Containment of Women and Adolescents

            Blog post “Governor Walker repeals equal pay, bans abortion coverage, mandates abstinence,” essentially screams containment of women and adolescents through state legislation in Wisconsin. Apparently 50 bills were passed on April 5^th, some of them made getting an abortion harder to obtain for women. While it seems like the doctor speaking privately with the patient to make sure she is not being coerced into the abortion is really just a way for the doctor to have a chance to coerce the women out of the abortion. Another bill passed was what the blog implies: sex education teachers don’t have to address contraception in lectures and are instead expected to emphasize that abstinence is the ONLY way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy.

             I honestly believed a year ago, that for the most part, we, as a country, had moved past such nonsensical topics such as debating women’s rights (minus the abortion issue), and sex education in public schools.  I thought it was an understanding that a women has the right to decide what happens to her own body without outside influence in the form of laws and legislation mandating otherwise, and that more knowledge gives people the power to make better informed decisions.  However, I guess that’s not the case. 

            Lately, I’ve begun noticing that there are certain groups of people in this country who want to contain women. They do not want to present women with opportunities to have other options when they get pregnant or even to prevent a pregnancy.   Apparently, despite how far our society has come we still have politicians and people who feel that women aren’t competent enough to be the primary decision makers for themselves.  Or maybe it’s the fear that women will finally become fully equal to men. Maybe there’s even a greater fear that women could even surpass men. Maybe there's a fear that women would be the ones in charge of this country if they had the option to completely control their ability to have children when and where they so choose, and thus allow them to also advance further in the workplace. In the past a woman was expected to quit work, settle down, get married, and have a family if she got pregnant, essentially ending her work career, which also gave grounds for gender discrimination in the work place, such as unequal pay between genders for the same work.

            Obviously women can’t be eliminated though. The human race would be unable to reproduce especially since cloning humans isn’t anywhere close to being perfected.  So the only solution to having control of something, or in this case someone, is to contain it.  And what better way to contain a group of people than to make it either illegal, make it incredibly difficult to obtain abortions, or even worse, contain the younger generations so they don’t even get to learn about sex and all the different forms of contraception that help make sex safer. 

           

            If anything this ignorance is going to result in negative consequences for our society.  I would predict a rise in teen pregnancies both from lack of access to abortions and overall ignorance to the dangers of unprotected sex (and after they’ve been at an all time low since 1946!), and sexually transmitted diseases.  Not giving future generations all the information we possibly can will lead them to be easily misinformed from other more unreliable sources, such as their peers who also won’t know the whole truth, to the Internet (because for all the good the Internet provides there is a lot of information that is also incorrect as well, or at least unreal expectations that porn provides).

            Essentially, while these bills aren't the most outrageous legislation to have been passed in this country, I would like to stress that this is how widespread containment can begin.  Without fighting back for individual rights, we'll become slaves to own government, which is the very government that prides itself for supposedly being governed by the people.

            So my questions are:

            1) Do you feel that some members of society trying to push against affordable contraception for women and other affordable preventive services, such as those provided by Planned Parenthood, are trying to contain women for an ulterior motive (such as wanting women to be more oriented to housewives), or religious based motives, or even simply they personally don’t want to pay the tax-dollars that go into such programs?

            2) While it is completely constitutional for states to make laws for their own school systems, do you feel any potential containment presented to any group of people will do more harm than good to society in the long run? Or can containment be a good thing for society? Is some level of containment good for some societies?

--Kasey Ostarello--