The invisible crisis
March 8th 2010 05:07
“Woman Abandons Baby in Dumpster, Goes to Party” screams a link on the Fox News website. You don’t need to read it to know what its content is. You’ve read a thousand articles like it before. Its tone encourages readers to shake their heads, make that impatient click noise with their tongues and teeth, and marvel at what kind of selfish failure could do something so callous. It’s a lot like those episodes of Maury Povich where he drags “out-of-control teens” on stage, interrogates them about their private life, and calls on D West to stand over them and shout slogans: self-righteous voyeurism, streamed directly into your home at broadband speeds.
It has no discussion of the fact that this is exactly what you would expect to happen in a society that refuses to make birth control available. It has no discussion of the fact that infanticide has been commonplace since the beginning of the last Ice Age, and that the conception of the maternal instinct as universal, all-encompassing, and overwhelming has been forced on us relatively recently, to make women feel bad about themselves either in comparison to other women or to their boyfriends’ or husbands’ expectations. It makes no comment on the fact that such an action is quite extreme, and must therefore have had some sort of a prelude, and features no discussion of what the person’s background or situation might be like.
That article is one of the most read on Fox News’ entire website for the last week. Even as I write, people are e-mailing it to their friends, so everyone can shake their heads, make that impatient click noise with their tongues and teeth, and wonder who’s going to put selfish young women like that back in their place. Nobody asks questions of the people in our country who hold the power to ameliorate this and every situation like it but choose not to. America takes its blue pill, and the young, as they ever have, suffer.
It has no discussion of the fact that this is exactly what you would expect to happen in a society that refuses to make birth control available. It has no discussion of the fact that infanticide has been commonplace since the beginning of the last Ice Age, and that the conception of the maternal instinct as universal, all-encompassing, and overwhelming has been forced on us relatively recently, to make women feel bad about themselves either in comparison to other women or to their boyfriends’ or husbands’ expectations. It makes no comment on the fact that such an action is quite extreme, and must therefore have had some sort of a prelude, and features no discussion of what the person’s background or situation might be like.
That article is one of the most read on Fox News’ entire website for the last week. Even as I write, people are e-mailing it to their friends, so everyone can shake their heads, make that impatient click noise with their tongues and teeth, and wonder who’s going to put selfish young women like that back in their place. Nobody asks questions of the people in our country who hold the power to ameliorate this and every situation like it but choose not to. America takes its blue pill, and the young, as they ever have, suffer.
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