As SallyStrange has pointed out in the comments here, quite a few MRAs seem to have a bad case of “womb envy” – or, more specifically, “abortion envy.” That is, they envy the ability of women to abort fetuses that they – the guys, as sperm providers — have had a part in creating. And since they don’t get final say in whether or not the woman in the equation gets an abortion, many of these guys claim they should have the right to a “paper abortion” – that is, to wash their hands financially of the baby once it is born.
But for every MRA demanding their own right to an abortion, there’s another MRA who thinks abortion is an unmitigated evil, which in essence means that they think pregnant women should be forced to give birth to babies they don’t want. The guy behind The Life Zone evidently thinks this way. And so does one New Mexican pro-lifer named Greg Fultz, who has launched a bizarre campaign designed to shame the woman who aborted what he thinks of as “his” baby – the highlight of which is a giant billboard depicting him holding what looks like the blackened carcass of a baby under the headline “This Would Have Been a Picture Of My 2-Month Old Baby If The Mother Had Decided To NOT KILL Our Child!”
I’ve been meaning to write about the Fultz thing for some time, but haven’t, because frankly the whole thing makes me depressed. Over the past day or so three separate Man Boobz readers have brought the subject up, so I figure it’s time to deal with the subject. My solution? I’m going to punt, and rather than post about it specifically I’m just going to point you to an excellent, and nicely sarcastic, post on the subject from Jill on Feministe.
Since Jill wrote that post, Fultz has been ordered by a judge to take the billboard down or face jail; he says he won’t. Details here.
NOTE: I originally ended this post with a 1200 word dissertation spelling out my take on abortion. But reading it back over again I realized that many of the points I made in it had already been made, in many cases more deftly, by various commenters in yesterday’s 800-plus comment thread (which actually stayed on the topic for the first several hundred comments, until more or less everything that needed to be said on the subject had been said). The tl;dr summary: her body, her choice. “Paper abortions” only work if the government is willing to step in to make up for the loss of child support, and that isn’t going to happen in the US any time soon. (And I don’t see many MRAs calling for increased support for single moms.)
So instead of abortion, let’s talk about Fultz. What a dick.
Toronto is the every city xD (tho technically my town is not Toronto… should I be flattered that we dun look like Milwaukee? xD Or insulted xD ) Toronto is the place where a LOT of Zombie movies are filmed xD (and the hulk! 😀 ) My hairdresser worked on the set of Resident Evil 4 :3 She did the eye contact work! 😀
My goal has always been to be in a bad low-budget SyFy movie (since so many are filmed here xD ) .. I want to be the role of “the hot girl who can’t act” xDDD That could even mean I’d be the hero! :3
@Ami, I’m not big on remakes as a rule, but I really enjoyed Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. And I loved the original. I knew it was filmed in Toronto; it’s so cool that it was across the street from your house. I’ve only been to Toronto a handful of times but I’ve always enjoyed it and loved it’s thriving film industry. It’s been years since I’ve worked on films but everyone I ever knew who worked crew in Toronto loved it.
And my friends and I regularly review our Zombie Apocalypse plan because these things are important. It is a little difficult to run drills, though.
Toronto is the place where a LOT of Zombie movies are filmed
There’s a running inside joke at Sadly, No, that every movie is filmed in Arkansas.
Except zombie movies, apparently.
And my friends and I regularly review our Zombie Apocalypse plan
I bet my plan is somewhat different from yours.
23. A. 1. “If you see a blonde Asian girl with a shotgun… run”
And all TV shows are filmed in Vancouver, which Smallville fandom calls Kanscouver because you can’t make a Superman TV show without acknowledging it’s supposed to be in Kansas, so the big tall evergreens, mountains, and seaports are…something? Kansas-like?
See also, Supernatural.
If you see a blonde Asian girl with a shotgun… run”
Which direction?
And all the Stargates XD Vancouver is the new SyFy destination… tho the place for movies still seems to be Toronto xD (Tekwar and a whole bunch of tv shows used to be filmed here in the 80s and 90s tho… xD )
My favourite “we’re not in Kansas Toto” scene in Smallville was the Aquaman episode with the tall mountains and beautiful lake xD
Up up down down left right left right…
should I be flattered that we dun look like Milwaukee?
It is said that Toronto is Milwaukee with a curfew.
Also, FWIW, I have a blogging friend who coined the phrase “IT’S NOT THIS HOT IN TO-RON-TO!” which must be said in a loud voice while walking through casinos or riding elevators in Las Vegas.
Toronto is every city except with a curfew (except for the Chinese parts of town xD Those ignore all the restrictions xD incl closing on holidays :3 I love where I live :3 )
If anyone doesn’t have a zombie apocalypse preparedness plan, the CDC can help!
http://www.bt.cdc.gov/socialmedia/zombies_blog.asp
Of course, NWO and anti-choicers always forget the monozygotic twins. What, can I just kill off one twin because they don’t have “unique genetic material” and weren’t “seperate things at the moment of conception”? Inquiring minds want to know. Also, for the religious anti-choicers, if the soul enters at conception, do monozygotic twins have half a soul? What about monozygotic triplets or quadruplets? Do they have one third and one quarter souls respectively? Imagine if you split the embryo into eight (totally has been done with non-humans in the lab) do the resulting offspring have only one eighth of a soul? What about clones? Do the Stormtroopers all share the same soul between them? Or do clones have no soul? And only one twin gets a soul-hence the “evil twin”/”good twin” mythos?
Still, if you are looking at the biology and capacity for higher thought, newborns have fully developed frontal lobes-at least 95% of aborted fetuses do not. Of that 5%, most are medically necessary, so you end up with about 1-2% where the question of personhood of a fetus might be relevant at all. Still, even if a fetus is a person, no person has the right to non-consensual use of another’s body, so it is a moot point (http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm).
I totally wouldn’t be here if my mum hadn’t had an abortion – the pill failed and she got pregnant while my older siblings were 4 and 2 and they were living in the equivalent of a trailer park at the time. There was no way in hell my parents could afford the time and effort to have that baby and keep the children they already had cared for and well-fed etc. Thanks to not taking the financial knife in the gut – they were able to get into a better financial position (i.e. save and continue building my Dad’s business) and had me some six years later. Planned, wanted, loved, (over)protected, cared for, fed, encouraged in all my interests…many of these things my parents weren’t capable of providing that aborted fetus.
Considering that Greg has been in it with the law over failure to pay child support several times before, I somehow doubt he would have been even a mediocre father. He couldn’t even take care of his own teeth.
That you all consider taking advantage of a drunk woman to be a war crime but not baby killing speaks volumes about you.
Female [REDACTED –DF]
evilumpire has an advantage over the rest of us — he’s immune to zombies due to lack of branes.
Come to think of it, that’s probably true of MRAs in general.
ewme – “taking advantage” of a drunk woman is rape, which is a crime whether there’s a war on or not. While rape is a tragically common part of war, and does count as a war crime, I don’t think most rapists in that situation bother to get their victims drunk.
Baby killing is also a horrible crime. But abortion is not baby killing.
I was originally going to add something about rape and forced impregnation as tools of genocide, but I thought you might enjoy it too much.
One unfortunate byproduct of the Moron Fultz is that he pretty much squashes any potential discussion on “should men have any say” in the aborting of their fetus/child.
Actually, Titty, the consensus view here on the blog is that if a man is pregnant, it’s entirely up to him whether to abort it. Bodily autonomy and all that.
@Lyn,
Same with my brother. My father didn’t that a woman’s supposed to wait a few months before having sex again after giving birth, so not long after I was born, my mother became pregnant again. I had been totally unplanned and she was only seventeen when she became pregnant with me (eighteen by the time she gave birth). She didn’t know what she was going to do another baby so soon, so she had an abortion. Well, thanks to that abortion, it gave my father a chance to try again, and that was how my brother came into being. Thus, my brother owes his life to an abortion.
So Mr. Slave and EW? Should my brother not exist? Would you tell him, “Abortion is murder and thus the one that came before you should have been born instead, even though you would never have existed”? Yeah, that sounds reeeally “pro-life” to me.
*didn’t care that
I really have to stop doing that. Mind goes too fast for my fingers…
oh please, baby killing is so last year. All the cool kids are into baby eating nowadays.