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Criminalising Pregnant Mothers who Drink

Out of interest do you all discuss this in a private conversation? Because the responses come in twos and threes all at the same time.
 
bluescreen said:
Apologies, Citizen66. I've caught up with some of your earlier posts on here and see where you're coming from. Sorry if I had you down as a Catholic priest. Yes, some people even these days have appalling cultural pressures about pregnancy choices. That is wrong. And some people have no problem about terminating a pregnancy.
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I don't know if you're being sarcastic or genuine here but if the latter then we're close to being able to chat like adults.
 
Citizen66 said:
Out of interest do you all discuss this in a private conversation? Because the responses come in twos and threes all at the same time.
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Can't speak for others, but I experience the same phenomenon of several replies coming at once.

And no - I have never heard of forced abortion in indigenous English communities.
 
We are all on the same side here. I include sas in that. This is a side that needs to be very broad. It's the winning side, too. We are winning this. :)
 
Citizen66 said:
An ex of mine had an abortion (not mine) because she didn't see a future with the father. That was her choice. But she was anything but happy about it. She was distraught. It fucked her up. And I was always left feeling that it was more external than internal factors driving her to that decision. She didn't want to be a single mother etc etc. That clouds my view pretty strongly on this.

I'm not arguing about the right to choose which I've repeatedly made clear. But it isn't all light hearted and sweetness and light that some of you appear to be arguing. On that note, I'm done. :)
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I remember there being a thread on here not that long ago where an awful lot of female posters, including myself, admitted to having abortions and rather than being fucked up over it, the resounding feeling was relief.
Obviously I cannot speak for women over all but that was the main theme on that thread.
 
bluescreen said:
And no - I have never heard of forced abortion in indigenous English communities.
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What did you think I meant by that by the way? I meant family pressure, not by the state. Perhaps 'forced' gives the wrong impression but that's what it boils down to imo.
 
kittyP said:
I remember there being a thread on here not that long ago where an awful lot of female posters, including myself, admitted to having abortions and rather than being fucked up over it, the resounding feeling was relief.
Obviously I cannot speak for women over all but that was the main theme on that thread.
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People have different experiences shocker.
 
Citizen66 said:
What did you think I meant by that by the way? I meant family pressure, not by the state. Perhaps 'forced' gives the wrong impression but that's what it boils down to imo.
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yes, I thought you meant family pressure. As I understand it the pressure came before the family ever got to know about it - the pressure was from not wanting them ever to know.
 
bluescreen said:
yes, I thought you meant family pressure. As I understand it the pressure came before the family ever got to know about it - the pressure was from not wanting them ever to know.
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Which is pressure because of family/society expectations is it not? Hence family pressure. Partner pressure too. More explicitly there and that still exists. Are you making this up just to be contrary?
 
kittyP said:
Well of course.
I just think that I was as shocked as you may have been by just how many women put there hands up and not only admitted to having an abortion but they that didn't feel devastated about it. And actually mainly felt relieved.
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Yeah, I had this realisation a few years ago. I'd thought of abortion as an exceptional thing, then it slowly dawned on me that loads of women I knew had had one. It's not exceptional at all.
 
kittyP said:
Well of course.
I just think that I was as shocked as you may have been by just how many women put there hands up and not only admitted to having an abortion but they that didn't feel devastated about it. And actually mainly felt relieved.
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Why did they feel relieved?
 
Well, you know, families do talk to each other down the generations.

And no, I'm not trying to be difficult. I'm trying to be truthful and fair and sharing my pathetic slice of human experience.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Yeah, I had this realisation a few years ago. I'd thought of abortion as an exceptional thing, then it slowly dawned on me that loads of women I knew had had one. It's not exceptional at all.
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Of course it's exceptional if it evokes relief. Almost as much as if it evokes distress.
 
Citizen66 said:
Are you suggesting, historically, that forced abortions have never taken place?
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Honestly I don't know because I haven't done a large amount of research into historical practices, which is why I was interested in any sources you had.

I am aware of places like this, for example:
Dark secrets of hospital that city pretended didn't exist
From the archive

Monday 30 August 1999




A LIBRARIAN'S research has pieced together the history of one of Glasgow's best kept secrets, the Lock Hospital for ''dangerous females'' with sexually transmitted diseases.

For five years, Mrs Anna Forrest poured in vain over Glasgow's borough records, the city planning office notes, and records of the city's hospitals, before concluding her account of the ''non-existent'' place. The 48-year-old librarian at Glasgow's Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons says she wants to give a voice to those so called dangerous women who were made scapegoats for the spread of venereal diseases, which were as virulent killers as cholera and typhus. ''When I first started looking, I was told that the hospital never existed,'' she said. ''It became a mission to find out more and let the public know what happened to these women and young girls.''

Polite society did not want to know when the proposal to open a VD clinic for females was considered in 1805, a feeling reflected in the lack of documentation about the building. It was called Lock. The name was thought to either derive from the old English word loke, associated with a leper house, or the French loque which was a bandage used for leprosy. Like lepers, those with VD were shunned. Initially, arguments on whether it should be built at all raged between the Glaswegian medical profession, the clergy, and traders of the time. Just as HIV has spread fear and prejudice through society of the late twentieth century, syphilis was seen as a punishment from God. Women were called the carriers and spreaders of disease, but there were no health provisions made for them. Indeed, throughout the 1700s, it was thought finding a cure would only encourage them to go out and sin again.

In 1598, the Glasgow kirk session and town councils of the time had ordered drastic quarantine measures. Men and women who were sick were rounded up in Glasgow Green. They were sent outside the city walls and ordered never to return. As females were considered the carriers, their shame was burned on to their faces with branding irons. There was no medical provision for either sex until 1733, when Glasgow's Town Hospital in Clyde Street was established: but only for the ''deserving poor'', which meant no one with the pox, or VD - or women. The Town Hospital was eventually used as an insane asylum, overrun by men in the last stages of syphilis. By 1790, a small unit for women was set up in Glasgow at the university, but it admitted only pregnant women. There were still no health provisions for women with VD.

When the Napoleonic war broke out, the Gallowgate Barracks were established in the city and Glasgow Royal Infirmary was opened. Such was the consequent spread of disease due to soldiers sleeping with the ''sporting ladies'' of the town that certain wards were used only to treat the military. GRI was still not taking in pregnant or diseased women or children. After much debate, the Lock Hospital for women was established in 1805. The dwelling house opened at 151 Rottenrow Lane with 11 beds, but did not exist in the medical establishment records of the time. It used mercury as a treatment - popular at the time but ultimately toxic to the patient. Many women entering the Lock were never seen again and those entering were not allowed to leave until their treatment, often lasting for months, was over. Many tried to break out. Some were moved eventually to the nearby insane asylum as syphilitic madness and mercury poisoning ravaged their bodies.

It was 1807 before the city officially recognised the Lock. By 1846, the hospital was moved to new premises at 41 Rottenrow. Child victims of abuse and incest were being discovered in larger and larger numbers but Victorian society found the fact impossible to admit. One Lock doctor is on record as saying a seven-year-old girl had ''given the illness to herself''. But from 1925, new treatment centres were opening up for venereal disease patients. Medicines were improving and in 1940 the Lock Hospitals annual reports showed the number of patients on the decline. Seven years later the building's funds were transferred to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. It was 1955 when the Lock was finally demolished and the walls which held the secrets and pain of thousands of Scots women were gone forever.
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http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport...tal-that-city-pretended-didn-t-exist-1.274517

Could forced abortions have happened at this Lock Hospital? Given the articel above (and I worked with the author at one point) it seems entirely possible, given the attitudes towards the poor at the time.
 
equationgirl said:
Honestly I don't know because I haven't done a large amount of research into historical practices, which is why I was interested in any sources you had.

I am aware of places like this, for example:

http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport...tal-that-city-pretended-didn-t-exist-1.274517

Could forced abortions have happened at this Lock Hospital? Given the articel above (and I worked with the author at one point) it seems entirely possible, given the attitudes towards the poor at the time.
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I made clear in a later post I was talking about family/partner coercion rather than a state policy.
 
tbh it's scarcely believable the shit that happened pre-1967. :(

To put this as explicitly as I can: The right to an abortion is a fundamental, a precondition, for any kind of women's 'liberation'. It really is as simple as that.
 
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