What is reproductive freedom?

Sometimes I question the right to abortion. I don’t question it out of jealousy or resentment or a desire to keep women ‘in their place’. I question it because I question a societal circumstance that leads women to believe that an instance of pregnancy is a disaster that must be dealt with by obliteration. It bothers me that in a supposedly “civilised” cultural environment, women can still feel that something is wrong with giving birth in itself, that there’s a problem if they happen to be fertile enough to provide some continuation for the human race.

I can’t chalk it all up to the nihilism of middle class+ white women. This is something deeper and more constricting in American and Western European society. This isn’t a thing that can be blamed on women alone, the feeling that their fertility is a fault to be papered over with abortion.

This strange and latently nihilistic undercurrent in those social fabrics makes the question of reproductive freedom a particularly complicated one, because so often in the MSM it is defined as the right to obliterate life and not much else. But there is more to reproduction than restricting one’s reproductive abilities and calling that freedom. There’s also the freedom to bring life into being regardless of circumstance, to not be told you should have been sterilised. There’s the freedom to learn how to prevent conception, and contemplate an approach to sex that isn’t based around male-specific fertility (that is, the idea of continuous fertility).

Most especially, there’s reconfiguring the social structures so that it isn’t a ‘disaster’ when a woman does get pregnant (or when she gets pregnant with certain kinds of fetuses). To me, the idea of reproductive freedom involves eradicating this fear of pregnancy, of embracing the true nature of female fertility (which is yeah, different than male fertility), and mostly of creating a situation where women can start with avoiding conception first so that surgical, hospital-based abortion is the last resort.

Abortion isn’t comfortable or fun, and I believe it can be reduced while still allowing women to choose how they’ll plan their families (or plan not to have them, in those instances). This brings us back to fertility awareness and the desperate need for it to be a primary element of reproductive freedom, not an unspoken, misinformed rumor.

Reproductive freedom to me should be about informing women so totally about their bodies that they don’t have to have abortions most of the time but can instead simply not conceive. I don’t care if some doctors lose money over that. I just hope I and others can find a way to get more accurate information out to the vast array of women who just have almost no information about their bodies. I guess I feel knowledge is freedom, then access.

Vitamin D, black American women, and fibroids

It has been a mystery to the American medical establishment why black American women got fibroids at rates far higher than white American women– some estimates run as high as 70%. It’s also been a mystery why black American men get higher rates of prostate cancer.

It’s the Vitamin D (or lack thereof). Unsurprisingly, the amount of Vitamin D one gets in a multivitamin is formulated for white people, who have far more ability to generate vitamin D in parts of America outside the South, where there’s less sunlight per day. And while many black Americans live in the South, there are plenty not living in the South, some so far north that they can’t make their own vitamin D (and the multivitamins don’t contain enough). Additionally, black Americans are concentrated in urban areas where pollution also affects how much sunlight can get to them to absorb and make vitamin D from.

Vitamin D is the precursor to hormones women and men need to avoid fibroids and some cancers.

There’s a mythos among fibroid sufferers (esp. black American fibroid sufferers) that the reason African women and men don’t get fibroids and prostate cancer at the crazy rates of American blackfolk is because of ‘traditional diets’. No, it’s primarily that African immigrants come from countries where they lived at a latitude to generate enough Vitamin D. Secondarily, it may be that their preferred ethnic diet is heavy in Vitamin D– but there are a lot of African ethnicities that immigrate over, and there is a fair variety in all the different diets.

There is finally starting to be a bit of research done (will update this post with the link as soon as I can find it) grudgingly suggesting that yeah, getting little black American girls vitamin D might help them not have fibroids, which is one way to avoid the disproportionate hysterectomies the medical establishment loves to inflict on black women. Plus, black men might not be dying at 55 from ‘stress’, but from not having enough vitamin D as little boys, putting them at higher risk for various cancers and even high blood pressure– possibly more so than ‘bad diet’ or ‘stress’.

I do think black Americans have more stress exposure in their lives and that it affects the health negatively, but it is quite appalling how ‘stress’ is used as a catchall to avoid investigating root causes (like this vitamin D issue, which involves some very cheap solutions to help people be healthier) when it comes to blackfolk.

Just an increase from 500 IUs of vitamin D per day to 2500-5000 IUs per day could be the key to saving a lot of black American women from unnecessary surgery and outright saving a lot of black American men. It would be bitterly excellent if millions could be helped by something so cheap as a bottle of vitamin D tablets.

Stop calling Prostitution the World’s Oldest Profession

Prostitution (and for that matter, all the rest of sexwork) isn’t the world’s oldest profession. In fact, the winknudge aspect of that whole association is remarkably non-respectful of womens’ ability to get along in the world using something other than sexual service. In the history of the world, women have been valued for far more than how much sex they can provide for cash in hand. The idea that in tiny twenty family villages there was a village hooker is just appalling. In such a tiny economy it doesn’t even make sense to have what is generally considered prostitution.

Prostitution fundamentally requires an at least minimally urban, specialised culture to sustain the idea of a woman having to support herself by having sex with the town’s men. In a foraging group, it’s not worth the trouble. The woman will get fed or get thrown out without having to have sex for the food. The fact that a society has to get pretty advanced to even have a village large enough to support a ‘town whore’ means prostitution is not the oldest profession, not even in jest.

I just get tired of hearing that transactional sexuality is the ‘real’ norm for sexuality– which is the primary underlying subtext in this ever-favored narrative. Women were engaged in plenty of other professions aside from prostitution historically. Which isn’t to say women’s lot has been perfect in the past or anything, just that it’s incredibly misleading to pretend that prostitution is what all women *would* do even if they all do not.

That’s another little implication. Of course, I still hold the oldest profession is murder for hire, and there’s less to dispute there comparatively. Anyway, it’s one of my little triggers, one might say.

A Reminder from Ecclesiastes

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%2011:5;&version=47

“As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything.”

This is the kind of Bible verse cherrypicked by science-worshipping atheists to demonstrate that Christians are inherently opposed to science. Because in that worldview, humanity has magically come to a complete understanding of all bodily processes. Actual science reporting shows otherwise, but that is generally not the thrust of such discussions.

I look at a verse like that and I realise that science is a perfectly fine complement to Christian faith– it illuminates aspects of God’s glory and creation, without usurping His role as Creator. While we as humans can know the processes of fertilisation and pregnancy, we don’t know why some eggs get fertilised and why some don’t. We don’t know why some women can easily get with child, while others cannot even in their late teens and early twenties. We don’t know why most zygotes and embryos never make it to fetal stage.

We can describe what happens when things go well, but science is no help as to why things do not. And I appreciate this little note that we can never truly know, understand, comprehend all that God has made of us and for us and around us. It reminds me that pride is foolish, especially pride in science, which only tells you how little you know the more you study it in any specialised aspect.

Sexwork is not transgressive, but socially normative.

In agreeing to participate in any form of sexwork, one is agreeing to rules and roles that are demarcated by society. They are rules that can be bent a little here and there, but it’s deceptive to claim sexworking is a transgression or flouting of social conventions. Sexwork is part of the social fabric in most post-agricultural societies, and as part of the fabric has rules and mores one is supposed to follow.

I won’t say they are comfortable or pleasant rules, but they are there. The work is many things, but it’s not subversion.

I’ll come back to this detail intermittently. It’s important to remember that true transgression generally doesn’t involve slotting oneself into predefined roles hundreds and thousands of years old.