Red State Feminist Blog:

Fractional Parents?

Red State Feminists are very concerned about artificial reproductive technologies. No, we don't mean those techniques that allow husband and wife to conceive their own child. That has been a true blessing and boon to otherwise infertile couples. And we certainly don't mean adoption, which can bring priceless happiness where otherwise sorrow would reign.

No, what we mean is the brave new world eloquently painted for us in a recent New York Times editorial on "fractional parents."

Researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center were looking for ways to eliminate diseases that can be inherited through maternal DNA. They developed, as the magazine Nature reported last summer, a kind of swap in which defective DNA from the egg is removed and replaced with genetic material from another female’s egg. The researchers say the procedure is also likely to work on humans.

The result would be a baby with three biological parents — or “fractional parents,” as Adam Kolber, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, calls them.

He mentioned the idea over lunch at The Times, and it provided plenty of grist for debate among law junkies: Could a baby one day have 100 parents? Could anyone who contributes DNA claim visitation rights? How much DNA is enough? Can a child born outside the United States to foreigners who have DNA from an American citizen claim U.S. citizenship?

We have joked for years about "sperm donors," those men who view the contribution of their DNA to a new human being as nothing more than a moment's ejaculation. Those jokes have been derisive jokes, and well deserved. But now we will turn women into those contemtible creatures as well. We'll have the "egg mother," the "DNA mother," and the "womb mother," none of which might have any human relationship with her "child." Great, we women not get to be the men we despise.

And what of the child? No mother gets pregnant in order to abort her baby or give the baby up for adoption. Those things happen, to be sure, but tears are shed because that is not what any woman wants.

But now we will have women who get pregnant or give their DNA kin away just so they can walk away from the human being who they have helped create or nurture.

We are tempted to say women would never do that. But we would be crazy to do so. As one writer put it, "we used to have Mexican divorces, now we'll have Mexican gestations." In a world deeply infected by male bias, we will now have a world run in the image of men. And even motherhood will be in the image of uncommitted ejaculation.

A fractional parent is not a parent--that's the point, isn't it? We now will have children for whom the term "mother" means nothing. Just like we have had several generations of children for whom the term "father" meant nothing.

January 30, 2010 by Red State Gal

The Boys in the Backroom Versus the Women in the Bathroom

Red State Feminists have noted in an earlier blogpost that the issue of health care reform has revealed a split in the Republican Party along gender lines. While we had our issues with particulars of health care reform, the overall goal is certainly feminist. The health care industry systematically discriminates against women, and it is women who are the caregivers for the young, the elderly, and the infirm. When you don't care about the health of the caregivers and the lifegivers, you just don't care about the health of Americans.

So imagine our delight when we came across this little video, less than a minute long:

So true, so true . . . The Boys in the Backroom Versus the Women in the Bathroom. You just can't help but root for the women in the bathroom! Women's experiences as caregivers and lifegivers gives them a common sense and a common purpose that the men just don't have. Time to make the Ladies' Room the real headquarters of health care reform in Congress!

January 27, 2010 by Red State Gal

A New Year, A New Blog Page: The Awful Dockers' Ad

Red State Feminists wish you a Happy New Year, and welcome to a fresh blog page! Our posts from 2008 and 2009 are still available here, but the file size was getting too big and not loading very quickly, so we thought a fresh page for the new year might be welcome.

It would be lovely to start the year out with good news, but alas, the first thing on our agenda this year is a really off-base ad by Dockers, a brand of pants for men and boys. Here's the ad:

dockers ad

Isn't that a delightful ad? The mixed messages practically slap you in the face. If we want little old ladies to be escorted across the street, we need men to be dominant over women. After all, if they are not dominant over women, they will feel no responsibility to little old women or to anyone else, for that matter. Cities crumble and children misbehave because men are no longer dominant over women. Women no longer get doors opened for them.

Gag. While Red State Feminists certainly do believe that the involvement of men is necessary to the overcoming of the world's problems, it has been the exclusion of women by men in the solving of these problems that has made them persistent.  It is men listening to women, being motivated to include women as full and equal partners, that is the cure for the world's ills.  This ad suggests otherwise--it suggests the desirability of male leadership OVER women--a recipe for continuing societal dysfunction.

We need men to wear their own pants and women to wear their own pants or skirts. In other words, we need partnership between the two halves of society--not domination of one by the other. In fact, this Dockers' ad is just a recipe for more of the same that we have had throughout human history, no matter how they dress it up by talking about "heroes."

Red State Feminists complained. if you want to complain, too, here's the link to do it.

January 20, 2010 by Red State Gal