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Focus on the Fetus (late stage purity culture) [1]
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Date: 2023-03-11
Don't abort Jesus!
We appear to be living in the age of the holy fetus. In the sense of having legal rights without reference to any mortal mother, this mysterious developing being is immaculate. Its’ personhood neatly erases her untidy one. As the fetus innocently (unless of course you count original sin, but that is a different story) dreams peacefully in its amniotic fluid, it provides a blank canvas onto which some fundamentalists project their idealized desires for purity and sinlessness. This fixation on an imagined realm of perfect innocence provides a psychological refuge from the corrosive shame and fear perpetuated by toxic religions.
Huh?
These are the religions that promote purity culture, in which young girls are taught that they are to blame for the lustful thoughts and actions of boys. Their greatest value lies in their virginity, which is promptly lost on the wedding night, with nothing to replace it. In the same manner, the infinite worth conservative policy makers bestow on the fetus also has an expiration date. That date is birth, after which that baby is on its own.
Holy fetus as imagined in the Dobbs decision.
In the Dobbs decision, Samuel Alito rhapsodized sentimentally about the “hair, fingernails, and toes” of the fetus (”unborn child”). In the rhetoric of anti-choicer fundamentalists, it is only the innocent that deserve protection. At least until they are born, at which time they become part of what Alito terms the “domestic supply.”
Let’s just be sure it is an actual choice.
As opposed to the “innocent life” they carry, women who are pregnant are seen to be past the expiration date of their purity and about to sour. In this perverse logic, the moral consideration lost along with virginity can best be reclaimed by complete self renunciation in the form of maternal martyrdom. At least this is the ideal expressed in the words of Saint Gianna Molla, who chose to die of cancer-related complications rather than sacrifice her fourth pregnancy.
And while I completely honor her choice, let’s admit that the people using her for propaganda do not really want us to have a right to choose.
Of course while Jesus had a lot to say about performative and legalistic religious authorities, he was conspicuously silent about matters of pregnancy, abortion, and premarital sex. But it was never really about Him, was it?
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/11/2157501/-Focus-on-the-Fetus-late-stage-purity-culture
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