The war to make sex distinctions not matter rolls on

Laura Wood has found an interesting story about an American woman, Karla Erickson.

Karla Erickson is very keen to push forward with the liberal aim of making sex distinctions not matter. She admits that women have a biological connection to babies that men do not, first by carrying the baby and then by breastfeeding. She even writes about how special this connection is. Nonetheless, she doesn't think it right that mothers should have such a connection because it sets up an "inequality" (by which she means a difference) in the position of men and women in raising children. She therefore concludes that her role should be to "disrupt" the special connection that exists between mothers and babies and that part of the way she can do this is to refuse to breastfeed any future children.

Here she is on the special bond between mother and child:

For birth moms, we have this physically grounded centrality to the baby-making process that carries through birth. If we breastfeed we deepen rather than disrupt that primacy.

In my case, I was pregnant and carried our son to term. As a result, I was deeply connected to that little guy before he ever came into the world. His heartbeat and mine were connected, as were our digestion and sleep patterns.

...My little son already knew my smell, my voice, and my heartbeat. It was perhaps the moment when my gender was the most salient it has ever been in my marriage: these things that my husband literally could not do, I had done.

And then I breastfed.

Every time I got to breast feed him I was holding my son, singing, whispering, touching, and loving on my sweet little boy.

If I had not breastfed I would have missed all those beautiful quiet times with my son...I had never known what it was like to be that close to another human.

Despite all of this, she concludes with the idea that women shouldn't breastfeed, precisely because it attaches a baby more closely to the mother than to the father - and this then produces "social differences" between men and women:

If we really want to address and redress the ongoing inequalities around the work of making life — the work of raising the next generation — then we have to look at breastfeeding. It’s one thing our bodies do that reinforces the social differences between men and women, moms and dads, and boys and girls.

...Over the years, my husband and I will work to unwind this preliminary advantage, but we could have avoided solidifying it if we had decided to use formula, or to pump and bottle feed our son.

So in a pro-breastfeeding era, I say, “I’m out.” Not because I don’t benefit everyday from that “special connection” to my son, but because I do.

...Sometimes we have to do a runaround our bodies to ensure equity. Sometimes we have to do some social engineering to help dislodge our social aspirations from the dictates of our glands and gonads.

Sometimes, to make sure that the next generation has more wiggle room around the gendered division of labor, we have to tuck away those breasts and reach for a bottle instead.

Why do liberals want to make sex distinctions not matter? Because their aim is to maximise individual autonomy. This means that our life is supposed to be self-determining, which then means that predetermined qualities like our sex aren't supposed to matter.

You might think that Karla Erickson is a crazy lady for thinking the way she does, but she is following through with a philosophy that is widely accepted in society. There are young people today being brought up with the idea that parenting should be strictly unisex and that it is unjust for a mother to spend more time with her child than the father does. Karla Erickson is just pushing that unisex ideal a little further along and with a little more honesty. She admits that there are reasons grounded in biology for a close relationship between mother and child, and that this relationship can be a fulfilling one for a woman, but she wants us to overcome this natural connection in the name of a social ideal.

That's what happens when you adopt the wrong principles for deciding social ideals.

The good side to this for traditionalists is that liberalism is advancing so radically along the lines of its principles that it must inevitably leave behind a good many people. Liberals like Karla Erickson want to suppress important aspects of human nature. That puts us in a good position to defend these positive aspects of human nature and to rally those whose strength of instinct puts them in opposition to a liberal culture.