What women want…to not be women?

Last Saturday was the memorial of Roe v. Wade and a part of Peter Lawler’s recent post touched upon it and its predecessor, Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized birth control:
We need to get over the modern error that the best way to get ourselves happy is to free ourselves from our natures.

Women’s Lib is about liberation from…being WOMEN. Birth control and abortion enable women to divorce themselves from their baby-making equipment. Having unshackled themselves from their feminine natures, they become free-floating individuals. Lawler continues, “We too often, in the name of autonomy, reject as authoritative the guidance nature—our social natures– gives us…But much of what we think we can reject or discard remains real or real enough.”

You can see this premium on Autonomy in Justice Kennedy’s decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, the Supreme Court Case which revisited Roe:

“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”

It can also be found in this exchange between Peter Robinson and Stacey Karp, President of the San Francisco Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW)

Stacy Karp: …Women are not here to be married, to have children, those are not their sole responsibilities and purpose for being.
Peter Robinson: You're pretty interested in metaphysics, too. What are women here for?
Stacy Karp: Whatever they want to be here for.

Of course, if every individual is free to decide what it means to be woman, then that just means the word doesn't really mean anything at all.

Here is Lawler’s take on Kennedy and Karp’s view: “There’s little that’s more hellish than my being stuck with the perception of “pure possibility,” the perception that every door is open to me with no guidance at all concerning which one to choose.”

Tocqueville argued that the power vacuum created by the absence of authority will just be filled by something or someone else because most people will not be able to live unaided. In the 1830’s, the authority was the MAJORITY. Today’s authority can be detected in statements like “Studies show…” or “Experts say…”

The dubious promise of these technological devices is women can be happy without having to be virtuous (chaste, temperate). My hunch is if it liberates anybody, it will be predatorial men. Here is Peter Robinson on the matter: “..the beginning of the period, the 1960's society, if a man got a women pregnant he was expected to marry her and provide for her and the child. Society imposed sanctions of responsibility on the man. Now if a man gets a woman pregnant it's her fault. She should have been on the pill. And she's forced to either have an abortion or to raise the child alone. She falls into poverty. We know that single mothers raising children tend to be in poverty at much higher rates than other sectors of the population."

Looks like women, and men for that matter, will be ‘stuck with virtue’ for the near future.