(Covering My Face in Shame)

Over at BlogHer, I wrote a very nice post accepting that a woman can be against legal abortion and still consider herself a feminist, but she cannot be a feminist if she agrees with the rationale behind the latest Supreme Court ruling on abortion. The ruling essentially said that women are idiots who sometimes make decisions that we regret, and thus for our own good, should not have options. If you are willing to agree to this insanity as a means to your end goal (banning legal abortion), you are opening a very scary door into a past in which women were not allowed to do many things because we are silly girls who need to be protected from our own selves. I’m cool with you fighting for your cause (and I’ll fight you right back), but not if you are going to do super crazy shit like say that this line of thinking is acceptable. Find a decent argument.

Anyway, someone posted this in response:

But what about the unborn women? Where is their choice?

Here’s what I so cleverly responded:

As to your argument (which had nothing to do with what I wrote) about whether unborn women have choices, I looked up the definition of "woman" on Merriam Webster and found the following:
1 a : an adult female person b : a woman belonging to a particular category (as by birth, residence, membership, or occupation) -- usually used in combination
2 : WOMANKIND
3 : distinctively feminine nature : WOMANLINESS
4 : a woman who is a servant or personal attendant
5 a chiefly dialect : WIFE b : MISTRESS c : GIRLFRIEND 2

The unborn seem to fit none of those descriptions, so it is technically inaccurate to describe them as women. However, even if I do buy into your personal definition of "women," I would argue that my point affects the unborn women as much as actual women. Not only are unborn women actually incapable of making choices, but Kennedy says that even if they were, we should not trust them to do so, so they still have absolutely no choice in the matter of whether they go from unborn women to female babies. Some man will make the determination for them.

Unfortunately, after puffing my chest with pride, I realized that I have been spelling “feminism” wrong in my signature file for months and months. It is something that I regret, and it is lowering my self-esteem. I should probably be banned from spelling bees to protect me from potential future errors.