Ain’t Bread Until It’s Out of the Oven

I just realized my (male / mostly irrelevant) stance on the abortion debate.

Them: “IT’S A HUMAN LIFE!!! AND YOU CAN’T CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE!!!”

Me: “And, with the same reasoning, this is bread?”

So, I hate to remind folks of basic biology, but if you think the analogy is false, that if the mother “does nothing” then the baby will be born, then you need a reminder that the mother IS the action. I mean… the mother could take no action, i.e. be dead, but at that point you have a zombie carrying a fetus and that’s the subject for a whole swath of horror stories.

There is no “simply maintains”.

A woman is an active part of the birth process, and folks, how could you not know this? It’s a very, very basic part of a pregnancy. The woman is not an incubator, nor any other machine analogue. She’s human all the way down.

There is a reason the old phrase was “bun in the oven” rather than “bun in the breadbox, ready for eating, with some olive oil and maybe a little tapenade”

Oh! Rant time! There’s the old argument of “what if it ends up being a brilliant person?”

Well, hooray for the great soul idea, but what if it’s a genocidal maniac? What if the daddy was a rapist? What if when there is a baby, it’s life would be abjectly horrible?

That’s why leaving it -absolutely- in the hands of the woman is so necessary. She has a bigger stake in it than you. We don’t have to have a “civil conversation” about this. That would be tone policing. We don’t need misogynistic snarks from men who want to argue that it’s not the woman’s responsibility because “she’s not in her right mind.”

There is no better person to fundamentally understand their immediate future than someone who is pregnant.

Why go into this, in depth?

In this case, I was engaged in -another- thread on social media. It had a woman talking about her views about abortion and her support of choice. Resoundingly, men were coming onto her page and “tut-tutting” her, telling her in increasingly civilized tones about how wrong she was about her “murderous views”.

Sometimes there is a time for conversation and sometimes people need to be called out.

I don’t have any easy answers for when that time is, but I certainly am starting to know it when I see it.

And I do know this. At some points, I have to make it clear who I’m allied with and where I stand. I’m more inclined for it to be with the people who will stir up things than those who safely say we should just wear our shackles and stop complaining.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to Top