Liberal Feminism Can't Resist Eugenics

The Abortion-Oppression-Eugenics Trilemma

Does liberal feminism have the internal consistency to stand against eugenics in human reproductive technologies? Featured author Mary Harrington suggests that it does not, arguing that "something has to give" in the progressive feminist stance.

Fairer Disputations
 

Liberal Feminists Can't Resist Eugenics

MARY HARRINGTON

Does liberal feminism have the conceptual headroom to challenge repro-paganization, though? That remains to be seen. For if we look closer, this oncoming collision between the feminist desire to defend women’s genetic role in fertility, and the progressive desire to advance LGBTQ equality, is only the tip of an iceberg of contradictions exposed by repro-tech. And more significant and salient yet than the conflict between feminism and gay equality in this domain is what we might term the abortion-oppression-eugenics trilemma: a conflict that leaves even those currently opposed to IVG on progressive grounds fatally hamstrung in their objections.  

This Week's Links:

In our first curated piece, novelist, essayist, and biographer Dame Margaret Drabble discusses the false choice many women feel they have to make between "books or babies." She suggests that domesticity need not be at odds with artistry.

Over at Comment, David Brooks lauds a uniquely feminine mode of philosophy.

UnHerd
 

Why Should Women Write Like Men?

MARGARET DRABBLE

This was a joke I often used to make in my own ever-evolving lecture about women and writing. I used to say, “I wrote my first three novels while expecting my first three babies,” and would then outline the challenge I had writing my fourth novel without being pregnant. Eventually, I got tired of this attempted witticism and dropped it, but it did no more than record a fact. Men might have thought it an impertinent fact, but it meant a lot to me, as pregnancy and childbirth seemed so intimately connected with my career and writing life.

In our next piece, Miriam Cates addresses collisions between the rights of individuals and the interests of children. Why, she asks, aren't adults willing to sacrifice the adult freedoms needed to prioritize the well-being and nurture of children?

The Critic

Confected Outrage Doesn't Change the Facts About the Family
 

MIRIAM CATES

Perhaps most disturbingly, the reaction to the interview demonstrates how little priority our culture gives to children’s interests. All the discussion about this issue — and many others that I have strayed into such as the “trans” debate, school lockdowns and universal childcare — revolves around the choices and best interests of adults. Why shouldn’t drag queens have the freedom to use young children to affirm their sexual fetish? Why shouldn’t we shut schools if it keeps adults safe? (It didn’t.) Why does it matter if we put small babies in institutional childcare if it means women can get back to work? In this case, “Why should it matter that so many children grow up without both parents if all adults involved have free choice?”

Nothing has shocked me more in politics than how completely children’s interests are disregarded in UK debate and policy making.

Finally, at The Critic, Featured Author Helen Joyce writes about the transgender lobby's ideological capture of charities and campaign groups, which now spend their time trying to "create a gender-neutral, race-obsessed new Jerusalem."

The Critic
 

The Diversity Trap

HELEN JOYCE

For a few thousand quid an employer gets the privilege of having chunks of its HR policies rewritten by young graduates who think oppression means forgetting someone’s “preferred pronouns” and being kept out of the opposite sex’s toilets. These identitarians know employers’ continued subscriptions — and therefore their own jobs — depend on inventing ever more absurd instructions for self-debasement in the name of inclusion. 

The latest iteration marks firms down for not having sanitary bins and tampon dispensers in the gents. Doing really well means telling customer-facing staff to wear badges proclaiming their pronouns and to ask everyone they interact with for theirs. “Gender-fluid” staff should be given email addresses and ID cards to match each of their identities. 

A Can't-Miss Event:

If you're local to the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, MA (our mother organization), please join us for this upcoming panel at Harvard. RSVP here.

Pre-read Wollstonecraft here and here.

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