Pro-life atheists

[Tartarus Sauce]

Has anyone else noticed - likely the ladies have - that the majority of the most outspoken anti-choicers are male?

Ah yes, I made a post about this on TTA.

I know this is a topic done to death, but this a thought that just occurred to me.

First of all, I just want to clarify that I am specifically talking about the typical fundamentalist-Christian segment of pro-lifers; I am aware that non-religious pro-lifers are out there as well.

We all know that the "sanctity of life" argument is ad hoc bullshit. For starters, they don't treat it as the universal rule its nature entails, since truly holding life as sacred would inevitably lead to anti-war, pro-environment, and anti-death penalty viewpoints as well. None of these are typically the case for fundamentalist Christians claiming "pro-life." Secondly, I'm not sure on this one, but I don't think it's actually a biblically supported statement. In fact, the Bible is pretty explicit in humanity's dominion over life, and there are plenty of justifications given for taking the life of even our fellow species, therefore negating the whole "sanctity" aspect.

The transparency with this faux argument is usually summed up with "it's an attempt to control women's bodies" although I think it's actually a bit more encompassing than that. It is, of course, obvious that fundamentalist Christianity is a patriarchal system, so control over women is a given, but this made me realize that abortion is actually not just an affront to the patriarchy present in Christianity, but is also an attack on the foundational reasoning of the patriarchy itself.

The most commonly accepted theory is that patriarchy rose to prominence with the introduction of ownership that was brought about by the sedentary, surplus-rich societies induced by agriculture and domestication. When we were simply bands of hunter-gatherers---which we have been for the vast majority of our specie's existence---it's believed that it was more advantageous for promiscuity to be the norm. Since the men wouldn't know who their children were, they ended up caring for each one as if it was their own rather than trying to secure as much of the scant resources as possible for their offspring, which would have led to severe internal conflict.

Of course, this all changed when agriculture and domestication led to resource surpluses. This led to unequally distributed, clearly defined allocations of resources and wealth, hence leading to the creation of property and possessions as legal concepts. Since property was the insurance of the socio-economic prosperity and security of one's genetic lineage, it all of the sudden became important to know who your children were so they could inherit your assets. The mothers would obviously always know who their children were, but since this was before paternity tests existed, there was only one way for the father to have access to such knowledge: complete control over their partner's sexual activities.

Therefore, within patriarchal systems, all the benefits of lineage are under dominion of the father. So in patriarchal systems such as that within Christianity, the act of an abortion is a two-fold subversion. First, it undermines the general control of men over their partner's, but even more importantly, it is the woman denying the father's access to his lineage (and all the benefits it brings him) via destruction of his potential offspring. Since, according to the common theory, producing a successful lineage is the main reason for instituting a patriarchy to begin with, performing an abortion is the ultimate sin within such systems.

http://www.thethinkingatheist.com/forum/...e-abortion