Made to Suffer for Her Sins

[demmiblue]

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.

Over the past several months, the Trump administration has further clarified its theories of the female body. The man in charge of refugee resettlement in the U.S. has gone to court to prevent pregnant undocumented teens from accessing abortion care. The U.S. delegation to the World Health Assembly recently used military and economic threats in an attempt to sabotage a resolution promoting infant health through breastfeeding. At the Department of Health and Human Services, officials cut funding to a teen-pregnancy-prevention program that has helped teen births reach an all-time low, shifting resources to abstinence-only education. On Monday, Trump nominated to the Supreme Court a judge who is expected to be the fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. And as the government jails children who’ve been separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, pregnant immigrant women in detention centers are being denied medical treatment and shackled around the stomach. Many have miscarried while in custody.

Some of these acts may appear incongruous. Don’t the people whose moral compasses point toward fetal rights want infants to get proper nutrition? Don’t they want the fetuses inside pregnant detainees to survive? If children are precious and motherhood is a woman’s “most important job,” as Ivanka Trump has said, shouldn’t asylum-seeking parents get to keep their kids? But these policies aren’t contradictory at all. They are rooted in a consistent worldview that casts women as vessels whose reproductive capacity is the property of the state, and whose pain is fitting punishment for any supposed offense.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/07/abortion-family-separation-and-how-the-trump-administration-uses-female-pain-as-punishment.html

[Corvo Bianco]

1. My sexual desire for men is dead for these reasons.

[Demovictory9]

2. Kick

[CrispyQ]

3. I'm so sick of these patriarchal cruel assholes.

I wish their stupid rapture would happen & take them all away.

[RandomAccess]

4. "whose pain is fitting punishment for any supposed offense"

Any offense being, if nothing else is available, being female.

But MOSTLY, the pain they prefer imposing is for being sexual. And for most of them, just being female = being sexual.

I like to remind people of Rush Limbaugh's outrage when Sandra Fluke testified on behalf of health insurance coverage for birth control, that she wanted, as he put it, "sex without consequences."

Think that through.

That makes pregnancy and birth and motherhood (a condition which lasts one's entire lifetime, not just 9 months) a PUNISHMENT for having had sex. And if women need punishment, that makes women wicked by definition for allowing sex or being interested in sex. And it makes men their rightful judge, jury and executor of that punishment.

Sick, sick, sick misogyny.

[Collimator]

5. I don't have much experience dealing with Limbaugh's vitriol.

But a year or so back, I heard a sound bite of him fairly foaming at the mouth during his show over the word, "consent". His point was something along the lines that "all liberals care about is consent."

He spit out the word over and over again as if it were nasty and offensive. The tie-in to the OP is that "consent" IS a dirty word if what the power structure really wants is "submission." A point that I have made in my own discussions on the subject is that there was a time when married women couldn't say, "no" and single women couldn't say, "yes".

That's the world that they want back. A world where men could have sex without consequences by simply walking away. A world where men ALWAYS had the choice about becoming fathers--acknowledge the child as his own or disappear after the sperm has been spent. With a backup method of decrying the woman as a whore with no proof of the child's paternity.

Mind you, DNA testing has thrown that last strategy for a loop. Bending the science to serve their own interests is now the focus. They can't walk away anymore, but they can always fall back on treating the child as a product.

Financial responsibility is the consequence they have always understood. If they're paying for it, they want to control it. Women earning their own money are already thwarting that desire to control. Women who can pay their own bills and decide when and with whom they will mate and if or when they will have children are the darkest nightmare. Nevermind a few dead babies.

Those can "die" in the sheets before they find a "vessel" or die in a war that pays dividends to stockholders of the military industry. Control, power and dominance are the treasured joys of the Patriarchal Elite. They are fighting like tigresses to protect their precious privileges.

[RandomAccess]

8. You're so right

and well said: there was a time when married women couldn't say, "no" and single women couldn't say, "yes".

And you reveal another excellent point. If women are given an opportunity to give consent -- and if men must now be sure it's given -- that DOES give women more control over their own situation than in the past. In fact, this "new" requirement institutionalizes their power. VERY good point.

[Oneironaut]

7. That's exactly how they think.

Women are evil and need to be punished. They secretly hate women for the perceived power that women have over them (None in real life, but they equate sex with power for some reason). If they can control women, they win that power for themselves.

[RandomAccess]

9. Or nullify women's power in that situation

Good point.

[arithia]

6. k&r, excellent read