Here’s something to ponder in your heart. It’s from a piece by long-time conservative columnist Cal Thomas. He tells the story of (I think) his granddaughter that got pregnant and decided to keep the baby. Over the years she has heard a lot of abortion stories from other women. Why did they have abortions?
Every single one was because of fear.
Not “because of a defect, rape, abuse.”
Now, I have my snarky maxim that relates to that:
Women expect to be protected; men know they are expendable.
I hadn’t thought about it, but I see that the maxim is really all about fear. Women expect to be protected because they are afraid. Men know that, when it comes to fear, they are supposed to “suck it in, cupcake” and die like a man.
The point is that bearing, birthing, and raising children are the only things that matter in a woman’s life, whether she realizes it or not, and despite what you’ve heard tell. But the only way for her to do that successfully is to be safe and protected. She needs to be protected during her pregnancy, especially during the last couple of months. She needs to be protected and attended during the birth, which used to mean older women in the community that knew a thing or two about birthing, and now means the full weight of medical technology. She needs to be protected as she raises her children, particularly in the early years of childhood.
Now think about the social institutions that humans have developed to protect women, and make them safe, and soothe their fears. And by the way, enhance the odds on them having children that survive to adulthood.
Protecting adolescent girls from sexual predators You men out there know who you are: you are sexual predators that are programmed to win a young woman’s trust so that you can get her into bed. So the reason that families — and especially fathers — have protected their daughters and turned an evil eye on the local lads is that girls need to be held back from giving themselves to cads and wastrels that don’t have honorable intentions. “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other,” said Benjamin Franklin. But when it comes to young girls finding the right father for their children it is hit or miss.
No sex before marriage Even if her lover is the best guy in the world, it sure improves the odds if there is no nookie before tying the knot.
Marriage The whole point of marriage and the public wedding ceremony is to establish before all the world that this here guy is committed to supporting this here gal and feeding her and the children that they create together. Till death us do part, in an age when death did part man and wife, all the time. And if the cheeky chappie falls down on the job, the community will know the reason why, especially the community of women.
All of these social institutions are designed to soothe the real fear that every woman has about life and to make her safe — whether she likes it or not at the time — so she can perform the central functions of her life.
And I would say that the central fear in every woman’s life is when she becomes pregnant and is afraid that she doesn’t have the support she instinctively knows she needs to bring forth life into the world and “keep her kids alive.”
Our prosperous post-industrial world is so prosperous that we can afford to forget the timeless social norms that supported women so they could bring forth the next generation and raise it to adulthood.
Because in the old days life really was uncertain, although perhaps not as nasty, brutish and short as Hobbes proposed. But if you delve into 19th century novels you are dunked into a world full of orphans and death and woe. And that’s just in the Dickensian city. How people lived on the farm is just about lost to memory, except that in George Eliot’s Adam Bede the two main girls in the plot are both orphans adopted by the redoubtable Mrs. Poyser.
I suppose it’s natural that, in the wake of our modern prosperity, people — lefties, feminists — should propose all sorts of stupid things. Because, for the first time ever, humans can do stupid things in their lives without dying in short order.
It is my belief that the women of the western world will eventually push back against all the stupidity — indeed are already doing so. Mostly because all the modern nonsense makes women afraid.