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One Day for Women and This Is It?

March 8 is International Women's Day, and the Leader of the Free World has declared an end to sexual exploitation of women, free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, it's a miracle. And if he can't change the whole world by executive order, today he's at least making a stern example of those South Dakota sex traffickers and exploiters of women and young girls?

Off to tell my teen-aged daughter the great news that it's morning in America and starting today, she'll be judged on the content of her character, not her uterus. . .

From the festive Voice of America holiday story:

"America will help women stand up for their freedom no matter where they live."

The president says his administration is working with other nations to end sexual exploitation and the human trafficking of women and young girls . . .


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JJ Ross's picture
Submitted by JJ Ross on 8 March 2006 - 1:41pm.
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Scott W. Somerville's picture

There's more to being female than getting an abortion

Submitted by Scott W. Somerville (not verified) on 9 March 2006 - 2:55pm.

I'm not trying to be snarky here, JJ... when it comes to helping women, there really is something to be said for toppling the Taliban by force of arms.


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NanceConfer's picture

There's a lot more

Submitted by NanceConfer on 11 March 2006 - 10:41am.

to being a woman than having an abortion. Or having a child.

Either choice is such a deeply personal one that no man, no judge, certainly no South Dakota Taliban-wannabe should be attempting to think they can possibly know enough -- no matter how much they study their particular scripture -- to make those decisions for a woman.

But don't they try. Don't they though.

But this too shall be overcome. Women have had to deal with this sort of hide-bound power grabbing forever and we will deal with it again. We are stronger than any of this testosterone-inspired legislating.

We know what it means -- to be pro-choice. And to be pro-life. Here's one essay about being pro-life that I found worth reading -- http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/3/10/191955/801 -- don't be put off that it is published on DailyKos -- just read it.

"Fighting them over there" does not give one man leave to think that he has any right, not one ounce of any right, to interfere with these choices that women are regularly confronted with.

This wrong will not stand. A right wing that is emboldened is one thing. But this -- SD and now TN and MO -- is an assault on all the women in this country -- including the ones in all of our homes.

Nance


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JJ Ross's picture

Straw man, uh, woman!

Submitted by JJ Ross on 9 March 2006 - 9:01pm.

That really was toppling, right, not just relocating?

The women of South Dakota didn't need rights-rescue liberation by force of arms in the first place, and that's sure not what the president's party is serving up for them.

What the Republican government of South Dakota is doing, on purpose, is the kind of known-to-be-illegal, patriarchal, drunk-with-power, unknown-in-my-lifetime rights-grab that the Terri Schiavo debacle was to me, here in my own backyard. The complete disregard for Schiavo as a grown woman, her rights protected so courageously and ONLY by impartial courts was a watershed event for me, put me on high-threat-level alert. Not even gains for suffering and enslaved women on foreign shores can change that very personal threat awareness now awakened in me. This feels more like what the Taliban moving IN must have been like for women . . .


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JJ Ross's picture

What About Specific Performance?

Submitted by JJ Ross on 11 March 2006 - 4:24am.

As a lawyer, what do you think about this approach from bioethics-philosophy professor Hilde Lindemann?

They want to hold pregnant women – who are innocent of any wrongdoing –to a punitive standard of specific performance, sentencing them against their will to the many kinds of hard work, physical discomfort, and outright danger that my daughter has undertaken to bring her wanted child into the world. No other class of people is held to this standard in peacetime. No woman should be held to it either.

If the South Dakota legislature is really serious about saving lives, it might consider distributing the gender burden more evenly by enacting a law that forces all able-bodied men to donate a kidney to someone who will die without one. That way they too would have to do something with their bodies to support someone else’s life--something a little like the creative and purposeful work that women do when they sustain a pregnancy.


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