The Femitist

The Men Behind The War On Women

This video talks about the religious men who are behind the war on women including denying access to reproductive health, contraception, abortion and in some cases even vasectomy in married men who don’t want to impregnate their wives.

We constantly hear about the “Big 4” issues in American Politics - gay marriage, reproductive rights, environmentalism and “intelligent” design - but lately abortion has been at the top of the agenda for the religious right. In Mississippi they went as far as trying to pass a bill considering a fertilized egg a legal person which, in essence, would ban most forms of contraception and ban abortion even if it means death to a mother.

Fortunately this bill was voted down in Mississippi but it doesn’t change that fact that the “right” is more concerned with their war on women than any other issue in American politics. According to the article The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles by Emily Martin:

The stereotypical imagery might also encourage people to imagine that what results from the interaction of egg and sperm-a fertilized egg-is the result of deliberate “human” action at the cellular level. Whatever the intentions of the human couple, in this microscopic “culture” a cellular “bride” (or femme fatale) and a cellular “groom”  (her victim) make a  cellular baby. Rosalind Petchesky points out that through visual representations such as sonograms, we are given “images of younger and younger, and tinier and tinier, fetuses being ‘saved.’  ” This leads to “the point of visibility being ‘pushed back’ indefinitely.”Endowing egg and sperm with intentional action, a key aspect of personhood in our culture, lays the foundation for the point of viability being pushed back to the moment of fertilization. This will likely lead to greater acceptance of technological developments and new forms of scrutiny and manipulation, for  the benefit of these inner “persons”: court-ordered restrictions on a pregnant woman’s activities in order to protect her fetus, fetal surgery, amniocentesis, and rescinding of abortion rights, to name but a few examples.” 

Like many other things in science, Emily Martin points out the sexist vocabulary and metaphors associated with human sexuality in science. This area of science is, in my opinion, one of the least objective parts because so many entities are involved including the Church, government, political interests and scientists with their own agendas.

Every year Americans fight back more and more against the War on Women but every year we continue to have the Church throwing lots of money at legislation to limit women’s reproductive rights. I feel that the best solution to this problem would be to begin educating children about their bodies from a young age and fighting harder than ever to keep the religious right out of our secular government.

To quote Rachel Maddow, the tea party wants “government so small that it can fit inside of every woman’s uterus”. This has to stop. Education is the key.