Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site brl-tgr.ARPA
Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!brl-tgr!matt
From: matt@brl-tgr.ARPA (Matthew Rosenblatt )
Newsgroups: net.abortion
Subject: Re: Human beings
Message-ID: <113@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 23-Jul-85 17:11:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.113
Posted: Tue Jul 23 17:11:04 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 25-Jul-85 06:30:45 EDT
References: <392@cmu-cs-spice.ARPA> <1259@pyuxd.UUCP>
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab
Lines: 66

> If the woman WANTS the fetus to stay there and grow into a child, great!
> If not, who are you to tell her how her body is to be used?

						-- Rich Rosen

Just a minute!  Just a minute!  Who is SHE to determine how her body is to
be used?  In all recorded history (pace Bachofen & his "Mutterrecht"), 
women have had precisely those rights which men have allowed them to have.
Listen to feminist Andrea Dworkin:

	"[Right-wing women] are not dazzled by the promise of abortion
	as choice, as sexual self-determination, as woman's control of
	her own body, because they know that the promise is crap: as 
	long as men have power over women, men will not allow abortion
	or anything else on those terms."

		-- "Right-wing Women" (New York, Perigee, 1983), p. 103

Women in the USA have the right of legal abortion because they were able
to convince six men on the Supreme Court that they deserve it, and because
the cops and judges (mostly men) listen to those six men rather than to the
fifty State legislatures (also mostly men) who did, and would again, have
the cops bust the abortion clinics.  When two of those six men are gone
from the Court, a President who ran for office and gained overwhelming
popular support twice while making no secret of his feelings about abortion
is going to nominate, and a Senate (nearly all men) is going to confirm,
two replacement Justices (men or women).  At that point the Supreme Court
(still overwhelmingly male) is going to return control over what a pregnant
woman can do with her fetus to those fifty (still mostly male) State legis-
latures, most of whom will promptly send the male cops to close down the
clinics.  

If this happens, women will lose the right to abortion on demand, because
men will take it away from them, just as they now have that right because
men gave it to them.  That is reality:  the men with the guns enforce what
other men establish.  If and when men make abortion illegal again, there
will be what there was 15 years ago, when

	"About 1,000,000 abortions [were] probably performed every year
	in the U.S., although some sa[id] as many as 2,000,000 and others
	sa[id] as few as 200,000."

		-- "Sisterhood is Powerful" (New York, Vintage, 1970), p.258

One million abortions a year is pretty awful, but it's still better than the
1.5 million abortions now being performed legally under the 1973 all-male
Supreme Court's grant of a woman's right to abort her fetus.

Rich Rosen cannot possibly believe that women's right to control their own
bodies is one of those "unalienable rights" that the Declaration of Indepen-
dence claims "they are endowed by their Creator with," because he cannot
prove the existence of any such "Creator."  Does he believe that they have
this right because they seized it from men by force?  Then he has to set
forth the history of that seizure.  Does he believe that they have that
right because of some "natural law"?  Then he has to show why his version
of such a natural law is correct, rather than versions that would have the
woman's right to control her body running a poor third behind the fetus's
right to live off that body for nine months, and the father's right to have
the children he begot born.  

The statement "A woman has the right to control her own body" is a fact
only so long as the men with the power allow it to be.  When they cease
to allow it, then the statement reverts to what it was before 1973, 
merely an opinion.

				-- Matt Rosenblatt