Ladies! Protect your right to gestate from men who want to grow babies in a box, world’s weirdest “reproductive rights” activist declares

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

Nobody’s sure how exactly the genes can tell where they were inherited from,

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

That’s dreadful news. But surely, such law must be unconstitutional?

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.

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?

And yet, here we are.

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

Right. Of course. Should have thought of that.

Thank you for reminding me what we’re dealing with.

@ Pie:

And yet, here we are.

A maxim for the time of trumpitude….

@Talonknife
Like Brandy said, I can only speak for myself, and I am planning on it. I’m satisfied with the outcomes I’ve seen from other women, and I’m lucky to have insurance to take the hit

Did this dude watch that one scene in Life Of Brian while high or something?

I wish the left would fight back against this firehose assault on women with some Overton window troll legislation of their own. Even if “99 year jail sentences for men who create unwanted pregnancies” doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of passing (hell, we can barely even get jail sentences for men who engage in unwanted sex), it’s critical not to allow any normalization of laws that regulate women’s bodies and medical decisions.

The GOP says “meet us halfway”, so the Democrats, wanting to be bipartisan, take a step forward. Then the GOP takes two steps backwards and says “meet us halfway” again. Repeat the same dance steps for fifty years, aaaand that’s how we got to where we are now.

As for John Howard, his argument that people have no right to do anything that falls outside of their biological abilities is absurd. Under that same reasoning, people don’t have a right to any corrective medical procedure. If prospective parents don’t have a right to accept sperm and egg donations, then it follows that no one should be allowed to get hip replacements, pacemakers, blood transfusions, organ donations, or eyeglasses. After all, a faulty body part is the result of a person’s genetic makeup and therefore unalterable. No substitutions!!

Sex outside marriage doesn’t even fall under the “it’s unnatural, so there’s no right to it” umbrella. There’s nothing about human biology that physically prevents adults from having intercourse if they don’t have a notarized piece of paper. Embryos don’t spontaneously self-arrest if they sense the womb belongs to an unmarried person.

Human rights are a human invention, granted by humans to other humans (though the Declaration of Independence says certain basic rights are “inalienable”, ie not subject to the whims of legislators, but good luck finding a Republican who believes that). Rights can’t be derived from nature or science, no matter how you jump up and down and stamp your little Archie Bunker feet and insist that goils are goils and men are men.

These people sure get angry at the idea of people having babies and sex outside traditional heteronormative marriage. It makes me think their own marriages must be miserable and punitive, and they’re furious that other people have the freedom to enjoy the good stuff without the suffering of being yoked for life to an abusive, Dominionist spouse.

*sigh* I’m calling John Howard libelz on this one. Cuz there’s a really neat John Howard buried in High Park who had a transformative hand in building Toronto.

I realize it’s against praxis as a socialist to admire a servant of the Family Compact (the 1% of Upper Canada), but engineers and surveyors like Howard needed somebody to fund their work and the Lieutenant Governor John Colborne had plenty of money, so I don’t fault him too much on that account. Clearly they had a close relationship as Howard named his lakeside residence Colborne Lodge after his patron.

Although even the John Howard name is suspect as he was actually born John Corby and had two stories as to why he changed his name, the first claiming he was an illegitimate son and adopted the name Corby after the man his mother married and the second that he was descended from Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk.

John and his wife Jemima bequeathed the land of High Park to the city of Toronto in 1873, on the conditions that they would be permitted to live there, receive a yearly pension of $1200, that no alcohol would ever be served in the park, and that the city hold the park “for the free use, benefit and enjoyment of the Citizens of Toronto for ever and to be called and designated at all times thereafter High Park”. Jemima fell ill with cancer and passed away in 1877, while John lived another 13 years and died at Colborne Lodge, both of them buried beneath a cairn just across the road.

Not sure if I’ve related the story of the fence, but it’s recorded in Howard’s journals that it was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and enclosed St. Paul’s Cathedral, Howard purchasing it when it was being replaced. Sadly, on its journey to Toronto, the ship carrying it sank into the St. Lawrence, taking the fence with it, but Howard at great personal expense hired divers to retrieve as much of it as possible and that’s what now encloses their burial cairn.

TL;DR When they’re sending John Howards, they’re not sending their best.

The silly man doesn’t realise that he doesn’t have a right to tweet.

There’s 0 accountability for the judiciary. If they feel like calling a law constitutional, even if it isn’t, no one will stop them.

We’re getting to the point, or maybe past the point, in which if Democrats ever somehow get enough seats in both the House and Senate, they will need to take drastic measures. Like impeach every single federal judge that does anything unethical. Or pack the courts to overcome Trump appointees.

This seems incredibly unlikely.

Which means we’ll eventually get to the point where democracy is subverted to such a point that civil unrest occurs.

Those are the two choices.

The first one is better, but too many Democrats either don’t get it or don’t care.

I wish the left would fight back against this firehose assault on women with some Overton window troll legislation of their own. Even if “99 year jail sentences for men who create unwanted pregnancies” doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of passing (hell, we can barely even get jail sentences for men who engage in unwanted sex), it’s critical not to allow any normalization of laws that regulate women’s bodies and medical decisions.

Not sure that’s the best example, but I get what you mean. It might work if you focused on things that are broadly popular. E.g. a special tax on people who own property worth more than ten million dollars, and paying that money out directly to everyone else.

That should scare the shit out of the capitalist swine 🙂

I get the feeling this guy’s definition of right is slightly different from everyone else’s.

@Lukas Xavier – But draconian abortion laws aren’t broadly popular either. Close to 3/4 of Americans support abortion in cases of rape or incest, and that number’s been pretty stable over time. Right wing legislators aren’t consulting polls or wringing their hands over how they appear to centrist voters when they introduce these horrible bills.

The point is to propose drastic and absurd things from the left as a counterweight to the drastic and absurd things the right is trying to ram through, so that it becomes impossible for Republicans to paint mildly leftist ideas as radical and scary. Most MAGA voters have no idea what the radical left even is. They think it’s clean water, or universal healthcare. They think CNN is Marxist. Democrats should get some genuinely far-left ideas out there instead of constantly ceding the middle ground. Call their bluff. Demand that those rich old white men make the same sacrifices and take the same risks they’re asking of young women.

@Samantha Kaswell

I already mentioned in a previous topic that sex strikes work best when the majority of the population supports the women’s side on whatever the strike is directed against, assuming the main role of the strike is to do more than just bring attention. (Which is fine, but attention alone will not translate into effective measures to handle said issue, and it gets even more polarizing when you factor in religious beliefs as a cause of the legislation- sure, the ultimate cause is their desire to control women’s bodies, but it’s the justification that God says an embryo’s life is as important as an adult human’s life that both makes it palatable to the general public and allows them to take what they believe to be the moral high ground on the issue.)

At this point, a better idea would be to just initiate a mass exodus of women from the state before the law can take effect. They won’t support you, so why let them have your tax dollars knowing that they will be used against you?

Impractical? Perhaps. But at the minimum, it has less risk of being subject to blowback, and even the most ideologically minded of politicians (who might very well take the strike as proof that they’re right) will be forced to notice the dent in their tax revenues.

@Buttercup Q. Skullpants

Knowing the country as it is now, even some centrists might throw a fit about those sorts of proposals because they’ve been led to think only “Communists” believe those sorts of things. Thanks for nothing, lingering effects of the Cold War and Red Scare.

That said, I favor what I believe to be a more acceptable solution: a mandatory maximum age for major political offices, under the (likely correct) rationale that after a certain age dementia and general cognitive decline will inevitably compromise a politician’s ability to make adequate judgments on policy, law, and the like. If nothing else, it will ensure that those old white men’s successors will not be so far removed from matters affecting current generations as to be incapable of dealing with them.

@Anonymous:
And always remember, the Cold War was actually the Second Great Red Scare.

The First was mostly post WWI, as a result of the Russian Revolution, and pretty much lasted until the Depression started a decade later and everybody had more immediate things to worry about.

Of course, union-busting goes back even further than that, but unionization being treated as some sort of foreign invasion more started after WWI.

The point is to propose drastic and absurd things from the left as a counterweight to the drastic and absurd things the right is trying to ram through

I get that. I’m just not sure the “absurd” part is really necessary or constructive. I don’t think we need to do that.

There are plenty of drastic things we could propose that are actually, genuinely good ideas and which would both draw actual popular support, and scare the ever-living shit out of the right wing. This puts them in a position to either fight and lose, or compromise and give us what we want. And then we push for the next thing, just like they did.

I don’t think we really disagree on the basic point, only the manner of execution. I don’t think we ever need to propose anything “absurd”.

@Jenora Feuer

Of course, union-busting goes back even further than that, but unionization being treated as some sort of foreign invasion more started after WWI.

Nah, only which foreigners were responsible. In the old days it was Fenians and German anarchists, post WWI it was Bolshevism.

@Buttercup Q. Skullpants

I wish the left would fight back against this firehose assault on women with some Overton window troll legislation of their own. Even if “99 year jail sentences for men who create unwanted pregnancies” doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of passing (hell, we can barely even get jail sentences for men who engage in unwanted sex), it’s critical not to allow any normalization of laws that regulate women’s bodies and medical decisions.

Apparently a joke amendment was proposed to the Alabama bill that would have made vasectomies a felony, but it doesn’t seem to be getting much attention.

@Rabid Rabbit – Well, it’s a start.

Sometimes bills aren’t really bills, they’re poltical theater. It’s a way of shaping public opinion about legislative priorities.

Republicans understand the messaging game much better than the Democrats. When it’s not your rights constantly on the chopping block, it’s easy to say “just wait, don’t be too radical, let’s not rock the boat or we’ll scare moderates”. That hasn’t worked in the past. It isn’t working now.

I think we should propose a bill to arm uteri with AR-15s in order to protect themselves from government back booted thugs.

Also, credit to @ohnoshetwint for this one, instead of saying “mother earth” we should call it “unborn baby earth” so that conservatives will have no choice but to protect it.

It’s a common misconception that men don’t have the biological ability to breastfeed, but they are fully equipped with lactation glands and sympathetic hormone stimulation responses. In fact, there is some evidence to support that fathers even have a biological imperative to do so.

@Dalillama:
Fair enough.

@Genjones:
Well, I know for some bats the males actually do breastfeed as well. Not sure how widespread it is across the mammalian family, but as you say, most of the chemical pathways are there. And there’s a lot more mushy biological middle ground between male and female than most like to admit.

@Jenora Feuer
I know, but hardly anyone remembers the first one happened.

Oh, and get a load of this: Pat Robertson of all people is now denouncing the Alabama law as ‘too extreme”.

When not even the quintessential fundamentalist is willing to support this, you know it’s not going to last long.

Not that John Howard, or that one.

Though I could see the second one producing bonkers crap like this.

Another John Howard was the 18th Century English philanthropist and prison reform advocate. There are various John Howard Societies in Canada dedicated to helping to improve the prison system.

@ that’s a Moray

Yes: I felt there was something unduly skewed about this, and then I spotted it: he’s not using the word “rights” right.

@Jenora Feuer

Well, I’m not sure about other mammal or primate species, but I know it’s certainly true of humans. There are entire tribal cultures where it’s the norm for fathers to share equally in breastfeeding. The practice was adopted as part of the hippie co-parenting movement in the 70’s. The concept of co-pregnancy or couvade as a part of small group evolutionary strategy has some merit. A pregnant woman’s pheromones can also increase prolactin and suppress the menstrual cycle of other cohabiting women. Men are more likely to experience corresponding breast growth and spontaneous lactation with lower income and higher cortisol, speculated to be a compensation for stressors to invest in the baby by making sure it has more stable nutritional resources. Fathers can very easily achieve lactation with intentional stimulation, as the 70’s movement proved. They are simply not encouraged to in our society.

I think its fascinating that we’ve managed to gaslight ourselves as a society to believe that body parts are just vestigial decoration, that even though an estimated 80-90% of expectant fathers experience body changes with their partner (aka, “dad-bod”), it is considered a syndrome that goes against the natural order.
It really is an excellent example of how engrained gender roles and conditioning are, that what we accept as immutable biological fact can be subjective and political.

@WWTH

Also, credit to @ohnoshetwint for this one, instead of saying “mother earth” we should call it “unborn baby earth” so that conservatives will have no choice but to protect it.

Conversely, let’s rename AR-15s to “Unwed Welfare Mom-15s” and then conservatives will finally be forced to regulate them.