Nerd is my Gender
What's yours?
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Who Pays For Unintended Pregnancies?
The cost of unintended pregnancies is large, and much of the bill — about $11 billion per year — is ultimately picked up by the government, a new study finds.
So why does that same government keep attacking family planning services?
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The proper attitude to be taken toward the perpetuation of poor types is that which has been attributed to Huxley. “We are sorry for you,” he is reported to have said; “we will do our best for you (and in so doing we elevate ourselves, since mercy blesses him that gives and him that takes), but we deny you the right to parentage. You may live, but you must not propagate.
The Early Days of Eugenics: A Scientific American editorial from 1911 praising the new science of eugenics also hints at the darker side of this philosophy.
This article may have been written 100 years ago, but make no mistake - there are still people today who would apply such a horrid philosophy to the poor, queers, autistics, trans peeps, people with disabilities, etc.
Pro-choice means the ability to choose parenthood, even when it is looked down upon.
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The Straw Man of Choice Feminism
Where are all these feminists who defend the “free choice” of the FLDS women to choose the lifestyle they were indoctrinated into? I did a Google search on FLDS, feminism, and choice, and all I found were articles like this (yes, I read through at least 20 of them) of people talking about mythical Choice Feminists who lurve the FLDS. But mysteriously, people who actually support the choice are silent. I’m going to have to call Straw Man on this one.
Which sucks, because I am aware of the reality that people like to hijack feminism and run off in an entirely harmful direction, and I’d like to be informed as to where the real threats are. (Such as, is “sex-positive” burlesque really any different than old-fashioned Playboy Bunnying? My mental jury is still out on that one.)
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Transcript of image of table.
HEADER ROW
Policyls this policy consistent with the belief that abortion is child murder?
ls this policy consistent with the belief that women should face consequences for having sex?
SECOND ROW
Abortion bans which expressly protect the mother from all legal consequences.NO.
No one would endorse a law saying that parents who pay contract killers to murder their four-year—old may in no circumstances be punished.YES.
By cutting off women from abortion, these laws will tend (in theory, at least) to force women who have sex to bear unwanted children.THIRD ROW
Opposing contraception and comprehensive sex education.NO.
Pushing contraception and sex-ed on teens is how countries like Belgium have achieved the lowest abortion rates in the world. No one who genuinely thinks abortion is murder could rationally oppose policies that would save tens of thousands of children from being murdered.YES.
The less teen girls have access to contraception and sex ed, the more likely it is that they will suffer consequences (STDs, pregnancy) for having sex.FOURTH ROW
Abortion bans which provide exceptions for rape and incest.NO.
No one would say that it is acceptable to murder a four-year-old because of the circumstances of the child’s conception.YES.
Exceptions for incest and rape are consistent with a belief in punishing women who have sex; since incest and rape victims are not to blame for having sex, they are exempt from punishment.FIFTH ROW
Banning the intact D&X abortion procedure (sometimes called “partial birth abortion”).NO.
Banning late-term D&X abortions (or any other particular procedure) will not save a single fetal life, since doctors will switch to other procedures.YES.
The other procedures doctors switch to may have a higher risk of injuring the mother, thus making it more likely that she suffers consequences.SIXTH ROW
Advocating less generous welfare for poor single mothers.NO.
According to conservatives, welfare encourages poor women to have children. If one believes that abortion is exactly the same as murder, it should be worth paying for welfare to lower the child murder rate.YES.
By keeping poor single mothers poor, opposing welfare increases the consequences of having sex.SEVENTH ROW
Opposing a vaccine for the human papilloma virus (HPV).N/A
Opposing this vaccine does not support or contradict the belief that abortion is murder.YES
If the vaccine is successfully blocked, nearly 4,000 American women a year, all of whom have chosen to have sex, will die of cervical cancer. Allowing the vaccine would spare them this consequence.EIGHTH ROW
Morally condemning extremists who bomb abortion clinics.NO.
If abortion is exactly the same as murder, then abortion in the U.S. is evil on a scale greater than The Holocaust, and people who bomb abortion clinics should be idolized.NO
If more clinics were blown up, more women might have to face the consequences of having sex.NINTH ROW
Opposing U.S. government funding for the U.N. Population Fund.NO.
The UN Population Fund does not provide abortions, but it is probably the world’s leading provider of birth control and reproductive health education to the third world. Defunding the Population Fund leads to tens of thousands of additional abortions every year. (Contrary to anti-choice claims, the Population Fund does not support forced abortion in China.)YES.
Cutting off funding to the Population Fund makes it more likely that third world women who have sex will suffer consequences such as S’I‘Ds, unwanted childbirth, fistula, and maternal death. -
Banning abortion after 20 weeks
Leads to dangerous and heart-breaking situations like this:
Ms. Deaver, 35, a registered nurse, was pregnant with a daughter in a wanted pregnancy, she said. She and her husband were devastated when her water broke at 22 weeks and her amniotic fluid did not rebuild.
Her doctors said that the lung and limb development of the fetus had stopped, that it had a remote chance of being born alive or able to breathe, and that she faced a chance of serious infection.
In what might have been a routine if painful choice in the past, Ms. Deaver and her husband decided to seek induced labor rather than wait for the fetus to die or emerge. But inducing labor, if it is not to save the life of the fetus, is legally defined as abortion, and doctors and hospital lawyers concluded that the procedure would be illegal under Nebraska’s new law.
After 10 days of frustration and anguish, Ms. Deaver went into labor naturally; the baby died within 15 minutes and Ms. Deaver had to be treated with intravenous antibiotics for an infection that developed.
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Pre-pregnancy diet affects the health of future offspring.
Poor maternal diet before conception can result in offspring with reduced birth weights and increased risk of developing type II diabetes and obesity.
A little while back, someone on Atheist Nexus asked about rights during pregnancy: “Smoking, drinking, serious drugs, whatever else you can think of that could harm the child in utero. Because the baby is going to be a person and anything you do will affect them when they qualify as human does it constitute a crime or child abuse to do things which will damage its cognitive development, or other parts of its development?”
But with this new research, it’s not just pregnant women, it’s any person who could possibly get pregnant ever. Are we going to hijack people’s entire lives and force them to reduce themselves to breeding machines? Tell people their personal choices don’t matter, because they might have a child, and if they do, then they’ve essentially doomed that child to diabetes and obesity? Maybe we should have people produce their proof-of-sterility certificate before they’re allowed to purchase Twinkies.
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Planned Parenthood Saved My Daughter
Planned Parenthood supports the right to choose parenthood. If you were to believe the anti-PP people, you’d think they’re there to pressure you into an abortion. Not so. This woman was being pressured by her husband to abort, and PP saved her and her future child.
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Andy, are you a card-holding homosexual?
Because I have a legitimate question for someone with a better grasp on how homosexuals classify or define homosexuality…and this is after I was (no kidding) in “the gay dorm” in college. It was in a themed college in Northern California - and the dorms were all themed too…and our dorm was the “gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, Jewish” dorm.
So, how do homosexuals account for or classify people that have the urge to experiment and *like* it, but are “primarily straight”? There’s no great way to ask this question - and believe me, I’m one of the most LGBTQIA-friendly folk, but I still don’t know if all homosexuals are literally “born that way”, but I’m curious to know what someone of that orientation feels. Also, and slightly related, Is there any talk about (or truth to) the idea of a kid’s sexuality being “rewired” after some form of abuse? I don’t know if that’s still something people say, or if that was one of those things conservatives said to dismiss homosexuality as a “problem to be fixed.”
Anyway Andy, I appreciate you answering any of that - and if it didn’t make sense, I’m typing from my iPhone, so I literally don’t know how to scroll up and re-read what I wrote without losing it.
The classification of people into identity groups based on their sexual orientations is a recent development in human history as a necessary step toward political organization for rights. It isn’t, however, necessarily based on what’s most useful for people to relate to themselves. The “lifestyle choice vs born this way” debate, then, is also based from that perspective.
What we know about human behavior in all areas is that it’s far more complicated than that. It is useful in certain circumstances to help someone understand “I am not choosing to go to hell, I’m a normal healthy part of the human experience” as a way for them to come to terms with being themselves in a world that hates them. But I will point out that the problem is entirely external - if people would stop being haters, nobody would need to find a “justification” in genetic determinism.
But if someone were born one way, and then experienced a traumatic event (abuse or brain injury or whatever) and became a different way, how then would we come to the conclusion that there is even a problem to be fixed? Because its origins are something distasteful to us? That doesn’t lead us to want to cure Spiderman. Of course not, Spiderman is cool, and even a traumatic origin story doesn’t mean the end result isn’t amazing. That’s how it is with being queer. I’m baffled that people out there would suggest I waste countless hours trying to undo a part of myself that to me is a good thing.
Then we come to the heart of your question: what if we could chose? Granted, that’s still looking at it too simply. There are no such things as “free choices”, because every choice comes with a baggage of all sorts of good or bad consequences. We tend to focus on physical responses in our society: the physical response of being sexually attracted, sexually indifferent, or sexually repulsed by a particular body. But that’s not the only aspect of human sexuality that is significant in defining our choices and experiences. Personality is another: you know those people you just love being around, who make any activity more fun than if you had done it alone. Why not sex? Why not experimentation?
Well, it could be awkward. And there lies the heart of the matter. Awkward because society has wired us to feel that way. And sometimes people hear social training as something that you can just “choose” to undo. And maybe you can, and maybe you can’t. Again, that depends on the baggage of that choice’s consequences. (Go ahead, try to “choose” to walk down the street stark naked in front of an elementary school building, see what sorts of psychological and social trauma you might manage to escape.) It’s what is known philosophically as “compulsory heterosexuality” (this is where you have fun Googling, hint hint).
I’m pansexual. That means I don’t experience attraction along the linear scale ranging from homosexual-bisexual-heterosexual. It’s more like wibbly wobbly sexy wexy feelings all around. That means, I absolutely can have a choice in who I am attracted to and who I am not. Granted, my choice isn’t always the final say in the matter, there are some things I’m genuinely repulsed by (independent of gender or genitalia). I might have difficulty getting it on with someone who is a real jerk, or who thinks they’re a psychic vampire, or who is covered in weird pimples, for example. I am definitely into people who are smart and funny in a pleasant disarming way, and who care about me as a person. But damn, 7 billion people on the planet? Of course I’m making some choices.
tl;dr - You might be labeled “bicurious” or “heteroflexible”. If that sort of thing even matters.
(Source: facebook.com)
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Because I Choose It | Zinnia Jones
Cannot cheer loudly enough in response to this post. I am SO PAST “born this way” vs “lifestyle choice”. I am SO PAST caring whether gender is from the inside-out or from the outside-in. Can I see signs of being non-binary genderqueer from early childhood? Hell yes I can. Did I make a lot of choices that weren’t necessarily do-or-die? Oh yeah. Should either matter as far as people accepting the legitimacy of who I am? Not on my life.
Genderqueer with a touch of happy humanism.
