Saturday, May 24, 2008

The anti-sex agenda and personal responsibility

About a week ago there was a news item about a woman who sued for "Wrongful Birth" and was awarded $80,000 after a screwed-up tubal ligation resulted in her getting pregnant:
"She was only 26 years old, but life was already starting to press in on the New Brunswick woman: She had three children to support, her husband was seriously ill, his business was failing and the couple had lost their house and car. The last thing the young mother needed was another mouth to feed. To prevent any costly additions to the family, she had a tubal ligation, a permanent sterilization procedure thousands of Canadian women undergo every year.

Much was her shock, then, when, barely a year later, she became pregnant. She eventually gave birth to a healthy baby girl. But just over a month ago, a judge ruled in favour of the lawsuit she had filed over the sterilization blunder, awarding the mother $80,000 in damages."

The lawsuit sounds reasonable to anyone with their head screwed on right. And one would think that conservatives in particular could get behind the "personal responsibility" aspect of the story -- the woman did try to do the responsible thing and limit her output of kids to what she could afford. Even social conservatives, basically a fascist constituency when it comes to reproductive matters, should be able to appreciate the fact that she chose not to abort.

Yet, in spite of seemingly doing everything right by the Conservative Playbook of Personal Responsibility, for some reason this woman has provoked the ire of social conservatives. CC took one of these self-righteous twits to the woodshed a few days ago; now someone even more arrogant has posted about the story at Free D, and the overweening superciliousness is just breathtaking. He starts:

"Culture of death"? So a woman who tries to be responsible is "culture of death"? She could have aborted, she could have even dropped the baby on the doorstep of a cop shop or in a dumpster for that matter, but instead she had it and kept it. But to this sanctimonious little fart, she's done something evil because she wanted restitution for a medical procedure that clearly went sideways. To their credit, FDers responding to the thread are baffled:

And one of the telltale replies:

Yep, it all gets down to having Sex for any other reason than procreation. That's the Bad Thing, and if you do it you better keep your mouth shut and your legs open, crank out those babies and be happy about it. So say the tense little authoritarians who would dictate how the rest of us run our sex lives, those who obsessively stuff their noses into the -- but hey, what's this:

HAHAHAHAHA! Oh, the intrinsic evil and immorality of the blowjob. Well, that might explain some of the tension. As for the rest, the culprit is probably sperm backup -- the brain becomes flooded, synapses flicker, smoke and short out and all manner of irrational behaviour ensues.