The Common Ills: Tie your tubes before you enlist . . . or else!

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Tie your tubes before you enlist . . . or else!

Who was Mary MacArthur? She was an "act of God." That was the finding. Helen Hayes was set to do a play and she learned she was pregnant and bowed out of the production and the ruling was "an act of God." It wasn't Hayes' fault, it wasn't the production's fault, it was just one of those things that happen in life.

Today BBC World Service Radio offered a report from Iraq, where US General Anthony Cucolo yammered away about the new development for US service members: If you end up pregnant, you can be court-martialed. [Click here for BBC story online in text form.]

Long gone are the days of "act of God." If you end up pregnant, married or not, and you're in Iraq, you can be court-martialed. For pregnancy.

Of course a man would love the law, it's (a) all about controlling women's bodies and (b) incredibly ignorant. On the latter, it takes a real idiot not to grasp that women don't have sex and, the next minute, know they're pregnant.

A woman might not know until six weeks after. Cucolo thinks he owns women's bodies and makes a big to do about how it deprives him (poor baby) of needed service members. So a woman could arrive in Iraq already pregnant and not even know she was pregnant. SHe could do her jobs for weeks and weeks and never know. If she's of a certain age, a delayed period might have her thinking, it's just "the change." A woman could go a pretty long time not knowing she was pregnant.

Birth conrtol's not 100% effective. That's the pill, that's anything. If a woman wants to have sex, she should be able to have sex. She's a grown woman.

But under Cucolo's Reign Of Pruriency, she's not allowed to have sex. Not with a man she's married to or a stranger she picks up. Having sex puts her at risk -- even with birth control -- of being pregnant.

Again, only a man could have pushed through this bulls**t.

This is control of women's bodies and it's appalling and it's disgusting. But watch people try to justify it.

The men, Cucolo insisted to the BBC, would be 'punished' as well. But not court-martialed. Not sent home to be court-martialed.

Remember The Scarlet Letter? Remember feeling we were long beyond it? Cuculo demonstrates that we aren't. He demonstrates that while he F**KING LIES that he's in Iraq fighting for 'OUR FREEDOMS,' he's RIPPING apart women's rights and women's freedoms.

Abortion needs to stay legal. Abortion needed to be legal because it's a woman's choice, it's a woman's decision and it's no one else's business. When we confuse the issue and we bring the government into it, we risk (this is pro and anti choice people) allowing the government control of our bodies -- allowing them to say yes or no, to deny us abortion or tofrce into having abortions. And the anti-choice crowd better be concerned becuase you better believe if a pregnant woman's being told she'll be drummed out of the military because she's pregnant, it's only a two or three second delay before someone proposes an aobrtion as a 'solution.' (E.g. "Have an abortion and we'll drop the whole issue.") A pregnancy is a woman's business. Not the government's. But the US military has now been allowed to blur that line and this is a very scary development -- whether you are pro-choice (as I am) or anti-choice, this is a very scary development.

At some point, someone's going to grasp that women in the military are now sexless beings. They can't have sex with other women becuase of the military's ban on being openly gay. They can't have sex with men because they might end up pregnant. It's amazing that the same institution that does NOTHING to protect women in the ranks from rape, is more than happy to ensure that any consensual sex risks punishment.

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