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<DIV>Hear, hear....Well done.</DIV>
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<DIV>Sue H. </DIV>
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<DIV style="font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A title=art.deco.studios@gmail.com
href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com">Art Deco</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Wednesday, August 29, 2012 9:42 AM</DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=vision2020@moscow.com
href="mailto:vision2020@moscow.com">vision2020@moscow.com</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> [Vision2020] Todd Akin and the Second Sex</DIV></DIV></DIV>
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<DIV class=published title=2012-08-27T17:32:04><FONT size=4><B><I>The New
Yorker</I></B></FONT><BR><BR>August 27, 2012</DIV>
<H1 class=entry-title>Todd Akin and the Second Sex</H1>
<DIV class=byline>Posted by <CITE class="vcard author"><A
title="search site for content by Judith Thurman"
href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/judith_thurman/search?contributorName=Judith%20Thurman"
rel=author>Judith Thurman</A></CITE></DIV>
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<P><IMG style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px 20px; FLOAT: right" class=mt-image-right
alt=akin-and-abortion.jpg
src="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/akin-and-abortion.jpg"
width=233 height=351></P>
<P>Simone de Beauvoir’s foundational treatise on gender inequality, “The Second
Sex,” was published in France in 1949, a year after the author—a
thirty-eight-year-old public intellectual—was allowed to vote for the first
time. French women, so belatedly enfranchised, would not have access to legal
birth control until 1967, or to legal first-trimester abortions until 1975. </P>
<P>In 1971, Beauvoir took the lead in her countrywomen’s struggle for
reproductive rights. She wrote a declaration, “The Manifesto of 343,” that
exposed her and her fellow-signers—some of France’s leading female artists,
actors, writers, jurists, and filmmakers—to criminal prosecution. (It also
exposed them to degrading ridicule of a now-familiar sort. Forty years before
Rush Limbaugh aired his repulsive fantasies about Sandra Fluke, the declaration
was nicknamed “The Manifesto of the 343 Sluts.”)</P>
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<P>“One million women in France have an abortion every year,” Beauvoir’s
declaration began. “Condemned to secrecy, they have them in dangerous
conditions…. These women are veiled in silence. I declare that I am one of them.
I have had an abortion.”</P>
<P>Not all of the women who signed Beauvoir’s manifesto had actually had an
abortion. Some of them, like Violette Leduc, the lesbian writer, may never have
had sex with a man. The point was to stand together on behalf of the “veiled.”
And in 1971, I was one of the veiled. I was a single woman just out of college,
far from home, living marginally, without a partner, who found herself
pregnant.</P>
<P>It is sometimes hard to remember that abortion has not been a crime in the
United States since Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973. If politicians like Todd
Akin and Paul Ryan prevail, it will be a crime again, under all circumstances,
along with some forms of contraception that can spare women from a hard choice
that they have to live with, one way or another, for the rest of their lives.
</P>
<P>Akin disgraced himself as a benighted zealot by blathering about “legitimate
rape,” but it’s a mistake, I think, to focus one’s outrage on the trauma of rape
and incest victims, on teen-age girls of severely limited mental capacity who
are conned by predators, or on patients who have been told by their physicians
that a full-term pregnancy may kill them. Forcing such women to bear a child
violates their integrity in a barbaric fashion—it rapes them twice.</P>
<P>But most women who seek abortions do not fall into those categories. They are
our neighbors, daughters, sisters, granddaughters, and colleagues. They come in
every size and color. They are rich and poor. They are Republicans and
Democrats. They are churchgoers and atheists. They are married, single, and
divorced. Some ardently want a family—when the time is right. Some of them have
children already. But they have this in common: at some point between the onset
of puberty and the end of menopause—and one neither wants nor needs to know the
circumstances, it is none of our business—they had a sexual encounter that
resulted in an accidental conception, and they couldn’t go through with it.</P>
<P>Here is where the Akin uproar leads us to perilous ground. “Legitimate rape”
(or “forcible rape,” as the Congressman put it in his apology for having
“misspoke”) is a coded expression that everyone in its target audience
understands. It conjures the image of a Victorian maiden ravished by a villain
in a cloak and a top hat, twirling his mustache as she flails on the railroad
tracks. It implies that there are “legitimate” victims—and only certifiably
“pure” women fall into that category. Everyone else had it coming.</P>
<P>“The Second Sex” is an exhaustive study of the ways that misogyny has, from
time immemorial, been disguised as righteousness. Todd Akin and Paul Ryan want
to write a new chapter to the story. If you are saved, you need not fear their
policies. If you are fallen, you will pay the price. They would lower the veil
of shame and silence on a new generation. But if we let this become a debate
about female virtue, rather than about female self-determination, we have lost
it. </P>
<P><EM>Illustration by Richard McGuire.</EM></P></DIV></DIV><BR clear=all><BR>--
<BR>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<BR><A href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com"
target=_blank>art.deco.studios@gmail.com</A><BR><BR><IMG
src="http://users.moscow.com/waf/WP%20Fox%2001.jpg"><BR><BR>
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