"I’ve got two daughters; 9 years old and 6 years old,” Obama said. “I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information.According to the Carpetbagger Report, Sean Hannity, a correspondent for Pat Robertson’s TV show, Hugh Hewitt, and some right-wing blogs are attacking Obama for suggesting that having a baby is “punishment.”
As a pregnant woman (now for the second time), let me school Hannity and Co.: Pregnancy is seriously intense, a takeover of one’s body by an alien being. If you want to be pregnant, it’s a miracle. If you don’t, it’s akin to a nine-month-long rape. And then there’s the child at the end of it. Absolutely, being forced to bear a child unwillingly is a punishment, indeed a life sentence.
Here’s to Obama for seeing this truth and speaking about it. Still, I don’t care for his assumption that getting pregnant as a teenager must be the result of a “mistake.” If he means it would have to result from some error in using birth control, he’s just wrong on the facts. No method of birth control is fail-safe. If he means the mistake was having sex—and given his use of code words about teaching “values and morals” I have to assume that’s what he did mean—I think he’s wrong too, in a deeper way. I don’t see sex as immoral. I see the hatred of the body, and of bodily pleasure, especially of the female body and female pleasure, that underlies most preaching of chastity as a far bigger moral failing than exploring bodily pleasure, even as a teenager. Sure, there are lots of pitfalls to teen sex, high on the list being the risks it poses to girls from misogynist boys, a misogynist culture, and, oh yeah, the difficulty of obtaining birth control and abortion thanks to right-wingers like Hannity and Co.
Fairness to Obama requires noting that he wasn't primarily talking about abortion. He was responding to a question about HIV and sexually transmitted diseases.
1 comment:
Wow, you had a baby and you can flippantly end up calling any baby, "akin to a nine-month-long rape?" Then there's this gem - "there’s 'the'(???) child at the end of it." "The" child? Do you call your child "the?" Or, do you affix some term that might give me some hope you value human babies? I don't get the idea that a child is worth less because he or she was/wasn't wanted. So, a person born as a result of rape is a lesser person? Of lesser value? Do you get your ideas from the Middle Ages or could you be a little more enlightened? Only asking because you seem to think very highly of yourself.
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