feminist blogs

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from chapter 21 of Harry Browne’s How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World (1973).

Raising the Child

As early as possible, it’s valuable to establish relationships with your child that are similar to the relationship you have with your lover.

The child should have his own world where he is clearly the sovereign. That means a room of his own that is subject to his control alone. If he doesn’t take care of it, he’ll learn the consequences of that sooner or later. But if he’s forced to keep it as his parents wish, he’ll never discover for himself the consequences of alternative courses of action.

He should also have other property to use in whatever way he chooses. Property isn’t owned if it can be used only in approved ways.

You’ll have to decide how he’ll obtain his property. He can earn it, receive an allowance, get outright gifts, or he can receive property in any combination of these ways.

But once he receives something, it’s important that he learn to understand what it means to own something and be responsible for its preservation. He shouldn’t be taught to expect automatic replacement of any of his property that he might destroy.

The importance of his sense of ownership can be seen by observing the difficulties many adults have in dealing with the world. For close to two decades, most people are led to believe that they aren’t sovereign.

Then, suddenly, they’re thrust out into the world, and expected to make far-reaching decisions concerning their lives. It’s no wonder that they have difficulty foreseeing the consequences of their actions and fall back on any authority that appears to be competent to make decisions for them.

I believe the child will be far better equipped to face the world if he understands how the world operates right from the beginning. He can easily learn what it means to make decisions and to experience the consequences of his decisions.

This means, too, that he should be helped to understand that you have your property, also. Show him which areas are off limits to him or require permission before he can use them. Even the dining table he eats on will belong to someone; part of his arrangement with the owner can include table privileges.

Obviously, a two-year-old child won’t have an explicit understanding of these matters. But there are two ways that he can understand them at the earliest possible age. One is that he can learn by example if the entire family operates in this way.

The second way is by never being taught otherwise. For some reason, many parents seem to think it important to change systems at some point in a child’s age. They first teach him he has no authority over his life, and then try later to instill a sense of responsibility in him. In the same way, they first want him to believe that Santa Claus loves and rewards him and then later want him to understand that it’s the parents who love him. I think it would make a considerable difference if the child were never taught anything that you intend to reverse later.

It’s important that each of the three of you be a separate human being with his own life, his own interests, and his own property. None of you is living for the benefit of the others; rather, each should be there because he wants to be. And each will want to be there if it’s a setting where he can live a meaningful life of his own choosing.

It obviously isn’t necessary that each member of the family own his own washing machine, stove, and living-room furniture; nor is it necessary for permission to be requested every time a non-owner wants to use something. Various things can be made available to other members of the household on a till further notice basis. But the ultimate ownership should never be in doubt.

If these principles don’t seem attractive to you, it may be because you’ve never been married. You may never have seen the hundreds of insignificant joint decisions that preoccupy most married people.

I’ve never known a family who used these principles who didn’t find them a great relief and advantage over normal ways of handling such matters.

A Sovereign Child

If you want your child to understand that he lives in a world in which his future will be of his own making, encourage that by letting him deal directly with the world as much as possible. Let him experience the consequences of his own actions.

Naturally, you don’t intend to let him discover first hand a very dangerous consequence of something he wants to do. But it’s important to deciade in advance where you will draw the line. How far will you let him go in making his own decisions? Don’t leave it to decide each time the matter arises. Have a clearly defined policy in advance that will prevent inconsistencies.

Be available to let him know your opinions—without implying that your opinions are binding on him. Let him think of you as a wiser, more experienced person—but not as a moral authority who stands in the way of his living his own life.

Be a source of information and opinion concerning the consequences of acts. Let him learn that the nature of the world he lives in (not the attitudes of people bigger and smarter than he is) sets the limits on what he can and cannot do in the world.

If you recognize him as an individual who is allowed to learn for himself, a genuine friendship can develop between you. He’ll be willing to talk to you about his ideas, plans, and problems—because he won’t have to fear the moral retribution that most parents inflict when they disagree with their children’s ideas and actions.

Parents who fear letting their children make decisions fail to realize that their children do make decisions on their own. You can’t possibly control all your child’s actions. So the best security you can have comes from two conditions: (1) allowing the child to learn as early as possible that his actions have consequences to him; and (2) developing a friendship that will make it possible for him to come to you when he needs help.

If either of these conditions is missing, you shouldn’t be surprised if you find out about crises only after they’ve happened. A child who knows that acts have consequences and who knows that he has a wise friend will be more likely to consult his friend before risking something dangerous.

Love and understanding are important to a child. And you’ll show your love more by respecting his individuality and appreciating him for what he is, not for what you force him to be.

—Harry Browne (1973), How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, pp. 240–243

Yesterday our government warned us about eating sausage and biscuits, today we learn from our trustworthy government that chickens have also been fed the contaminated feed containing melamine. Melamine is a chemical used in plastics and fertilizer. An estimated 30 broiler poultry farms and eight breeder poultry farms in Indiana received contaminated feed in early February and fed it to

Seems that more and more school systems are incorporating Dance Dance Revolution into their phys ed programs.

What’s amusing about this is that the gym teachers are surprised that kids today don’t enjoy team sports:

Children don’t often yell in excitement when they are let into class, but as the doors opened to the upper level of the gym at South Middle School here one recent Monday, the assembled students let out a chorus of shrieks.

In they rushed, past the Ping-Pong table, past the balance beams and the wrestling mats stacked unused. They sprinted past the ghosts of Gym Class Past toward two TV sets looming over square plastic mats on the floor. In less than a minute a dozen seventh graders were dancing in furiously kinetic union to the thumps of a techno song called “Speed Over Beethoven.”

Bill Hines, a physical education teacher at the school for 27 years, shook his head a little, smiled and said, “I’ll tell you one thing: they don’t run in here like that for basketball.”

I submit that most team sports, particularly as they’re practiced in gym class, enforce a hierarchy and instill bad feelings. I can remember being picked last for every team in junior high except basketball, where I was always team captain simply because of my height. But whether or not I was picked last or did the picking, seems like whoever lost was in a very bad mood.

Not that I’m saying team sports are bad or anything; just that they’re not the best model for gym class all the damn time. And maybe finding a way for kids to move their bodies in a way that’s fun and that they enjoy will help them with lifelong fitness.

Just saying.

This is just fucked:

A 17-year-old girl who is four months pregnant and whose child cannot survive outside the womb has gone to the High Court to challenge a decision by the Health Service Executive to stop her leaving the State for an abortion.

The girl is in the care of the HSE and is challenging its decision to contact gardaí and not to let her travel for the abortion unless she presented as a suicide risk.

After hearing this news, the girl made a decision to travel to the UK for a termination but the HSE asked gardaí not to permit her to leave the jurisdiction.

So this girl will literally be held by the police (gardaí ) if she tries to leave. It's sickening. She's challenging the ruling in court tomorrow; our thoughts are with her.

The so-called DC Madam's list of clients includes "a Bush administration economist, the head of a conservative think tank, a prominent CEO, several lobbyists and a handful of military officials," teases The Blotter over at ABC News. Earlier today Jeane Palfrey told reporters that “she does not know how many people will be outed by ABC, which is planning to air a report Friday on its ‘20/20′

Paul Krugman (behind the firewall) talks about the high profits today:

Last fall Edward Lazear, the Bush administration's top economist, explained that what's good for corporations is good for America. "Profits," he declared, "provide the incentive for physical capital investment, and physical capital growth contributes to productivity growth. Thus profits are important not only for investors but also for the workers who benefit from the growth in productivity."

In other words, ask not for whom the closing bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Unfortunately, these days none of what Mr. Lazear said seems to be true. In the Bush years high profits haven't led to high investment, and rising productivity hasn't led to rising wages.

The second of those two disconnects has gotten a lot of attention because of its political consequences. The administration and its allies whine that they aren't getting credit for a great economy, but because wages have been stagnant — the median worker's earnings, adjusted for inflation, haven't gone up at all since the current economic expansion began in 2001 — the economy feels anything but great to most Americans.

Less attention, however, has been given to the first disconnect: the failure of high profits to produce an investment boom.

Since President Bush took office, the combination of rising productivity and stagnant wages — workers are producing more, but they aren't getting paid more — has led to a veritable profit gusher, with corporate profits more than doubling since 2000. Last year, profits as a share of national income were at the highest level ever recorded.

Krugman then asks what happened to these profits, the ones which were supposed to be invested to give all those workers new jobs and higher wages. It could be just lack of confidence in the economy in general, given what is happening to the housing bubble of the recent years (it is bursting). But he also suggests another theory:

But as Floyd Norris recently reported in The Times, there is a more disturbing possibility. Instead of investing in physical capital, many companies are using profits to buy back their own stock. And cynics suggest that the purpose of these buybacks is to produce a temporary rise in stock prices that increases the value of executives' stock options, even if it's against the long-term interests of investors.

It's not a far-fetched idea. Researchers at the Federal Reserve have found evidence that company decisions about stock buybacks are strongly influenced by "agency conflicts," a genteel term for self-dealing by corporate insiders. In the 1990s that kind of self-dealing often led to excessive investment, which at least left a tangible legacy behind. But today the self-interest of management may be standing in the way of productive investment.

Interesting. Then there is the possibility that the demand sides of various markets are not very strong, given the unchanging earnings of the workers who also happen to make up most of the consumers in the economy.

“Informed consent” laws are all the rage in anti-choice circles these days. They started off with The Script — legally requiring abortion providers to read an often factually incorrect statement to women seeking abortions. The Script varies from state to state, but it generally includes the idea that the fetus is a “unique life,” that abortion can lead to breast cancer (completely proven false), and that abortion has a series of psychological and physical consequences (also totally unsubstantiated). In many states, the woman is required to go home and think about it for a day or two after hearing the script before they have an abortion.

These laws serve a few purposes — to try and scare women out of abortion by telling them that they’re killing their baby and their life will be forever ruined; to make it more difficult to get an abortion (in many states abortion clinics are few and far between, and women drive for hours to get there — making then wait 24 or 48 hours puts up serious roadblocks); and to enshrine paternalism into the law.

The latest “informed consent” move is the ultrasound. Women are apparently to dumb to know that they’re carrying a fetus, and so they must be shown a picture to “fully inform” them. When pro-choicers object on the grounds that required ultrasounds are coercive, medically unnecessary and condescending, we’re told that we’re hypocrites — after all, don’t women have a right to know?

Well, fine. If we’re going to treat women like stupid children when it comes to medical decisions about reproduction, then let’s go whole hog. Whenever a woman decides to give birth, we should legally require her doctor to give her the whole list of what could go wrong. We should tell her that her chances of dying in childbirth are about 10 times greater than her chances of dying because of an abortion (and because the “pro-lifers” leave out information about just how seldom death from abortion occurs, I see no reason why we should tell pregnant women that death in childbirth really isn’t all that common). We should tell her that she’s much more likely to experience depression and other mental illness after giving birth than she is after abortion. We should tell her that adoption also includes a significant risk of depression. We should tell her that motherhood will significantly decrease her wages. We should make sure that she’s really informed about what childbirth entails — since anti-choice activists like pretty pictures so much, we should make her watch a video of a woman giving birth. And a video of a C-section. And we should be sure to include the important details — like the fact that the little piece of skin between your vagina and your anus might very well rip through during birth, if the doctor doesn’t cut it to allow more room for the baby to exit. We should make sure that women know that kids are expensive — and raising kids is probably the most expensive thing you’ll ever do. We’re talking a quarter of a million dollars — and that’s only until the kid is 17. Better hope Junior doesn’t want to go to college.

Women have a right to know, right?

I have a feeling that if we proposed a law which would require doctors to read that script and show a birthing video to all pregnant women, anti- and pro-choicers alike would not be happy. So why the special treatment for abortion? People like William Saletan may argue that abortion is a Monumental Choice and it is Very Important that women know what they’re getting into beforehand (even if it’s a pack of lies). Fine. But since when is having a kid a walk in the damn park? If women are too dumb to know that they’re pregnant with a fetus, shouldn’t we assume that they’re too dumb to know what childbirth and childrearing (or adoption) entail? Child-rearing, unlike abortion, is generally a life-long commitment, and almost always has more substantial effects on women’s lives than terminating a pregnancy (physically, emotionally and financially). How are we talking about approving coercive laws for the Monumental Choice of abortion and not discussing the fact that pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing are a hell of a lot more Monumental?

Obviously I’m not in favor of treating pregnant women like idiots. But if we think that women are so intellectually inferior that we must be read a script and shown a picture before we can terminate a pregnancy, then we sure as hell should require women to be read a script and shown a picture before we can carry a pregnancy to term and have a child. I look forward to the “pro-family” groups — who are, you know, so pro-family — proposing this law, which will ensure that women know what they’re getting into when it comes to birth and motherhood. Because we value motherhood, right?

Don’t get mad at me — it’s just informed consent. Don’t women deserve to know?

It’s a well-known fact (at least, to Slate’s William Saletan) that pregnant women who seek abortions actually have no idea what abortions are. http://feministing.com/movabletype/mt.cgi?__mode=view&ping_errors=1&_type=entry&id=6950&blog_id=2&saved_changes=1 Let alone what a fetus is.

Enter Saletan’s Rules for Girls. Cleverly disguised as an article about the increasing popularity of ultrasound bills among the anti-choice sect, Saletan’s article is more like a manifesto about why us absent-minded gals need laws (and men like him) to remind us what happens in a pregnant uterus.

Critics complain that these bills seek to "bias," "coerce," and "guilt-trip" women. Come on. Women aren't too weak to face the truth. If you don't want to look at the video, you don't have to. But you should look at it, and so should the guy who got you pregnant, because the decision you're about to make is as grave as it gets.

…The image on the monitor may look like a blob, a baby, or neither. It certainly won't follow some senator's script. All it will show you is the truth.

Because obviously women who have made the decision to end a pregnancy won’t understand the “truth” unless it’s put up on an easy-viewing screen. As Amanda so aptly noted in an email exchange: "If women only knew that they were getting abortions when they got abortions!!!!!"

You can’t get much more repulsive than Saletan’s rhetoric. He claims to “trust women” while simultaneously making the case that women don’t understand what they’re doing when they get abortions; that we’re incapable of making an informed decision without a helping hand from the state.

My favorite line in this mess of an article, though, has to be this: “Ultrasound has exposed the life in the womb to those of us who didn't want to see what abortion kills. The fetus is squirming, and so are we.” Are we, now?

Also see a bird and a bottle, Lawyers, Guns and Money, Echidne and Newscat.

William Saletan is an abortion expert and a centrist one, too. This means that what he writes on the issue will be taken seriously. More seriously than the rantings and ravings of feminists who are also women, I suspect.

Today Saletan has written about the idea that women contemplating getting an abortion should be made to watch an ultrasound of the fetus. This is something pro-lifers advocate because it is intended to make the women suddenly realize that it is a fetus they have in their wombs, not an aquarium fish! Wow. Saletan likes the idea, because it opens up the aquarium to the general public. He begins by noting that the recent SCOTUS ban on the so-called partial birth abortion relied partly on the method having part of the fetus outside the uterus, and he points out that this distinction is immaterial:

In other words, it's rational and constitutional to ban abortions based on how they look, not what they are. Inside the womb, a fetus bears just as much similarity to an infant as it does outside. But killing the fetus inside is OK, because the public won't perceive and be "coarsened" by what's being done.

That's a pretty cynical distinction. It's hard to accept if you see abortion as a woman's right. But it's even harder to accept if you see abortion as the taking of a human life. That's one reason why pro-lifers are turning their attention from partial-birth abortion to ultrasound, from the fetus outside the body to the fetus within. They're trying to open, in their words, a "window to the womb."

Pro-lifers are often caricatured as stupid creationists who just want to put women back in their place. Science and free inquiry are supposed to help them get over their "love affair with the fetus." But science hasn't cooperated. Ultrasound has exposed the life in the womb to those of us who didn't want to see what abortion kills. The fetus is squirming, and so are we.

Actually, what the ultrasound would show in the case of the most common early abortions is a minute dot, I suspect. But that is not what is odd about Saletan's piece. The oddness comes from the way he writes as a spectator of these horrid events, but a spectator who demands even more access to his viewing experiences and some respect for his expert knowledge of the sport he is watching. William doesn't have an aquarium but he knows a lot about its upkeep.