By David Futrelle
Most reproductive rights activists today are doing their best to deal with the increasingly likely reversal of Roe V. Wade, brought a step closer to reality by the draconian anti-abortion bill just signed into law in Alabama, likely to be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court.
But the exceedingly sui generis reproductive rights activist John Howard — Twitter’s @EggAndSperm — has rather different concerns. Like men trying to gestate their own fetuses in a box, women trying to fertilize the eggs of other women, and single and/or gay people having sex.
I first ran across Howard in tweets from @Chinchillazllla and @NuclearTakes several days ago, and I’ve been trying to figure him out ever since. He’s no feminist, obviously, but he’s no Men’s Rights Activist either — he doesn’t seem to want men to infringe on what he sees as women’s fundamental right to gestate. He’s kind of his own thing, mixing the assorted bigotries of a Christian fundamentalist with the paranoia of someone who’s just read Brave New World for the first time. (And he seems way too dedicated to be a troll; he’s been at this for years.)
Huh. It never occurred to me that my inability to become pregnant was a right; I just thought it was a biological limitation. I guess I also have a right to not be as smart as Einstein, as well as a right to not be able to fly by flapping my arms. Apparently I have as many rights as there are things I’m unable to do.
Oh, and as a single person, I also have the right not to have sex. When Howard talks about the reproductive rights of men and women, he makes clear he thinks these rights (including the right to have sex) only apply to straight, married couples.
Howard is so sure that (straight) marriage is the only way to go that he’s managed to convince himself that all sex between single people is therefore somehow rape.
But Howard seems less concerned with this sort of “rape” than he is with the specter of gay marriage, which he manages to blame for everything from school shootings to the opioid crisis.
While gay and lesbian couples are shit out of luck in Howard’s imagined utopia, he’s an eensy, teensy bit more forgiving towards trans people — but only if they accept the fundamentally transphobic belief that trans women are really men and trans men are really women.
You might wonder why Howard is so intent on banning things that aren’t actually possible in the world we live in today — obviously, neither cis men nor trans women can produce eggs; nor can cis women or trans men produce sperm. But he of course has an answer.
No, really. His answer is “aliens” — or at least their technology.
Howard — while not a TERF himself — has some awfully TERFy concerns:
But he also thinks he’s got a solution:
Yeah, that’s not how that works.
Indeed, Howard might well be the poster child for Not How This Works. So I’m just going to end this with that lady from that commercial. And every other gif along those lines I could find.
And for you Star Wars fans:
As for me, I’m just going to go lie down for a while.
We Hunted the Mammoth is independent and ad-free, and relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
story was worth it for the cat at the end.
also? I’m off to ensure my right not to have a car engine implanted in my chest to replace my heart.
toodles.
So I was reading the first volume of Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, and came across the woman in charge of a college who not only enforced gender separation for swimming in the river, but insisted that men only swim downstream from the women, for fear that their sperm would be carried on the current and impregnate her innocent charges.
I honestly thought that would be the weirdest reproduction-related thing I came across this week.
This all reads as the usual catholic (and various other totalitarian religions) crap to me. The fear of artificial insemination, the control of sexuality, sex as purely procreative. It’s bog standard.
In this view, men and women are here to make babies via PIV sex in the missionary position, and that’s the start and end of it all. Any hiccup on that is an abomination.
I lost brain cells reading this ?
Apparently all I need to do is accept that I don’t have a right to become pregnant and somehow I just won’t be crushed by my dysphoria, who knew.
I didn’t think it was possible for heaps of bat guano to become sentient and start talking English (however incoherently). However, this one convinces me that Something Must Be Done To Stop Heaps of Bat Guano Becoming Sentient.
The question remains, however: What the everfucking FUCK?
Apparently, it’s theoretically possible to have a genetically unique baby produced by two female with no male involved. It requires an ovule and a stem cell from a different female and some genetic hacking to remove genes that prevent same sex reproduction in mammals (but apparently those are easy to find and remove). The experiment only ever succeeded on mice and we have yet to succeed with two males, but hey. In couple of years, maybe he could start to rave about lesbian having children of their own without sperm donors. Not that such a technology is really useful and would be very costly for pretty much nothing, but it’s possible.
https://www.inverse.com/article/49792-can-two-males-or-females-make-babies
@epronovost
In practice though it runs into a very nasty little problem that nobody has figured out to bypass: genetic imprinting. Basically, for some genes it doesmatter which parent the gene comes from, and in quite a few cases development of an embryo only works if one set of genes comes from a sperm cell and another set comes from an egg cell. Nobody’s sure how exactly the genes can tell where they were inherited from, but whatever process it uses is important enough to make this guy’s fears about women fertilizing the eggs of other women literally impossible.
That’s because those imprinted genes include the ones that play a critical role in the formation of the placenta. In experimental scenarios using animals where an ovum was “fertilized” (via a sperm cell whose nucleus was replaced with that of another ovum’s) the embryo formed more or less normally but inevitably died due to the placenta never forming properly. There’s also the case where one sperm (sometimes two) “fertilizes” an ovum which doesn’t have any DNA due to errors in meiosis. The failed zygote reduplicates its DNA (in the single sperm case) so it technically has a full set of chromosomes, but instead of a viable pregnancy it develops into something called a hydatidiform mole, which can generously be described as a hideous mass of grape-like vesicles that can sometimes spread through the uterine wall as a malignant tumor.
I have seen photographs of those things. Suffice to say that even the most extreme anti-abortionists would be hard-pressed to recognize them as having ever possessed the potential to be human.
@Anonymous
Methylation.
Knowing that doesn’t make it easier to fix, however.
Hold on a tick, he’s against adoption as being unnatural? What the hell is supposed to happen to orphaned and abandoned children then?
@genjones
The natural thing of course. They die like animals who parents die or abandoned them. Like the panda in the wild that had twins and threw one out to die to because she couldn’t produce enough nutrients for two cubs and herself. If you want get really natural women could eat the babies they don’t want like mother animals on the wild do.
Well, now I need to go reread Blue Genes by Val McDermid.
Women don’t have a right to be unable to be pregnant? I know I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but somehow I still am.
Amoeba on Saturn could Tweet more sensible things than this guy.
I am sure that many have heard the news from Alabama, but I wanted to spread it around anway.
Gilead is becoming a stronger possibility with the passage, in Alabama, of the most restrictive anti-choice law in the country. No abortions, period. The one and only exception is it the mother will die during pregnancy because of said pregnancy. On top of that, they are trying to make it a felony for any woman to travel, while pregnant, out of the state, for fear that she will have an abortion in a state that allows it. Some of what I have read says that she would be charged with a felony if she was pregnant, but it was too early for her to know.
I believe that it is high time for we who are women to create a Lysistrata movement and refuse to take care of, feed, work for, have sex with or continue to live with any man who has not proven to be a true friend.
I have young grand daughters and I, for one, will fight to whatever end for their rights, and the rights of all girls, to live lives of freedom and integrity.
As a transhumanist, I like to think about how the medical science of the future will be able to alter our bodies, especially in the context of people with disabilities and trans people. I’m curious if we’ll eventually be able to give people fully functioning opposite sex reproductive systems and how many trans people would actually opt to get them. I recently saw a thread between some trans friends on Twitter discussing top and bottom surgery and a lot said they just wanted top surgery, not bottom. Is this because of the different ways dysphoria can affect different people, or is it because current bottom surgery is mostly cosmetic and not worth the price/effort?
I can agree that there is no right to have a child. The rest??? WT ever-lovin’ F?
Also, having been pregnant and given birth – bring on the baby-in-a-box thing. I’m cool with that.
@Talonknife I’m an expert only at my own lived experience, and informed primarily by my experiences talking with other trans people (so, anecdotally only) but I think that “because of the different ways dysphoria can affect different people” is much more the reason for people who like me (TMI probably sorry) don’t really want MTF bottom surgery.
For me, that part of my body isn’t the source of my dysphoria in any meaningful way, though it is for a lot of the trans women that I have met. I haven’t heard people in my circles say “the limited change that I would get isn’t worth the expense” but I have heard “I want it, but it is prohibitively expensive” as well as “I don’t need that part of my body changed”.
Big however: I’m middle-age and transitioning fairly late in life, so my years as a parent of children in the house are behind me, not in front of me and my experiences have led to many more conversations with trans women in my age range than with younger. To what extent there might be a generational difference, I couldn’t say.
Warning lawtheorie inside:
It comes down to that, has somethink to be explicite allowed to be legal or is everythink allowed that is not forbidden. Democracies tend to the second.
(I leave out the obvious point that the rights of other people are an important factor in your rights)
So from that point, yes people are allowed to have sex, married or not (not true in some islamic countrys), children from people who aren’t married have existed since forever. (Some societys had no concepts of mariage if I remember correctly) Modern society has chanced that those children are not to be ignored but have rights.
Leaving the religios isue aside, a mariage is a treaty that gives certain rights, makes the partners have responsibilitys for each other but is nothing magical.
O/T (via Charlie Stross on Twitter): One of the arseholes responsible for that disgraceful new abortion bill in Alabama is an OB/GYN with a documented history of being sued by patients for negligence.
@Samantha Kaswell
That’s dreadful news. But surely, such law must be unconstitutional?
I’m not from the US, but leaving aside criminalization of abortion, it seems impossible that a law could be passed that limits freedom of travel for an entire class of citizens?
@Beyond Ocean
The muslim ban exists.
Never say the words “it can’t happen here”. It creates vulnerabilities. Instead, hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
Beyond Ocean
The critical thing for the people involved with pushing these laws is getting shot of the Roe vs Wade decision. The actual laws they’re making are almost an afterthought… they’ll throw in all sorts of shit that they’d like, but the key thing from their point of view is that they receive legal challenges and can take it all the way to the SCROTUS who, they hope, will be on their side.
If the law gets watered down, as it almost certainly will, they’ll still consider it a win. They might even get to pretend they’re being magnanimous by removing the travel restrictions.
And yet, here we are.
Right. Of course. Should have thought of that.
Thank you for reminding me what we’re dealing with.
@ Pie:
A maxim for the time of trumpitude….