dcnovice
Posts: 37282
Joined: 8/2/2006 Status: offline
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FR Part of what makes this all so thorny, I think, is the biological reality that women experience pregnancy and childbirth while men don't. The decision to carry or abort will affect the woman in intimate and lasting ways that the man can't conceive of. Barbara Ehrenreich--journalist, scientist, mother of two--puts it far better than I could: From the point of view of a fetus, pregnancy is no doubt a good deal. But consider it for a moment from the point of view of the pregnant person (if "woman" is too incendiary and feminist a term) and without reference to its potential issue. We are talking baout a nine-month bout of symptoms of varying severity, often includinjg nausea, skin discolorations, extreme bloating and swelling, insomnia, narcolepsy, hair loss, varicoe veins, hemorrhoids, indigestion, and irreversible weight ganin, and culminating in a physiological crisis which is occasionally fatal and almost always excruciatingly painful. If men were equally at risk for this condition--if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go for nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains--then I am certain that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies. Barbara Ehrenreich, "Their Dilemma and Mine" in The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes From a Decade of Greed (HarperPerennial, 1991)
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No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up. JANE WAGNER, THE SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE
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