great post on forced pregnancy

# Kyra Writes:
October 26th, 2005 at 9:23 am

“has also declared that abortion is not a legitimate element of reproductive health assistance.”

Well, I can see where she might come up with that . . . I mean, slaves can be “healthy” despite being forced to labor against their will.

Y’know, I’ve been thinking about how accurate the “slave” analogy is in regards to forced pregnancy. Aside from the obvious lack of control over one’s own body, the idea that “someone wants something (in this case live babies), therefore they force other people to create that thing (via pregnancy), is pure slavery, plus there’s the added insult that once it’s created, the people who forced its completion don’t care about it anywhere near enough to justify all the time and effort that went into it. This has strong overtones of classism—that one person’s months of work, forced at that, is worth almost nothing to the people who demanded that it be done. The anti-abortion, anti-birth-control, anti-welfare, anti-education conservatives are the equivalent of a rich slaveowner, who has her slaves spend months creating a fantastically beautiful, intricate, labor-intensive dress, wears it once, and throws it away, or perhaps doesn’t even bother to wear it at all. Their months of labor are not worth so much as a half-hour of her time, and certainly aren’t worth any compensation beyond that which keeps them alive to do their job, and sometimes not even that.

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2005/10/26/the-unpfa-2005-report-which-states-the-obvious/

Forced birth is a form of slavery. The dress analogy is incredible and incredibly sad, with the ring of truth it carries.