Wait a minute: hasn't the patriarchy always controlled women's reproduction, and feminism was a response for that?
Is this an Orwellian manipulation of history or what?
And have you noted how this campaign equates abortion with choice?
From the About page:
The 4000 Years for Choice project seeks to create new icons, symbols, and images about reproductive choice.
Look folks, no matter how many icons, symbols and images you create, they will ALWAYS be superimposed on the image of a dead fetus. Because that's always the result. So no matter what kind of symbols of "empowerment" are created, they are always created against the backdrop of death and destruction. There's no evading it. Abortion means death.
Since the days of Roe v Wade, the pro-choice movement has presented images of feminists, coat hangers, and dead women to represent reproductive rights. Now is the time for a broader and more dynamic visual campaign!
Images of dead women? Really? Haven't seen too many of those. If anything, they tend to be abstract statistics. The person who has the goods on women who died from abortion is pro-lifer Christina Dunigan from Real Choice.
2. Teach history! This project reframes the current abortion debate through a new lens: the ancient traditions of abortion and contraception from the past 4000 years. Most people believe that reproductive control is recent “invention” or “idea” that developed as a result of the feminist movement, political rights, or medical technology, and therefore, must be “defended” or we will return to the days of “back ally abortions.” Rather, reproductive control is inherent to all human societies and a fundamental human desire.
But "reproductive control" by women IS a recent idea!
And that's why feminists revolted.
I mean are these women so bloody dead to history that they don't know? The patriarchy has exploited women for millennia, and always had the upper hand, and that's why feminism emerged (among other reasons).
Look, pointing to some witch's brew or some Greek medical textbook does not prove that the ideology of "choice" has existed for the last 4000 years. It proves that ABORTION has always existed (which no one denies). Female power? No, sorry. Has not always existed. In fact, if it was ever exercised, it was in isolated cases; it was not a social phenomenon.
If it's always existed, what did feminists revolt against?
This campaign is so damned laughable.
3. Celebrate clinics! The 4000 Years for Choice project focuses on the most vulnerable spaces in the abortion debate: the clinics in our communities where anti-choice protesters are a daily sight, especially during the 40 Days for Life campaign. 4000 Years for Choice hopes to reclaim clinic spaces in two ways; 1) through a weekly postcard campaign to clinics, and 2) an upcoming grassroots clinic celebration campaign in Summer 2010.
I'm rubbing my hands at this one.
Are they stupid or something? Reclaim the space-- how? With MORE protests. Yeah, just what a potential abortion patient wants. More people crowding her as she enters the clinic.
I propose we counter with a campaign of our own: a baseball-card type postcard collection of all the dirty, horrid clinics that operate or have been closed down in the last ten years. On the front would be a picture of the clinic. On the back: "Vital statistics" about the people who ran it, the women who died there and all the gross health violations.
About the creator, Heather Ault:
She is passionate about creating connections between artists, historians, and the pro-choice community in order to celebrate the ancient traditions of reproductive control we continue to practice today!
Ancient tradition of reproductive control? What an effing crock! How can she call herself a feminist?
I'm a little passionate about this campaign because not only is this an attack on the unborn, it's a manipulation of history, which I hate to the core, having studied it in university. This is propaganda, along the lines of the feminist crap that is typically spewed in universities.
Check out the Timeline. Another ridiculous attempt at manipulating history. For example, here she quotes Plato:
300s BCE – The Greek philosopher Plato commented on population in the Roman Empire. He wrote, “There are many devices available. If too many children are being born, there are measures to check propagation.
Yeah like, exposure. And the decision, of course, belonged to the FATHER.
Here's another blatant attempt at manipulation:
100s – The Didache, an early Christian document, asks two questions concerning abortion: Is abortion being used to conceal the sins of fornication and adultery, and does the fetus have a rational soul from the moment of conception, or does it become an “ensouled human” at a later point?
It doesn't ASK ANYTHING.
It is a series of instructions.
Here's the relevant passage:
you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.
Murder...that is, the taking of a life.
418 – St. Augustine condemned abortion because it broke the connection between sex and procreation. However, in the Enchiridion, he wrote, “But who is not rather disposed to think that unformed fetuses perish like seeds which have not fructified.” He, and most theologians at that time, felt that abortion wasn’t homicide.
So we're supposed to believe St. Augustine based on bad science?
St. Augustine and EVERY SINGLE CHURCH FATHER who wrote on the subject condemned abortion, REGARDLESS of whether the fetus was "formed" or "unformed".
When the science was established that human beings were formed at conception, the Church accepted that science. Too bad feminists don't.
900s – In the Irish Cannons, the penance for having intercourse with a woman was seven years and intercourse with a neighbor woman was nine to fourteen years. However, penance for “destruction of the embryo of a child in the mother’s womb” was three and one half years.
Yeah, there was PENANCE. Woohoo, some celebration of choice there!
This is effing ridiculous. This is their "celebration of choice"? Three years of penance for abortion? Yeehaw, it was a sin, just a lesser one...?
1318 – While St. Thomas Aquinas opposed abortion as a form of contraception and a sin against marriage. However, unless the fetus was “ensouled” at approximately 30 days after conception, it was not a sin because it was not a human being.
Yay choice! Abortion is wrong!
1600s – During slavery in the U.S, many African women were known to take the cottonwood plant as an abortive remedy in order to rebel against their masters and spare their children a life of misery.
Yay choice! Rape and sexual exploitation! Woohoo!
If this doesn't embarrass feminists, I don't know what would. Their ability to harbour contradictory ideas makes me think though that this might catch on. To their detriment. This could possibly be their downfall. In the age of fisking, I don't think this is going to fly.
Update September 28:
Clearly, I was late to the party on this topic. Jill Stanek had already covered it.
When Osumashi made her comment about giving exposure to crackpot, I had had some misgivings about having published blogpost.
However, now that I'm aware that it has reached a wider audience, I'm not sorry at all. Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains has promoted it.
I'm dumbfounded that a feminist organization like PP would eat up this tripe. Part of me thought: this is so stupid, educated feminists would never buy this. Four thousand years of choice!. Claiming the very OPPOSITE of what feminists have been saying for more decades than I've been alive. But part of me thought that it was so pro-abortion, they would eat it up. So here we are. I'm trying to tell feminists how oppressed women really were. For goodness sakes. C'est le monde en envers.
