“Some Sadducees came” to Jesus and made a harmful patriarchal assumption about women, also children, “If someone’s brother dies leaving a wife but no child, his brother must take the wife and raise up descendants for his brother.” The harmful patriarchal assumption is that women are controlled by men as property.
Under patriarchy, women are denied human rights and treated as property. This includes patriarchy’s abortion industry. Patriarchs promote abortion as a human right and a “moral imperative” for women (California, Kansas). Feminists, including Sidney Callahan, who, like her early feminist suffragist sisters is Pro-Life, and whose ideas are shared in this essay, know abortion rights are derived from patriarchy and promoted by patriarchy. Patriarchy is based on granting rights only when that life – woman, slave, laborer – is wanted, by the patriarch. Patriarchs routinely classify ‘other’ life – women, slaves, laborers – as unwanted. Patriarchs control the criteria for personhood, for life, primarily for the purpose of denying it to – women, slaves, laborers, unborn,… Thus, within patriarchy, IF the unborn child has rights – akin to a woman, slave, laborer – they have them only if wanted by their owner, in this case, the pregnant woman. When patriarchs claim a woman’s treatment of her unborn child is a woman’s own private business it is in keeping with patriarchs always claiming their treatment of their women, slaves, laborers was their own private business. Feminists have historically rejected the patriarchal value system of judging the value of life and the dehumanized treatment of that life. Feminists have historically promoted a Pro-Life morality. All life, certainly their own and that of children, is of “intrinsic value” in a web of relationships. Feminists promote a powerful woman centered morality, including as it regards a Pro-Life ethic of sex and childbearing. Patriarchs dehumanize women as sex objects and denigrate childbearing as debilitating. Patriarchs assert that it is an injustice that women have to have babies. But of course, “it is an injustice that men cannot.” The unique, life-giving sexual power and pleasure of a woman, her pregnancy, and her childbearing is rarely appreciated and instead oppressed, abused, and violated under patriarchy. The intimate communion women feel with their sex partner, their baby in their womb and at their breast is at least diminished while patriarchy idolizes the male experience which is only orgasm. Orgasm only sexual behavior is also touted when done in masculine, detached and non-committed instances, which patriarch-influenced women are mimicking. Uncommitted sexual intercourse with a variety of partners lacks benefit for women as it has always lacked benefit for men, who do their best to remain free of the harmful value. Such sexual behavior produces anxiety and harm for women but it produces a lucrative business opportunity for patriarchs, especially their Planned Parenthood Federation. Descended from KKK and Nazi affiliated founders, patriarchy’s Planned Parenthood originated in the harmful patriarchal assumption that women’s sexuality and bodies are the problem that must be overcome. Planned Parenthood has thus always targeted women with its birth ‘control’ propaganda. Patriarchy pushes its harmful contraceptives and abortions on women from their early teens onward and is responsible for doing great harm to women’s bodies. It was not in Planned Parenthood’s mind-set nor values, and thus never in its mission to offer vasectomies to men. Nor was it ever a priority of its advertising campaign to ensure every male teen gets a vasectomy. Though they are easier, safer, and reversible. Pro-Choice women and their Planned Parenthood Federation offered a new and improved patriarchal birth control and patriarchal woman control. Pro-Choice ethics maintain life and women as patriarchal property to be controlled and not as human beings to be respected.
Pro-Choice women are like the men questioning Jesus in the Gospel story. They assume women are the property of patriarchs to be harmed as needed. We can be free from patriarchy. Women and men are called to co-create a full web of committed social relationships based on healthy social, financial, and medical systems that respect their sexuality, their wombs, their childbearing, their full health, and their life interests. Pro-Choice women might consider not demanding patriarchy’s abortion rights and instead start co-creating a society of human rights that promotes women’s pro-creative power.
Prayer: Beautiful Spirit, inspire us for life.
Question: How shall we ever be free of patriarchy if we keep mimicking it?
November 06, 2022 Gospel Luke 20:27-38 Thirty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time