Mrs. Q has gifted Ethics Alarms with another trenchant post. I almost framed it in her currently dormant (but still open!) column for Ethics Alarms, but I know Q is a perfectionist, and even though the comments she dashes off put most of us to shame, she would want a column entry to be carefully massaged.
Here is Mrs. Q’s Comment of the Day, in response to this post, and the Roe demise generally:
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“We seek power and equality in society, and then we continually play the victim”.
Agreed. I saw a meme the other day (yes memes are reductionist) that captured a part of this whole debacle. It said something about being able to wear a mask for two years but not being able to wear a condom for 48 seconds.
Aren’t strong women supposed to be able to say ‘no’ to sex with men they don’t want babies with? Aren’t they able to practice self-care by taking care of their bodies during sex? Aren’t they smart enough to know that abortion carries risk and do what is necessary to not put themselves in that situation in the first place?
Apparently not. Apparently it’s men’s fault or the fault of the patriarchy or Trump or Catholics on the Supreme Court. It’s never a woman’s fault for making terrible disembodied choices that end a life.
You can’t be a strong woman if you won’t value yourself enough to stop sleeping with jerks. You can’t be a resilient woman if you refuse to take responsibility for your body before pregnancy (or STI’s). And you can’t be very smart if you deny basic biology in how pregnancies happen.
There is only one reason why I think early term abortion should be legal in this country. Because if its not, we’d see women slitting babies throats in the streets otherwise. According to this Quillette article, 10-15% of babies in history have died from infanticide, almost solely at the mother’s hands.
Essentially, we have to have a slightly less barbaric version of in utero baby killing to mitigate post-birth babies being left outside to die, being suffocated to death, or being killed by other means by their moms. This is what we’ve come to: sanitized murder of the most vulnerable of all humans because too many pregnant mothers will kill them after they are born.
You can call this women’s rights. I call it taxpayer-funded blood thirst by those who refuse to be accountable for their actions.
Ethics Alarms 
Ah. Yes. This is 100%. I shared a quote that basically said the same thing. Here’s the quote:
“Ladies. Definitely boycott sex with men who won’t marry you and start a family.”
Here are two responses that I got.
“Are you insinuating that married men are honest men? How are you interpreting this post, plainly.”
“Aren’t the men responsible for keeping themselves honest? Why is that a woman’s responsibility? (I went to law school with this person)
I felt dejected.
OUTSTANDING Mrs. Q!!!!
My goodness. That’s refreshing. Cue the scene from “Moonstruck:” https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=moonstruck+snap+out+of+it&view=detail&mid=5367934B8502525C48DD5367934B8502525C48DD&FORM=VIRE
Why don’t all these women flash their “Keep Your Hands Off My Body” signs at the slugs who are getting them into bed? While they’re doing so!
Excellent comment, Mrs. Q.
I think what most women want is equality in irresponsibility with men. They think men can just sleep around without worrying about impregnating women, so women should be able to kill their unborn children to make all that casual sex equal.
Otherwise, what are they fighting for? If a woman is responsible for herself, it’s almost impossible to become pregnant without either wanting to or being so reckless as to make it inevitable absent some kind of sexual assault. As you correctly point out, it is a simple biological fact that women carry the burden of carrying a fetus to term and giving birth. It is also a fact that women bear the inconvenience of monthly menstrual cycles once they achieve puberty. These things may not be “fair,” but they are facts of biology that humanity has had to deal with since the dawn of human history.
Demanding a license to kill children, born or unborn, is destructive to society, especially in the name of… what? Equality? Convenience? What possible justification other than those exists? No matter what you think of religion, neither of those justifications seem morally defensible to me.
Your point about women killing their children after birth is just another sad commentary on how selfish and amoral people can be. I would accept your solution if I thought it would significantly reduce such murders, but I doubt it would make much difference, and as you say, allowing such abortions would be little more than a taxpayer-funded price in blood for irresponsible behavior. Perhaps it would be better just to imprison the murderers.
Equality in irresponsibility. I like that.
Some really good news today: The Court held CO2, you know, that naturally occurring, inert substance, is not a pollutant subject to regulation by the EPA and that psychotic woman Gina Murphy or wooden head John Kerry. We can all breathe a little easier. Literally.
Naturally occurring substances can be harmful. A mazuku occurs when a huge pocket of carbon dioxide rises to Earth’s surface from underground (sometimes from under a lake) and suffocates all animal life in the area, including humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazuku
Insofar as I can understand the majority opinion, it seems the Court wasn’t saying that carbon dioxide cannot be regulated, but that doing so goes beyond the jurisdiction of the EPA and is the responsibility of Congress. As a concern regarding the separation of government powers, that sounds reasonable to me. It does make a certain amount of sense that the EPA could only regulate unnatural substances and not levels of natural substances. That said, however much I trust the EPA to make responsible decisions about carbon dioxide levels, I trust Congress less. We’ll have to work on creating a legislature we can trust to make responsible laws.
Isn’t that the problem with the administrative state? How much control does Congress have over the EPA, the IRS, the FED, etc.?
jvb
“We’ll have to work on creating a legislature we can trust to make responsible laws.”
So true, and yet the realization of that is as elusive as ever.
It is likely a case that when Congress passed the Environmental Protection Act, it gave the EPA authority to regulate “pollution”, but defined pollution in a manner that precluded carbon dioxide. Saying Congress “has jurisdiction” only means that Congress would need to amend the law to allow regulation of CO2, not that Congress itself would be expected to research and develop the minutia of CO2 policy.
Yes. The decision is an attempt to rein in administrative overreach, which is a colossal problem in our current government of, by and for the experts.
Actually, as far as I can tell, they didn’t even preclude regulation of CO2. They said the EPA can’t force them to switch generation methods, and was only allowed to set target emissions standards and technologies to use to meet them.
Aws always, Ms. Q, happy to see a comment from you. Your comments always demonstrate your ability to THINK. This trait is, apparently, missing in some people.
Damn. On fire as always, Mrs. Q…
Self-anointed strong, independent Lefty women have this, if you’ll forgive me, d!cked; just ask ’em.
They’re merely looking out for/trying to reach the ones who are incapable of conducting themselves in a…um…civilized manner…which is to say…too helpless to make the right choices.
Well done Mrs. Q. Some days ago I wrote about the facade of abortion being a bodily autonomy issue that undergirds the theory of a women’s right to choose.
I stated outright that third parties created and nurtured this belief for their own beneficial interests. Not a few days later Janet Yellen testified that limiting abortion would adversely affect the economy. Numerous multinational corporations are now offering to pay employee’s expenses to travel to places that are less restrictive.
It seems to me that many self interested parties want to keep women in the workforce for economic reasons that do not necessarily benefit women.
In my mind, all those donning Handmaids Tale outfits might want to reconsider exactly who wants put the woman’s uterus under their control.