Friday, May 30, 2008

Reproductive Exploitation/ Predator and Prey

I am so very disenchanted with the women's equality movement. I was all for the ERA, went to local NOW meetings and considered myself quite the feminist. Of course, I was also in deep denial of my adoption loss grief, buried anger and pain.

When I reunited and started becoming really, genuinely educated about what had happened to me and millions of other women, I wondered where the feminists stood on this issue. I certainly had never heard it addressed in all the meetings I attended or spoken about at demonstrations.

As the years progressed, I saw some of my activist sisters who were a bit further along in the justice for moms and natural family preservation arenas apply to NOW and the movement for recognition and support. It never came and the reason was bitingly evident. Many of these women who purported to stand for the rights of all women were adopters. They were able to "have it all" by becoming predators who preyed on their more vulnerable sisters, taking their babies as if by right, and calling themselves "mothers."

It has already been established as scientific fact that one of the leading causes of infertility among women is delayed childbearing. As a woman ages, her eggs become less viable and conception is less likely. Building a career, making sure that all the "right" things for a "successful" life were in place, takes precedence over giving birth, and other considerations such as starving oneself to stay thin or becoming obese or smoking, etc, can tilt the balance of the fertility scales even more. Then these women become the object of great social empathy, the poor, barren women and no one sees that it is usually their own damn fault. They are quick enough to blame us, though, for being human, sexual and fertile.

The feminist movement said that a woman could and should have it all, a career, a family, prestige and a comparable paycheck to a man's. Perhaps that is where this attitude of self-entitlement comes from when the little stick they pee on in the bathroom keeps showing up as "not pregnant." I wonder if they see it as their due...they worked hard to get where they are, graduated with their degree, got a career, then married the right man, or joined the right political action committees and those who were "careless" enough to get pregnant before doing all these fine things just didn't deserve that baby as much as the infertile feminist. Rather than reaching out to their less affluent, less educated, less successful sisters with help and support, they prey on them like crocodiles on zebras. Rather than filling hungry stomachs like the animal predators, they just fill a crib with a child to whom they are genetic strangers.

I used to call myself a feminist, but now, if a woman cannot be respected for doing the one thing she can do that a man can't, if she is just seen as a brood mare by her sisters, then I don't think I want to be called a feminist. The National Organization for Women does not speak for me or for all the women who still fall into the hungry jaws of the adoption industry to feed the demand for healthy infants. We are disregarded, ignored and used as much by these "champions of the American woman" as we ever were by any man.

The adoption and surrogacy industries are anti-woman, as anti-woman as pornography or prostitution. We are not people but fertile bodies to be used and then kicked to the curb like an empty can.

I'd love to tell the John Birchers and Moral Majority mavens that it isn't political liberals, homosexual rights or "free love" or lack of sufficient religion that is the biggest threat to the family. Plain and simple, it is the failure to respect the bond between mother and child....it is Eugenics with a capital "E." It is self-entitlement and everyone out for themselves and what they want and to Hell with who they have to walk on to get what they want. It is sitting in judgment of a pregnant teen or a poor family with more than two children that is bringing us down. It is elitism and arrogance, and I remember there was a lot of that involved in the fall of Rome.

We no longer have a social conscience. If we did, I don't think that mothers of adoption loss would be so summarily dismissed as unimportant by one of the biggest, most powerful women's groups in the country. As long as women treat other women like convenient incubators, there are no true feminists, just female predators and female prey.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does NOW as an organization have any official stance on adoption?
Feminists have been the only people I have ever heard who point out the exploitation and serious medical risks inherent in surrogacy and egg harvesting.

Marley Greiner said...

I don't think that NOW has an official stand on adoption. When I was still VP of Columbus NOW I got in a snit over National's pimping off Maria Elena Salinas, a Latina TV person who supports safe havens, but giving her one of their fancy-schmancy awards. I blogged an open letter (and sent an email copy) to Kim Gandy, Olga Vines, and the rest of the officers complaining about it and writing up a short history of so-called feminist treatment of mothers. I was not surprised that I didn't get a reply--even though Kim seems to know who I am from when I met her in Nashville.

On the local level, at least here, the NOW people got it when I did ia program on adoptee rights and the treatment of mothers, and were appalled at their national organizations's own history. On the national level, who knows? I few years ago a got a snotty letter from some NOW member in NJ tellng me I should be grateful I wasn't aborted.

There are many types of feminists and huge factions within the movement NOW feminists are middle class, and professional oriented as a rule. They are, to use a term I really dislike, but will use anyway: cultural Marxists. They love the state. They think the government is their best friend. The real feminist movement was always about self-reliance, personal responsibility, and keeping the state out of our lives. First Wave feminists would run away in horrorat what passes for feminism today.

You're still a feminist, Robin The current crop aren't!

Robin said...

I can tell you, Marley, that I KNOW this government is not our friend. It stopped being a government "of the people" a long time ago. Sisterhood is a dream with the self-entitlement of this "crop."

Marley Greiner said...

Mainstream feminism as always been elisitst, classicst and racist. For instance, I remember when lesbians were barred from any meaningful activity within the mainstream movement. Blacks, unless they held some academic or national standing were ignored, and working class women didn't exist. That's why I prefer Women's Liberation over the term feminism, since Women's Liberation was a very different thing. We knew that Roe v Wade was the real end of the reproductive rights movement. It gave the government power where it had none before--and whatever "gain" was gotten, quickly vanished. Women's Liberation was a short-lied truly revolutionary movement. And then it was co-opted by academics, Marxists, and the middle class, I was greatly influenced by the Red Stockings and the libertarian and anarcha-feminist factions.Today nobody know what you're talking about. The snarf at the trough of the state.