Christian Feminist or guilty conscience (cut and Paste)

[stilltrucking]

http://www.aish.com/societyWork/science ... Ethics.asp Judaism recognizes psychiatric as well as physical factors in evaluating the potential threat that the fetus poses to the mother. However, the danger posed by the fetus (whether physical or emotional) must be both probable and substantial to justify abortion. The degree of mental illness that must be present to justify termination of a pregnancy is not well established and therefore criteria for permitting abortion in such instances remains controversial.
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The traditional Jewish view of abortion does not fit conveniently into any of the major "camps" in the current American abortion debate. We neither ban abortion completely, nor do we allow indiscriminate abortion "on demand." To gain a clear understanding of when abortion is sanctioned, or even required, and when it is forbidden, requires an appreciation of certain nuances of halacha (Jewish law) which govern the status of the fetus.

The easiest way to conceptualize a fetus in halacha is to imagine it as a full-fledged human being - but not quite. In most circumstances, the fetus is treated like any other "person." Generally, one may not deliberately harm a fetus, and sanctions are placed upon those that purposefully cause a woman to miscarry. However, when its life comes into direct conflict with an already born person, the autonomous person's life takes precedence.
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It follows from this simple approach, that as a general rule, abortion in Judaism is permitted only if there is a direct threat to the life of the mother by carrying the fetus to term or through the act of childbirth. In such a circumstance, the baby is considered tantamount to a rodef, a pursuer after the mother with the intent to kill her.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... rtion.html

I will never forget that black dress
over thirty years ago
a Clinic on K st in DC
She was in black and I was a whiter shade of pale


Jane Roe changed her mind
and the woman on the radio was the first feminist in her dorm
but now she does not want women to have that choice
and I still think a woman should have a choice,
what the hell does a wombless male have to say about it anyway.



Of all the changes taking place or planed by our dear leader, I think the anti-abortion is the one that troubles me the most. Not that I love abortions, the very word appalls me. it is really not my problem, I wont ever have to have one, I dread the thought of what it would mean to women to go back to how it was. Perhaps the pendulum has swung to far, I knew one woman who had six abortions and I don't think she was much older then thirty. It seems a poor method of birth control to me. But life is what happens while we make other plans. I have only been responsible for one aborted baby that I am aware of. It was not a decision she made lightly, probably the one reason that trumped the others was the two children she already had. Reminded me of Sophie's Choice.

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Mourning for the image, insofar as I fail to perform it, makes me anxious; but insofar as I succeed in performing it, makes me sad... Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments.

[url]http://users.rcn.com/laporta.interport/senft.html[/url]
"The room is dark," begins My Womb The Mosh Pit, Sharon Lehner's voice echoing from a microphone somewhere off-stage.11 "I look at the monitor," she says. On cue, the room suddenly floods with light. Computerized grids of female bodies, rendered by digital artist Tina LaPorta, are projected over the walls. Superimposed within those multiple grids is a single sonogram."It takes thirty minutes," Sharon narrates, "to measure and inventory the body parts of this fetus: the arms, the legs, the stomach, the liver, the lungs, the kidneys, the brain." When Sharon confesses, "I find looking at the fetus in my body to be unbelievably pleasurable," I suddenly realize it's her body at which I've been gazing. Momentarily intrigued, I struggle to make out the body parts Sharon tells me are located right in front of my eyes. After a while, however, I realize that if I am supposed to be Sharon in this performance, it's not working.
I hate pregnant women who gush. "After the examination," Sharon gushes, "the technician offers me a few snapshots from the collection stapled to my medical records. I forget about girl names, report to my friends, call my family." "Whatever," I think, wondering instead what kind of 3D modeling technologies LaPorta uses to make the endlessly turning grids on the walls.
"Exactly ten days before I aborted a ten-inch fetus from my body in the company of medical strangers," Sharon's voice booms above my head, "I laughed with wonder at what looked like a naked baby boy." Suddenly, I realize I've been seeing things all wrong: what I thought was some advertisement for fertility is actually a picture of a body that no longer lives, narrated by a woman I can't see. As if to complicate things further, I later find out that the sonogram image I've been staring out isn't from Sharon's body, at all.
My Womb is explicitly feminist, yet resists both liberals and conservatives who equate sonogram images with fetuses, and fetuses with infants. "I bonded with an image, I aborted an image, I grieve an image," Sharon insists, except that the image displayed isn't the image for which she grieves. In a brilliant reversal of the tactics of the religious Right--who champion the "rights of the fetus", thereby erasing and/or interchanging women's bodies--My Womb instead claims a right of motherhood without birth, and uses technology against itself, grieving an anonymous sonogram.