Ugh.

When exactly did anyone gain the right to determine what families and children are burdens and which are blessings? Because I’m not seeing much difference between Suleman and a family like the Duggars, except that they are white, married, and blatantly Christian. I guess that makes it okay, even when despite the fact that they can support their kids, they still end up being a burden on the taxpayer’s dollar when these kids have to be fit into an overworked school system, if we’re going to go by that argument, and they have more children than Suleman does.

The latest snit is that she has a messy house. Wow, with only six kids prior to this, it should have been fucking Martha Stewart heaven.

Ten to one everybody who is talking shit about her either doesn’t have kids or isn’t raising them…

For wingers, as soon as they learned she was unmarried and low-income, this is where the hate began. Nadya is not good enough to be a mother to her children, and I have seen repeated calls that her children be taken away from her. Has she committed a crime? No. Has she abused them? No. Her crime, in the wingers’ minds, is daring to have children while poor.

There is also a lot of speculation that she is an immigrant who is just popping out lots of children to take advantage of the “American system” and bleed us dry. People have no shame.

I wrote some counter-arguments to some of the most annoying things I’ve heard said about her, if you want to read further.

The other, which I find kind of amusing, is that she might well be able to support them, by virtue of selling her story to the media. America hates her, but through the free market, they may well pay for her to raise her kids. hehehehe.

When this story was first coming out, there was a post on Bitch magazine’s blog, also in support. But the number of unbelievably critical and judgmental comments that followed fell far from standard feminist principles. You know, like reproductive justice and rights. (to read the blog/comments: http://bitchmagazine.org/post/the-war-on-choice-when-life-is-chosen-eight-times)

So, thanks, Feministe-ers (bloggers and commenters) for being here.

That’s the recurring motif, not just in the discussions of this woman’s pregnancy, but in all such discussions. Whether a woman (especially a poor woman or a woman of color) becomes pregnant in the first place, whether she carries to term or not, whether she rears her own child(ren) or not, has nothing to do with anything she may want. I can’t think of the number of times I’ve seen male pro-choicers accused of only wanting a wider range of prospects for sex: “Then you can just tell her, ‘Go get an abortion’ and walk away!” The notion there is that a woman has no will of her own, certainly not a will to want or not want sex herself; she only exists as a receptacle for a man’s penis and a man’s seed.

There’s this bizarre concept of “the womb”, as if it were some sort of freestanding appliance, with no inconvenient wishes or desires or needs of its own. And that endless series of “what should she do” questions: a woman or girl is pregnant in some set of appalling circumstances (she’s a thirteen-year-old rape victim, or she has TB and her husband has syphilis, or she’s poor and already has fourteen kids, or she’s single and her fiance is not the father): “Should she get an abortion?” Always with the triumphant punchline: “If you said yes, you just killed Ethel Waters/Beethoven/John Wesley/Jesus Christ!” But I never say yes. I say, to every single question, “Does she want one?” And no one answers. Ever. The question of whether she might want one or not, the question of whether she might have an opinion to be consulted, genuinely does not occur to them.

The question “Does she want one?” never occurs to these people. Whether a woman gets pregnant, whether she remains pregnant, are entirely in the hands of other people. That she might have a will or a wish of her own actually never occurs to them.

“Woman? What woman?