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decoupling pregnancy from femininity means more accurate & inclusive language and treatment, but it also allows cis women to refuse motherhood without refusing womanhood, which is great for feminism and terrifying for misogyny
one of the parts of second-wave feminism which fed into TERF-dom was the pessimisstic terror that if men could somehow reproduce without women, then women would be obsolete. ergo women had to maintain complete control of motherhood, and assume we were all consigned to it
the older i get, the more distressed people seem to be about my choice not to have kids—they assume some kind of incapacity, prolonged childishness, misplaced affection for pets etc. there’s still a tacit belief that an adult cis woman is not a true woman unless she’s a mother
true reproductive autonomy also means the choice not to have children—ever. we don’t think anything of childless cis men—it’s irrelevant to their being. but childless cis women are still very much seen as “incomplete,” because our uteruses (uteri?) are supposed to be our destiny
obviously discrimination against women is rooted in notions of our supposedly appropriate reproductive labor but you don’t get out of that tangle by reifying this kind of reproductive labor as *inherently* feminine
anyway! donate to abortion funds abortionfunds.org/funds/
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Sanjukta Paul @sanjuktampaul
·
Jul 5, 2022
Nice thread, and I'd add that plenty abortion rights rhetoric continued to treat motherhood at some point as normative for women. In general I find it odd that destabilizing a rigid gender binary (which isn't necessarily traditional anyway) could be considered bad for feminism.