On the Punishment Of Women

You may have heard about the opinions of one Bob Marshall in the new campaign to kill Planned Parenthood. Marshall argues that all first-born children belong to God and that women who have abortions are later punished for that with more disabled children. Marshall later argues that he did not say that but something about Mother Nature punishing women instead.

Well, you can now judge for yourself what he said:





It's hard for me not to see this or the Nicaraguan case (where a woman with metastatic cancer is left without treatment because she is pregnant) as two different cases of the odd fundamentalist need to see women punished for having sex. Or perhaps just for being women who have all those goodies the church wants to rule over? It must be enraging to find that women can control fertility when it is such an important aspect of the religious fight for global domination.

Last night I happened to read John Donne's The Curse. It begins:

Whoever guesses, thinks, or dreams, he knows
Who is my mistress, wither by this curse;
Him, only for his purse
May some dull whore to love dispose,
And then yield unto all that are his foes;
May he be scorn'd by one, whom all else scorn,
Forswear to others, what to her he hath sworn,
With fear of missing, shame of getting, torn.

It goes on in the same cursing vein. Here is the ending:

The venom of all stepdames, gamesters' gall,
What tyrants and their subjects interwish,
What plants, mine, beasts, fowl, fish,
Can contribute, all ill, which all
Prophets or poets spake, and all which shall
Be annex'd in schedules unto this by me,
Fall on that man; For if it be a she
Nature beforehand hath out-cursèd me.

I think this poem belongs to the post but I'm not quite certain why. Perhaps it's because the fundamentalists do want women passive receptacles of everything nature and men impose on them?