Carole

At 12:31 AM 8/4/99 EDT, you wrote:
>I hate to break it to you, but being a feminist doesn't mean one has to support the right to kill.

I don't support the right to kill. I do support women's right to control their own reproductive life.

> It amazes me that this seems to be the whole creed of the womens movement.

That is one of the silliest and misinformed statements I have ever heard.

> Where is your effort to ensure that women who
>choose to not kill their children have access to daycare?

I do support women's access to daycare along with many other feminist issues, such as the right of women to live free of violence in many of its forms, the right of women to be educated and to have careers, the right of women to their own autonomy. Why do you assume that I do not support any issues but abortion? Haven't you bothered to read the list of books on my book summaries page? If you had, you would have seen books on a wide variety of topics, only a few of which pertain to women's reproductive lives. You shouldn't jump to conclusions about your opponents, it makes you look as if you have pre-judged your opponent and prejudice is a form of stupidity.

> Where is your
>outcry against the pornography industry that exploits and degrades women and
>is major business in our culture? You aren't really pro-women, you have
>become just a lobby for the abortion industry.
> Shame on you for selling out your sisters.

One of the reasons I support abortion rights for women is because I know that if we loose the right to abortion, our opponents will next try to take our right to birth control from us. In 1965, 8 years before Roe v. Wade, in the case Griwold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court overturned the laws of 17 states that banned access to contraception to married couples. In 1972, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Supreme Court ruled that laws forbidding contraception to single women was unconstitutional. Both cases rested on the privacy of people, the privacy of women, to make their own reproductive choices. You cannot overturn Roe v. Wade without also overturning Griswold v. Connecticut. In other words, you cannot outlaw abortion, especially early stage abortions without also outlawing the most popular forms of contraception.

Although you may or may not support the right for women to have access to contraception, the leaders of your movement certainly want to bar all women from having access to, at a minimum, the most popular and effective forms of contraception - the ones that inhibit the implantation of the fertilized egg in a woman's womb. To them, life begins when the egg permits the sperm to enter and that life should be accorded the same protections as an already been born person. That list includes both the pill and the IUD. More extreme members of the anti-choice movement want to ban all contraception including barrier methods such as the condom and the diaphragm, as well as, non-barrier methods such as spermicidal jellies.

The Catholic Church is officially on record as teaching that the purpose of sex is reproduction and that any sexual acts that involve contraception are great big sins.

Uta Ranke-Heinemann in Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven quotes Bernadine of Siena (d. 1444): "It is better for a woman to have relations in the natural manner with her own father than with her husband in an unnatural manner" and later, "Every time that you came together in such a way that you could not conceive and beget children, it was a sin" page 207. Here "unnatural intercourse" means intercourse using birth control or withdrawal.

If you think that such ideas are limited to medieval Catholic theologians, then how do you explain the following quote, also from Eunuchs, by a distinguished 20th century Catholic theologian? According to Arthur Vermeersch (d. 1936): "If her husband proposes to use a condom during intercourse, the wife is obliged to resist until she is physically overpowered or until she sacrifices "a fair equivalent to life." The wife is obliged to defend herself against her husband as if he were a rapist. She must be prepared to put up with the consequences, namely, "no joy or happiness in the family, breakdown of the marriage, willful desertion, divorce." " page 288

The position of the Catholic church on this issue is important because they are the largest and best-funded organization striving to take away women's control over their reproductive processes.

There is no doubt in my mind that if the radical right succeeds in prohibiting access to abortion for women, they will next try to limit access to birth control for women. And if they succeed at that, they will try to limit access to birth control for men (such as condoms). It is currently almost impossible for women to be permanently sterilized in Catholic hospitals. To the church, it is better for the woman to die in child birth, than to allow her to sin with her husband by having intercourse with him without there being a significant probability that she will eventually become pregnant.

I know. My grandmother died in 1949 because she could not have an abortion. Her fifth child kicked through her womb and the doctors told her that if she became pregnant again, she would die. She was not permitted to either have a tubal litigation or to have a hysterectomy and 14 years later, her sixth pregnancy killed her. The church has not changed its stance on abortion, contraception, or permenant sterilization. If you value access to contraception for yourself and your children, you must support access to abortion because they are founded on the same constitutional protections.

I urge you to learn your own history, women's history, for those who forget their own history are doomed to repeat it.

Sunny

>Carole LaFreniere

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