We are celebrating the 37th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that placed the control over women’s reproductive decisions in the hands of women and their doctors.
Now it seems that a lot of men out there, especially those who believe in faith based misogyny do not think that the most personal of decisions belongs in the hands of those most affected.
As far as I am concerned life does not begin at conception but rather at birth. But let’s say it does. As long as that life can’t not live outside the woman’s body it is not an independent life.
The woman will be responsible for all the care and support of any child born should the father or for that matter the non-biological spouse decide to walk away. Child support payments are all too often a joke.
This was true a hundred and fifty years ago when the Suffrage Movement was active and it is true today. But choice and trusting women should extend far beyond abortion access that is both safe and easily available.
Trusting women means offering advice with the understanding that an individual woman may weigh that advice and reject it. It doesn’t mean guilt tripping her if she chooses a different path from the one you may think is the correct path.
As a woman born transsexual I too have experience people guilt tripping me for taking the path I have take. Some feminists seem wedded to the idea that my body and life are not my own, that I owe my being to an ideology that would have required me to not change my sex but rather to fight sex or gender oppression by “transgressing gender”. In essence this is not trusting me to determine what I wish to do with my life and demanding the same sort of enslavement to an ideology as the denial of any other form of control over one’s reproductivity.
At the heart of the abortion and by extension birth control debate for they are in fact one and the same is the right to control one’s own sexuality, something that goes to the heart of the questions of freedom and autonomy. It is the right to say what happens to my own body and not the right to impose my beliefs upon the bodies of others.
Just as no one has the right to demand sex with out consent no one should have the right to proscribe matters such as abortion, birth control, sterilization or sex reassignment surgery.
The idea of personal freedom as long as one does not harm others is challenged by the anti-abortion people and the anti-SRS people alike, often the groups putting forth that challenge are one and the same and most often they claim the authority to do so based on some sort of mysterious voice emanating from some invisible and undetectable being in the sky who coincidentally belives in male supremacy, rich elites and the hatred of LGBT/T people.
Street by street, block by block, organized by city ward, PrayforNewark’s squads of church members are walking their city, praying for residents and businesses… its leaders claim their effort now fields enough volunteers to pray for almost every street in the New Jersey city… the effort is directly tied to an international movement that, as detailed in my new video documentary Transforming Uganda, played a significant role in organizing and inspiring Ugandan politicians who have backed the internationally notorious “kill the gays” bill, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill currently before Uganda’s parliament.
Women Born Transsexual 