument is just so depressing.

        I’m sorry Barbara snapped at you; as pro-lifers we have heard this argument before and we do think it’s specious and fallacious.

        • http://intimategeography.wordpress.com/ Barbara

          Stupid is the word I’d use. Like a five year old stuffing her fingers in her ears saying “you hate women lalalalalala”

          • Tess

            Yes, well it is a stupid argument isn’t it. I mean having legal abortion so that we save the potential lives of women who would seek out unsafe abortions is madness. It’s like making burglary legal so people don’t cut their jugulars coming in through a broken window.

            Besides the argument just has so many assumptions and it completely bypasses the life of the unborn baby which is killed.

            I guess with the advent of ultrasound it’s becoming harder for pro-aborts to claim that “it’s just a bunch of cells”. It’s harder to deny the humanity and personhood of the unborn when every Western mum gets given pictures of their unborn babies when they have their scans. These get posted on social networks for friends to ohh and ahhh over. It’s a hard shift to move from wanted loved little baby pictures to an abortion which ‘merely’ terminates a ‘pregnancy’.

      • Anonymous

        “Given that when lawmakers make Mafia hits illegal, the only result is illegal hits—and hitmen having to eliminate witnesses—the choice is obvious.”

        How is that any different?

    • KarenJo12

      A fetus is NOT a ‘separate person’ from its mother; it exists inside her and using her body to grow.

      I have a serious question for all ant-abortion and anti-contraception advocates: what role should women have in society? What legal rights should we have? What kind of education should we have? If you believe women should be permitted any public role, how would you protect that role if we’re going to be constantly pregnant?

      • Marc Barnes

        Unique DNA says its a separate person, depending on its mother, sure, but a separate person nonetheless.

        Whatever role they want! There’s more ways to avoid pregnancy than contraception and killing.

      • LT

        Being constantly pregnant does not remove women from society, does not abolish their legal rights, does not prevent them from acquiring an education, and does not take them out of public roles. I know plenty of women with large families. They participate in society, obtain plenty of advanced degrees, run their own business, are fiercely independent, vote and campaign, exercise their free speech rights, and they do a great job as moms too! And most women are not constantly pregnant, but the constantly pregnant ones are not lesser human beings to be pitied. Why take the pinnacle femininity, our greatest gift and strength — the ability to bear children — and make it out to be some disease? I don’t want to be a man. I love being a woman and all the gifts that come with womanhood. Please stop treating pregnant women as second-class citizens! We are smart, strong, capable, and we do not need your pity.

        • Tess

          Well said! I’m a mum with a large family by today’s standard and to say that my children are some kind of shackle is deeply offensive.

          I participate in life just fine thank you very much.

        • KarenJo12

          Pregnancy and lactation are simply being placental mammals. There’s nothing uniquely human about those things, and, in fact, non-human mammals do a much better of job of it. Do you believe women have reasoning equal to men?

          • LT

            “Do you believe women have reasoning equal to men?”
            Yes.

            None one said that reproduction alone was uniquely human. The reproduction of human children is uniquely human. I thought that was obvious. Participation in the fullness of our natural abilities is not beneath us, nor is it a hindrance or burden to our lives.

          • Anonymous

            Do you believe that a samurai has reasoning equal to a duly-constituted jury of one’s peers?

            Because what you’re talking about is granting the Right to Cut Down—the right, of certain elite classes in premodern Asian countries, to kill those not of the class at will.

            (In Joseon Korea and much of Chinese history it was landowners and scholars, in Japan it was the samurai, and I do believe in the Qing Dynasty it was simply “ethnic Manchurians”.)

  • Anonymous

    Wow, EdinburghEye, I knew you were a hubristic hypocrite but this is actually worse. And remember, you recently claimed Catholics—who invented the conept of women’s rights, and whom your compatriots have used terror-rape against, as recently as the 1920s—believe men have a right to commit rape.

    Your assertion this time, however, that to deny women the right to cut down is snobbish, is not only not true, it is the opposite of the truth. There is no basis, not sex, not race, not even something actually useful like military service (which is why the samurai could do it), that gives a person the right to kill an innocent.

    But you keep right on with your servile praise of unjust privilege, it’s really what we’ve come to expect.

    • http://twitter.com/espressobean21 Sarah Martinez

      Seriously, why hasn’t she been blocked, yet? She’s not seeking truth or information, or to have calm and charitable discourse. She’s here to flame and deride, all while refusing to acknowledge what anyone is actually saying.

  • Babs

    If you don’t want a baby, don’t have sex. Good night, everyone in our culture treats sex like a need akin to hunger and the need to breath. It’s really really not. Sex is a fantastic thing, but you don’t have to have it.

    As for contraception, it’s another damn shackle, and another way for the world to tell women the way they are made isn’t good enough. Don’t blame the church for asking women to quit lying to themselves.

    • KarenJo12

      So, do you believe in mandatory paid maternity leave? Do you believe men should do half the housework? Do you happily support bond elections for your local public school and libraries, so that parents are bankrupted to provide their children with a good education? Would you pay taxes for single-payer health care so that every woman has good prenatal care? If your answer to any of those questions is “no,” and you still don’t think women should have contraception, then you support a system that will force women out of the workforce and into being the helpless dependents of males we were for the last few hundred years.

      • KarenJo12

        Ugh, that should read “so that parents are NOT bankrupted. . . “

      • Babs

        See the first sentence. As for building a society that supports families, that can be accomplished in many ways. I’m not going to be drawn into a political debate over a very basic concept: Sex equals babies.

        • KarenJo12

          No. Sex equals babies only for women. Men DO NOT HAVE BABIES. MEN DO NOT GET PREGNANT. Men can always leave, and generally always have, even when they occupied the same house. I remember all too many times being told “don’t bother your father; he’s had a hard day,” as though doing a job he adored was somehow harder than being home with me was for my mother. That’s why I am pro-choice. Pregnancy is extremely difficult and dangerous, but men have all the fun and take all the credit.

          • Aldespertarelclarin

            That’s why you’re pro choice?

            Well, that’s….sorry to say, a bullshit argument.

            Im communist because I don’t like capitalism
            Im facho because i don’t like communism nor capitalism
            Im atheist because I don’t like the church.

            So, you’re funding the budget of multinational pharmaceutics who take advantage of all the abortions that take place worldwide.

            Every human (starts a day 0 from fertilisation, as the DNA states i’ts a new human) has one right, which cannot be overruled= To Live.

            Is your life in danger because of a 2 week human being? No.

  • Eric Christopher

    I agree, though I hope you don’t see the pro-life movement as a culture war.

    • KarenJo12

      Show me one single instance of the formal and official pro-life lobby supporting or advocating for any laws that help adult women keep their jobs or their educations and I’ll be happy to stopping seeing you as warriors against my interests. Until that time, this is a war and women are your targets.

      • Aldespertarelclarin

        And I can also say: Innocent human beings are your targets.

        So much logical fallacies here that it hurts. I’m bout to go mental.

        • KarenJo12

          So it’s okay to burden women in way that no man will ever suffer?

          • KarenJo12

            No pro-lifer has ever addressed my question: What should be the proper role of women in society and, if it is anything other than being an uneducated baby-machine, how should that be achieved?

          • Anonymous

            Read “Women in the Days of Cathedrals” by Regine Pernoud.

            The Catholic Church invented a method, over a thousand years ago. Didja know women in 12th century France could own property, practice trades, file lawsuits, and, oh yeah, vote? That was because of two factors: Catholicism and Gaulish tradition. Your precious Renaissance brought back the “uneducated baby machine” role, because that was what it had been in Ancient Rome.

            But keep arguing with that strawman, I’m sure you think it can talk back to you.

          • KarenJo12

            Did any other Catholic countries have a high rate of women in the labor force? Did that rate continue in those places during and after the Counter Reformation?

          • Anonymous

            England did, and Italy did. To a lesser extent the body we think of as Germany, then the Holy Roman Empire, did. They had less because their laws were more Roman in origin.

            As for the Counter-Reformation, apparently you are incapable of reading a timeline. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation, both, were after the Renaissance, therefore the damage had already been done. Read some of the things the “Reformers” said about women—or the things Protestants did to women, for that matter (the English in Ireland were the only Western country to systematically use rape as a tactic, prior to the 20th century).

            The point is, when—as in the Middle Ages—the Church follows her own rules, women benefit. When, as in the Renaissance, Wars-of-Religion, and “Enlightenment”—and as you appear to be urging—the Church listens to the world’s customs, women suffer.

            Understand, the belief that women have any rights at all, is only intellectually tenable if one accepts the Catholic view of human beings. On any other intellectual basis, women’s rights come, at best, from the denial of their existence—Platonism, Buddhism, and Marxism (which is a philosophically naturalist form of Platonism) all deny the reality of the sexes, and Gnosticism actually specifically states that women become men when they’re saved.

  • guest

    Well my best friend had an abortion at 2-3 weeks after conception. The ultra sound showed… nothing.

  • KarenJo12

    What has the Catholic hierarchy done other than oppose legal abortion and birth control to increase the participation of women in public life? What is the Church’s position on, say, community marital property? mandatory maternity leave? women’s education for professions? legal protection for battered women?

    • Anonymous

      It invented community marital property, it was instrumental in getting mandatory maternity leave in Europe (have you heard of the Christian Democrats?), and indeed it provides those last two, free of charge, all around the world. Out of curiosity, who do you think is the major, if not only, provider of women’s shelters in many communities?

      • KarenJo12

        Community property was an invention of the Visigoths, who were Arians, not Roman. Spain kept the custom in spite of the RCC, not because of it, which is proven by the fact that no other Catholic jurisdiction has that particular marital law arrangement. Also, the RCC hasn’t done anything in the last 200 years to support liberal laws for married women. That things were better 1,000 years ago than they were 500 years ago does nothing to support your argument that the Church helps women. What organization supported all those Renaissance scholars, d’you suppose?

        Finally, I am not aware of any battered women’s shelter anywhere supported by the RCC. When I was a kid in Dallas in the 70′s, the RCC flatly refused to support the Family Place because to do so would undermine the institution of marriage, which apparently depends on husbands being able to beat their wives to a pulp without interference.

        • Anonymous

          My mistake.

          The Catholic Church does not presume that men have a right to own property their wives have earned, which community property does.

          My mistake stems from my—apparently ill-founded!—assumption that you would favor policies that are advantageous for women, which community property isn’t always, or even usually.

          Are you seriously concerned to claim that Spain has in any way been more feminist than France? Even at the height of the Renaissance, that wasn’t true.

          Bilaterality, in descent and in property, is always the best system for women; it was the Celtic and Gaulic system, and became the Catholic system. Spanish-speaking countries are rightly praised for using bilateral inheritance, but they didn’t have the guts to deviate from German-Roman patriarchy in the matter of marital property.

          But it’s just horrible, the Church, recognizing that women have an individual existence.

          As for your claim that Catholics oppose battered women’s shelters, it is to laugh. A quick check of any statistics about Catholic charities, including the organization Catholic Charities, would show that you are wrong.

          But no, one experience in your childhood trumps all the statistics in the world, right? Because “generalization from the self” isn’t a logical fallacy, or anything.

          Also, the Catholic Church was the first institution to deny that husbands had the right to beat their wives; it was also the first to accept physical abuse as grounds for civil divorce, which no other society had ever done (look at Islamic or Confucian thought on the matter)—indeed, it was the first society to let women sue for divorce, period. It even considered “taking one’s ‘conjugal rights’ by force” a form of abuse: when, exactly, did your society get around to discussing “spousal rape”?

          Again: anyone who has positions advantageous to women is simply aping, unwittingly, the Catholic Church. And lacking the Catholic teachings on human nature, and the reverence for the Blessed Virgin, they have no intellectual right to do so.

        • Anonymous

          On further reflection, you’re even more off-base.

          Is the Catholic Church bad for not favoring community property? Or for not encouraging women to work? Pick one, those are mutually exclusive. Community property offers some useful protections for women who don’t work, but it’s drastically sub-optimal for women who do.

          And know what? Regine Pernoud—curator of France’s national archives—found that medieval French property arrangements were mixed. Many couples’ arrangement approximated community property, but others’ had individual ownership, and many mixed the two for different assets. Given that this was all under the aegis of the Church, we can safely conclude that their problem with Spain’s community property was that it was a one-size-fits-all system, thus screwing over those women who worked.

          Again: what monsters the Church was, recognizing that women are individuals.

          As for “what happened 1000 years ago has no relevance to now”, wrong. You asked what the Church’s position was, and I told you—using the example of the era when policy was most consonant with Catholic teaching.

          Here’s an analogy. Traditional Navajo society is the closest thing to a matriarchy we’ve ever found. Women own the property and descent is matrilineal; men do the planting and fighting but the women own the fields and decide when to make war.

          The modern Navajo reservation, however, is plagued by sexual assault, domestic abuse, and absentee fathers. Nevertheless quasi-matriarchy is the Navajo way of life, and anyone who behaves differently is at variance with Navajo tradition.

          You need to learn more economics, sociology, and history before forming opinions on these matters.

  • JamesA

    Astounding evil. But sadly not surprising.


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