A few days later the Daily Mail posted a story about a BBC presenter, Tessa Dunlop, who at age 41 lost her unborn son during pregnancy and who is now grieving her incomplete family (she has a 7-year-old daughter). She writes:
We need to drop the old-fashioned taboos surrounding fertility and admit that many of the babies born to ‘older’ women in particular are accompanied by a painful back story. Some only have a painful story.
Fewer celebrity ‘miracle’ births and more honesty about the pitfalls of middle age that are so cruelly exclusive to women would help everyone.
Societally, it might even force us to work out a way of better supporting girls during that precious decade – somewhere between 24 and 34 years of age – when both emotionally and biologically they are best equipped to give birth.
Where is the prudence of those Italian feminists? A 41-year-old woman is laying out her grief and wisely calling on society to respect the critical decade in which a woman is best able to have children - but when a government does try to do the right thing it is shouted down by young feminist women who fear maternity above all things.
There's two theories, a recent one I read that the religious inherit the earth. The religious have babies, it's part of their religious way but in the meantime the irreligious believe in having a good time and raising children often doesn't fit in with a good time. So there's less babies to carry on their irreligious ways and eventually they're gone and this has happened before. It's not just current with feminists fighting the family, it happened in Rome and elsewhere. The next theory, Howard Blooms, is that people passionate enough to believe in their system that they are willing to die for it will conquer dilettantes who are consumed with their own trivia like LGBT bathrooms and who feel that they are so special the world owes them. We now live in a world of declining birthrates in the West, a growing liberal ideology obsessed with the trivia of looking inclusive and murderous religious fanaticism. Crikey, I hope things change for the better.
ReplyDeleteBoth theories seem variations of the same thing.
Deletewhen a government does try to do the right thing it is shouted down by young feminist women who fear maternity above all things.
ReplyDeleteThey fear maternity because they fear their own femaleness. They fear that within a few years they'll start to want children themselves. They're angry because they want to live exactly as men do but deep down inside they know their own biology is telling them that women cannot live like men.
I think they have it considered though they wouldn't state it in such plain terms.
ReplyDeleteFeminism, the extremist " and of late years the predominant cult of the Woman's Movement, is Masculinism.
It makes for such training and development in woman, of male characteristics, as shall equip her to compete with the male in every department of life; academic, athletic, professional, political, industrial. And it neither recognises nor admits in her natural aptitudes differing from those of men, and fitting her, accordingly, for different functions in these. It rejects all concessions to her womanhood; even to her mother function.
- Feminism and Sex Extinction, Arabella Keneally, 1920
Good find! I didn't know about this one, and it's a reminder again of the long first wave of feminism.
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