Monday, March 06, 2006

Belated http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifInternational Women's Day

So I missed International Women's Day & coinciding Blogging Against Sexism Day, so I've just got a couple of links to pass on. I missed yesterday because I was crazy busy with the kick off to our admit weekend (which is going tolerably well thus far).

Twisty's reporting on this story of a man who just won a court battle over whether or not his now infertile-due-to-cancer ex-partner can use their previously fertilized and frozen eggs in order to have a child. Man's decision: throw the embryos away. Court: Yes, Sir! Makes you wonder, as Twisy points out: what would anti-choicers say? (specifically those men in South Dakota who are ooh-ing and ahh-ing over how brutal a rape has to be in order for a woman to be allowed an abortion.) Because if those people sided with the man in this case, I think we can see the blatant sexism. Twisty pulls out this quote, remind us of anything?: “The key thing for me was just to be able to decide when and if I start a family.”

Personally, I think it's just cruel to take your ex-fiance to court and deny her the chance to have her child, just because you've changed your mind. I can sympathize with not wanting one's biological child running about, but this guy doesn't have to carry the embryo or go through labor, and his comment of "starting a family" completely misrepresented the situation. He's not being expected to start a family, or have any emotional ties to the resulting children. The word "family" implies a relationship much beyond and distinct from a biological relationship. It's interesting because he's using the pro-choice rhetoric of "deciding" when to start a family, and yet he doesn't have the same physical relationship to producing a child.

And also:

Pandagon has highlighted another story defending the D&X procedure that seems to have been termed "partial birth abortion" by anti-choicers... Eek:

Nothing more “pro-life” than making a woman walk around with a corpse banging around inside her body, apparently.

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