Incels lose it (even more so than usual) after woman jokes about the “aborted girlfriend” meme

@Katie

You got a lot of good replies already. I’ve been thinking about this all day and I’ve got a few things I’d like to add, as well.

First, you said in one of these posts that you are currently pretty vulnerable and high-strung, yes? I know that feeling only too well and in my case it can make me extremely careful in how I phrase things so I don’t give offense. I tend to over-explain in situations like that, because I’m so desperate that people don’t get me wrong and turn hostile. The problem is sometimes that ends up making things less clear and actually leads – paradoxically – to more misunderstandings. Re-reading your posts I got a bit of the same impression from you in this thread. You explained so much that I ended up somewhat unclear on what your question was and more importantly on what your mother and her group of friends actually do and don’t believe and how they act. This is not meant as a criticism. As I said, I do these things myself and I thought I saw some of that in your posts. If I’m wrong, I apologize.

Two points that have been made already, but are so important that they should be repeated:
1. I once got the following explanation of “pro-choice” on another forum and it really helped me: If you believe that every woman should be legally and practically (in terms of availability, no negative consequences, etc.) able to terminate her pregnancy if she wants it, you are pro-choice. If you yourself wouldn’t have an abortion or wouldn’t have an abortion for some reasons but would for others, or if you think fetuses are maybe “alive” and maybe an abortion ends that “life” but you STILL believe in and advocate for the above, i.e. that every woman should be legally and practically able to terminate her pregnancy for any reason SHE deems sufficient, then you are pro-choice and not pro-life. Because pro-choice is a stance that leaves every woman to make her own choice. It’s for the right to choose freely, truly freely, between the options, it does not – regardless of what the forced-birth propaganda tries to paint us as – predetermine that choice.
Pro choice is not pro-abortion. It’s pro a free choice between abortion and no abortion.

It also isn’t about you or me. It isn’t about what choice you would make or I would make, it is about guaranteeing that there is a choice available to all women at all times. It’s about realizing that just because you would choose a certain way – like your mother wouldn’t have an abortion or I would – other than kupo – probably for personal reasons always find it an agonizing choice to choose an abortion – that other people can make different choices and they are equally valid, equally moral, equally okay. That we can never judge another woman for the choice she makes and that we can never make the choice for others. Never.

Now in between all you wrote about your mother and her friends I think you said something really crucial at one point – provided I understood correctly. You said she would never try to put legal restraints on the right to abortion and you also said that she had no problems with her friends having abortions – which I read as she accepts their choice even if hers would be different. If that’s true, then it doesn’t matter one bit if she would ever have an abortion herself, she is still pro-choice. Even if she might not realize it – perhaps she has heard to much of the pro-choice = abortions-are-my-hobby propaganda – if she fully supports other women’s right to choose about their own body and doesn’t inhibit that choice, she’s pro-choice. Pro-choice does not dictate a personal choice in a specific situation, only the respect for everyone’s right to make truly free choices in the first place. As long as they are truly free choices they are all valid, moral and okay.

Kupo actually made a really good point about abortion not only having to be legally possible but also about the dangers of societal pressure inhibiting free choices. Therefore what is important – and what your mother and her friends could improve if they don’t already do that – is that you’re careful with not influencing other women’s choices with being to vocal about what your own choice would be in their situation. What I mean is, especially in the current societal climate which is still more against than for the choice of abortion, you shouldn’t go around telling everyone what your choice on the matter would be without being asked. Because really? Do our personal choices really matter to anyone but ourselves? Should they matter to anyone but ourselves? Not really, not in this issue, I think. If someone were pregnant and asked me “Would you have an abortion if you were me?” then the answer would be: “I am not you. What I would do is completely irrelevant.” and since right now there is still a cultural bias against abortion which means the choice is still not entirely free, I guess you should try to balance that by adding that “It’s completely okay to choose not to have a baby.” Because it is.

2. On the terminology. Give up the term pro-life. Be careful not to fall for the other side’s propaganda. The good things your mother and her friends do, the helping people, wanting everyone to have the best life possible? I want that, too. And I’m very much pro-choice. The two terms are not mutually exclusive. Wanting to care for people, making their lives better, those things have nothing to do with one’s stance on abortion. You say, they use the term pro-life because they do all those things and somehow that makes them use pro-life and not pro-choice as if they couldn’t be all this under the label pro-choice. And that’s weird, because pro-choice is not (despite what the forced- birthers say we are) anti-life. It’s not anti-people. It’s not anti-helping-others. Just the same weirdness happens with the BLM and All Lives Matter. I’m quite certain that people in the BLM movement don’t believe and never wanted to say: Only Black Lives matter and all other lives are worthless and those people can die. As a statement all lives matter is not opposed to the statement black lives matter. One includes the other. Yes, all lives matter but not all lives are treated as worthless right now. Black lives are treated as such, so while all lives matter, there is apparently an appalling need for people to be reminded that black lives matter, while there seems to be no problem valuing white lives.
But while they aren’t logically opposed somehow a lot of people get the impression that they are and in reality they are opposed. How does that happen? It’s like a propaganda trick from the other side that’s insidiously working and gaining control of public discourse.
There are racist assholes who actually do believe that black lives matter less. There are also asshole who actually do believe that women shouldn’t choose when it comes to abortion, that they should be objectified as incubators or “punished” for self-determined sexuality by unwanted pregnancies. But you won’t see those assholes call themselves “Black Lives Don’t Matter” or “Pro-women-as-incubators” or whatever. Oh no. They are much more clever than that. They say: We are All Lives Matter and we are the opposition (and thereby implicitly the opposite) of Black Lives Matter. The other way around: Black Lives Matter is the opposite of our All Lives Matter. And so Black Lives Matter gets painted as “All Other Lives Matter Less”. Which is bullshit. It tricks people into believing they have to make a choice between all lives are equally valuable and only black lives are valuable. Which isn’t the point, at all. The real choice, the obscured one is between: all lives (including black lives) matter equally and society should finally start to mirror that (BLM) and fuck black lives, how dare these people confront us with that problem, just shut them up already (Everyone who “can’t get behind” BLM).
Same with pro-life/pro-choice. They construct a false dichotomy between you can either be pro women’s right to determine what happens to their bodies OR you can be pro-life. Implying that supporting or even taking the label pro-choice would automatically require you to be not pro-life in all the caring for people ways your mother and her friends seem to be. Which is utter bullshit. Again the real choice is between taking control of women’s bodies from them, turning them into things, into objects OR letting everyone make choices about their own body. That is all. It is nothing beyond that. It’s not a choice about caring about other’s or not, helping other’s or not or thinking that life is valuable. You can do all that and still – or rather especially – believe at the same time that you shouldn’t turn half the human population into things and make their lives living hell.

So, my advice, if your mother and her friends really do support women’s rights to choose. Dump the term pro-life. It’s part of a straw man. It’s a part of a false dichotomy created by people who – believe me – are not humanitarian, caring people at all. Make sure they (and you) don’t have a warped understanding of what pro-choice is (no, it’s not anti-humanitarian, egotistical, anti-life!) and that it does in no way contradict the humanitarian efforts and caring that make these people require the term “pro-life” in your eyes. And then, in the next debate about abortion, use the right label. If you’re for every woman’s right to make a free choice, you are pro-choice. Call yourself that. Call them that. Don’t let the other side convince you that this would exclude all the other things and traits. It does not. You and they do not need the term pro-life, they do not need to stay away from the term pro-choice. Because we who are pro-choice are caring people, too, who want to make people’s life better.

Sorry, if this comes off as somewhat jumbled in parts.

ETA: Read Kupo’s post about thinking abortion immoral.

I didn’t really think about the implications of that term. “Moral” or “Immoral” implies a universally applicable value-system? Then it most definitely is an anti-choice opinion since it means imposing my opinion as a universal rule and deviation from my choice as a universal wrong-doing.

So I should rephrase that and say that you can be pro-choice and still be personally in a situation were your having an abortion wouldn’t feel right with you. It hopefully takes away the universal value judgement and reduces it to what it is: an unimportant personal feeling. With that I would still say that a person to whom having an abortion wouldn’t feel right personally is pro-choice as long as they support other’s right to choose and the validity of others’ feelings of right and wrong. But a person who would think abortion is immoral maybe should examine the term’s implications a bit more closely.

@Catalpa –

Hi:

I have about 3500 words for you on the history of adoption including why and how it is connected to the eugenics movement, not just historically but now with supporting documentation, book and article recommendations. I’m working on giving it a good edit and cutting the number of words, but where should I put it? Here? Because this thread has now moved on in two parts or somewhere else? Sorry for the length, I started explaining and adding citations and before I knew it I was closing in on four pages. I do realize that this is probably more than you wanted when you asked and if you want me just to pull the citations and the book recommendations out and paste them into a post, I am more than happy to do that. I realize that a lot of what I am saying goes against some very heavy societal programming, but I can support everything I’ve said with the work of other people and once I started explaining and citing….

Anyway, let me know and if you only want the citations and recommendations that is completely fine.

@Who

I am most familiar with healthy white infant adoption as it has been practiced in the US, Canada, England, Ireland and Australia with special attention on the post-WWII period to the present.

I am very familiar with international adoption in all of the countries where it has been practiced from the late nineties to the present. I am far from expert, but I am absolutely more knowledgeable than the average person.

I have studied this subject for almost thirty years. I have spoken to literally hundreds of people, adoptees, mothers, agency workers and brokers and lawyers, lawmakers and adopters over the years. These people cover different eras in adoption history and many, many different countries.

International adoption is now widely believed to be essentially child trafficking in most cases. Even when it is egregious, we don’t punish it. Please see the cases of Madonna and Angelina Jolie. Jolie’s Cambodian adoption is of particular interest, though all are suspect. In this case, the agent was found guilty of adoption fraud, not only in the case of Jolie, lest you make the argument that only movie stars benefit from trafficking and genocide practices. They don’t. In this particular case, Lauryn Galindo pleaded guilty to fraud, forgery of visas and falsification of birth, orphanage and adoption records. It was found that seven of the children she placed (and the standard of proof in these kinds of cases is incredibly high because we’ve all been told adoption is an unalloyed good) were absolutely found to have been taken from their natural parents fraudulently. Do you want to know how many children were properly returned to their natural parents who wanted them? Zero. Yes, zero. So, even in cases where the courts find the fraud and trafficking those children are lost to their parents, their identity, their country and their origins forever. The customers just get to keep them.

It was also widely reported that lies and falsified documents figured in Madonna’s adoption in Malawi. The mother wasn’t dead, she didn’t agree to adoption, her mother acted in her stead without her knowledge and there is extended family that wants the child. A big nope on that one too.

Yes, I understand that Germany and most EU countries have stopped forcing their own women into reproductive slavery. This includes Australia, which now has a good model of what happens in adoption when the profit motive and the fraud and coercion are taken out of the equation. Very few women give their children up to strangers. This is true of most EU countries too, which has forced prospective adopters into the international market which as hard as this is to believe is even more viscious and corrupt than domestic markets have traditionally been and that is saying something. Adopters are routinely lied to about how the children they are adopting were acquired, including false tales of abandonment. In other countries, orphanages are used much as foster care is in this country. It is a temporary way to care for a child while a parent either works far away from home or solves other temporary problems. Many parents have returned to reclaim their children and find that they have been sent out of the country in adoption schemes. False names, falsified records, falsified stories about how children came to be at the orphanage make it extremely unlikely that parents and children will ever find each other again. Read prospective adopter boards. Many, many people will tell you right up front that not only is international their only option, but it is preferable because the child will be able to be stripped of all identity and connection to their past and lies in records and will never be able to find their natural parents. Nor will their parents be able to find them.

For scholarly legal analysis of how the child laundering is done, I recommend:

https://works.bepress.com/david_smolin/

I also recommend The Child Catchers by Kathryn Joyce for a readable popular non-fiction description of some of the issues.

As for sex slavery, your answer proves my point in such a horrible way. You assure me that the children aren’t sex slaves. I am talking about the mothers. Being forced to give a wanted child to people who want to adopt is a form of sex slavery. Pregnancy is part of the sexual continuum. It has been said that adoption is the abortion of the mother and that making the mother disappear is the prime directive. That you can’t even “see” the mother in all of this shows just how effective all of this is. And our racism and colonialism just keeps rolling because your post also implied that we don’t do this to our own citizens anymore – it is difficult – but we go ahead and do it internationally, to primarily brown women. I am not blaming you for being a product of your culture. I am a product of mine too. I have blind spots as well.

It may seem like I have taken over this abortion thread with unrelated stuff. I swear to you I haven’t. Abortion rights, birth control, adoption and foster care all fall under the umbrella of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights and freedom. Paradoxically, the fact that we conflate these issues, especially abortion and adoption keeps the waters muddied and helps keep all reproductive rights under attack. We have to talk about each aspect of reproductive freedom separately.

So, these reasons Who? are why you cannot say that your friends the adopters were clean and free of trafficking in all of this. Lies are told, documentation is falsified and outright fraudulent, misrepresentations of the child’s status, history and circumstances are misrepresented and it is the job of the people the adopters are paying to insulate the customer from the crimes. This is part of the service for which they are paying.

I will stipulate that your friends may be decent people who did a bad thing out of desperation and ignorance. I will also say that over the years several adopters have told me things like “we all know what we did, but we did it anyway” and “you might enter the [adoption] process innocent and ignorant, but you don’t exit the same way. It’s impossible”

And again, because it cannot be stated enough, there are several aspects to true bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom, but the way they are conflated and debated is having the effect of losing ground on all aspects.

I wrote a long comment earlier and it isn’t showing up so that I can edit it. 🙁

@AuntieMameRedux, I hadn’t seen your last comment when I posted. I think I was arguing against a strawman version of what you said, now that you’ve clarified you’re talking about the potential for abuse in inter-country adoption and not saying that adoption is bad in general. Sorry about that!

Adoption is necessary but it is not what is best. It took me a long time to understand why my girlfriend said she wished she never was adopted. For her it was horrible, not the worst, but still horrible. It is difficult to say if her life will be better or worse if she stay with her biological parents or go to the foster parent. but that is what it is now. I met her foster parents and they are nice and I believe they try to he good. But it doesn’t mean that her experience of adoption was good, even if she is happy and okay now.

I want to add that when I said “Adoption is not best” I mean that is not best situation for a child to need to be adopted. ideal is to have parent(s) who love you and stable childhood from birth. It is not best for a child to need adoption, but plenty do and in such situations it is *better* than what is there before. My gf suffered from her biological parents and also from another foster parents, until she finally came to the parents she has now. and they are not perfect, but from her stories and memories, they are probably much better. it is not *best* to have parents who are not perfect but better than before – but it is necessary to try to keep the child safe as possible.

ChimericMind – I agree and you don’t need to apologies that you are angry. I feel like auntie is being absolutist too and also made some statements without evidence. it is a fact adoption saves lives and improves lives and it is necessary.

Huh, maybe my original reading was right? I didn’t think someone would say all adoption is bad, because that is a wide, WIDE net to cast.

@ChimericMind –

I’m pissed that someone would call it evil to rescue my previously-mentioned big sister from her situation, or the two other sisters and one brother that were abused non-sexually, or my trans brother being nearly killed for his identity, or the gay brother who was kicked out of his house for his identity (and never actually went into foster care, just transferred to our house and legally adopted later).

Internet hugs if you want them. I’m sorry they had to experience all that and I’m glad they’re living a better life. There are still parents who will react in shitty ways to their kids coming out.

Much more than just being disapproving about it… but I’m thinking of myself now and my relationship with my mother. Which isn’t horrible, but it also gives me a personal reason not to give the mother/child bond an automatically privileged status over other relationships. I don’t hate her, but I’m closer with other people in my family.

Kupo, yes abortion is a medical procedure but like one or two other people have said I don’t think you can say it’s exactly the same and no different at all from for example putting a cast on a broken leg because take away any moral judgment you still are killing something.
…
I think that makes it slightly different from a medical procedure where you’re not killing anything just by strict technical definition.

When you take antibiotics you’re killing something too. Millions or even billions of somethings, actually. Sure, things like injuries are generally treated without killing organisms, but a large number of disease treatments are intended to, you know, kill the disease.

Are things like viruses technically alive I thought that was ambiguous?

Catalpa said “anti biotics” which are for fighting bacteria, not virus, and bacteria are alive. there is nothing like antibiotics for virus, the only way to fight virus is to treat symptoms or stop it before it comes with vaccine. what grows in the womb is just living cells, exaclty like bacteria which are living cells. in both case, abortion and use antibiotics, unwanted living cells die.

I probably should’ve posted this earlier, but then I keep feeling I need to write and rewrite to make it less wordy (and self-centric). Also meat space stuff got in the way.

Let me say this first, @lunarqueen and @ChimericMind, I will take your(plural) words that Auntiemameredux was criticizing adoption in a harmful, adoption-negative way. Both of you are in the right to express anger at that being part of the adoption experience.

However, comments like this:

The culture that held her of such little value that she was abandoned and declared by the government as a foundling? The culture that abandoned a healthy baby because she was a girl? She gained the culture of a family- worth it so far.

Set off a lot of red flags for me as a non-Western, non-white feminist lady who has experience racism on herself and witness it on others in online spaces. I legit got very emotional (angry, to be specific) when I read that sentence.

@Lunarqueen, you’re inadvertently propping up your experience using white/western saviour rhetoric. I get it, you’re trying to tell us to be aware of the issue from the adoptee’s perspective. And yes, I’m definitely for uplifting underrepresented voices like that of adoptees. But the way you’re doing it… just those 3 short sentences I quoted above, it causes unintended harm because you are repeating and enforcing the language and reasoning of existing racial/cultural stereotypes. I’m basing this on my own experience as part of the group who will bear the brunt of such racism and western-elitism. Such enforcing of racial/cultural stereotypes can also circle back to whichever Western country you belong to and affect not only your daughter but also immigrants and diaspora who happen to share the same birth culture as her.

Case in point.

@ChimericMind

Just, this whole comment:

I’m rather offended by the assertion that all foster-care is genocide, as well. I mean, I suppose that the culture my big sister was taken from, where she was raped by her older brother while her parents knew and let it happen is an important cultural touchstone, and it’s racist to say otherwise. The state had no business profaning her heritage by removing her from their custody and putting her in a soulless orphanage run by horrible cultural imperialists like my mother. Auntiemame is wise to support the ultra-conservatives that gained control of the Kansas legislature and decided that the foster care industry needed to be privatized within an inch of its life, and would have kicked undesired teenagers like my big sister back to their birth families regardless of the reason that they were removed in the first place. Of course, my mother had to fuck it all up by imposing her cultural biases against sibling rape and insisted on adopting her to stop that. Thank you for opening my eyes at how unenlightened my parents were, Auntiemame.

Ok I get what you’re trying to do, you’re trying to play the ‘an eye for an eye’ card on Auntiemameredux. You’re trying to get her to understand how her comments read to you and what it ends up implying about your experience. I get you’re angry. But can we… do the base minimum and not use valid, existing issues and experience (heritage erasure, imperialism) that still affect POC and people like me till this day as an ironic ‘hyperbolic’ tool to own someone on the internet???

Look, originally I had this whole long-ass paragraph within this comment about my views on adoption. I deleted the whole thing deciding that me being neither adoptive nor adoptee means I lack the required perspective and knowledge to effectively talk about it. I give due respect to both lunarqueen’s and ChimericMind’s statements of how they are involved in the adoptive experience. I’m not trying to lecture anyone on a moral high horse. I’m sharing my honest opinion about things that set off warning alarms in my head due to my experiences. Uh… I guess what I’m saying is, please practice a degree of intersectional awareness before you post? (said with sincerity)

Ok… awkward… err thanks for reading?