Ob/gyn perspective on abortion...

[ancianita]

31. The 21st Century context of women's hopes and dreams is one thing. For the record I support

that. Doom and gloom are your words.

I consider myself a realist, and a radical feminist since the 70's having studied women's history, both through Marilyn French's world history series on women (the only in-depth and sourced history of women globally in existence), and taking graduate studies in feminist philosophy and law. I was also a single mother for twenty years, living the strengths and limitations of that knowledge.

So where I come with the previous post is this.

For centuries upon centuries, women's hopes and dreams have been mediated in private and public realms by religious dogma (East as well as West) and various versions of rule of law. Behind religion and law has been the essentialist male view of male superiority, spiritually and legally. That's on record.

We're not past any of that yet, for all your claims of gains in the last 100 years.
Religious belief and law still reflect centuries . The reason for male inertia (from home, to statehouse erosions of Roe v Wade) has been the same for centuries, no matter how civilized systems in America treat women. Male inertia is proven legally and socially through unequal pay for equal work and women's forced impoverishment by business policy and practice; the unborn, at state and local levels, having the same rights as women with previous rights to life who try to choose to carry or not carry them; the existence of domestic courts in all 4,000+ U.S. counties that adjudicate both domestic violence and child custody; the FBI's estimated 127,258 rapes reported to law enforcement in 2018 across 50 states; the 200,000+ untested rape kits across 50 states. There's much more, which is, imo, why women out-graduate men from law schools lately.

Why male inertia has been the same for centuries is because, said or unsaid, they choose the essentialist view that domination is superior to adaptation. So they use social tools of domination, win-lose -- mocking, dissing and dismissing. verbal and physical aggression, threatening words and gestures, violence and murder. For every 100 males it only takes one male practice these for the other 99 not to have to, which is enough to convince themselves that they are better than the violent 1 whose behaviors allow them to reap the legal, religious and social privileges they insist they don't have. More often than not, allowing for the growing exceptions.

It's the essentially male belief that Might Makes Right that drives insurrectionists to believe in Rule of Men over Rule of Law. Rule of Men and Might Makes Right are the fascism that undermine Rule of Law.

Obviously I don't know you and you don't know me. So rather than accept your personalizing label, I've given short form (moving from state to state at the moment) on my reasoning. It's realist, not nihilist.