Social Conservatives Step Up Efforts to Shame You Over How You Perform Womanhood
Two pieces from the anti-choice hub LifeNews over the past week tell us oh so much about the gender politics of that movement right now: that women should be willing to sacrifice everything, up to and including their lives, to satisfy their ideal of how women should be.
The first, which hits close to home because it’s about me, was graciously brought to my attention by friends on Facebook who were cackling witchily about it. The article, titled “Feminist Writer: ‘I Don’t Particularly Like Babies, If Birth Control Fails I’m Having an Abortion,’” quotes large chunks of a blog post I wrote last year at Raw Story in defense of women who get abortions simply because they don’t want to give birth right now.
Using myself as an example and shoring it up with some cheeky language, I’d argued that women should not feel obliged to give in to conservative guilt-tripping about how we should curtail our own happiness to fit their notion of a “model” woman. The idea that women should have that level of autonomy is treated as so self-evidently evil at LifeNews that the site simply quotes me, at length, and expects its audiences to be horrified.
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