An interesting couple of paragraphs

[ismnotwasm]

These are from "Woman--An intimate Geography" by Natalie Angier.

(She writes in prose/poetry kind of way, and the result is more emotional than I usually tolerate when it comes to abortion rights, because forced birthers are emotional manipulators as well as liars, but I thought this was worth sharing. A great book, by the way)


"There are the stimuli that we know of, and those that slip in unsung and unknowable. Years and years after a woman has delivered a child, she continues to carry vestiges of that child in her body. I'm talking about tangible vestiges now, not memories. Stray cells from a
growing fetus circulate through a woman's body during pregnancy, possibly as a way for the fetus to communicate with the woman's immune system and forestall its ejection from the body as the foreign object it is. The fetal-maternal cell dialogue was thought to be a short-lived one, lasting only as long as the pregnancy. Recently, though, scientists have found fetal cells surviving in the maternal bloodstream decades after the women gave birth to their children. The cells didn't die; they didn't get washed away. They persisted, and may have divided a few times in the interim. They're fetal cells, which means they've got a lot of life built into them. A mother, then, is forever a cellular chimera, a blend of the body she was born with and of all the children she has borne. Which may mean nothing, or it may mean there is always something there to remind her, a few biochemical bars of a song capable of playing upon her neural systems of attachment, particularly if those attachments were nourished though a multiplicity of stimuli, of sensorial output--the hormonal pageantry of gestation, the odors of fetal urine, the great upheaval of delivery, and the sight and touch of the new--born baby.

For all the reasons that I remain a staunch supporter of abortion rights, for all the reasons that a woman is entitled to her full sexuality regardless of the unreliability of birth control and of the human heart, here is another one. It is vicious to force a woman to bear a baby she doesn't want, to prod her vengefully though the compound priming of pregnancy and force her to be imprinted through every physiological contrivance at evolution's disposal with an infant she can't keep, an infant that will remain forever stuck in her blood, and antigen to the attachment response, try as she will to shed her sad past. The "adoption option" is fine if a young woman chooses it and is at peace with it. But option it must remain, for the body is a creature of habit, and the longer it hs been exposed to the chemistry of bondage, the more prone it becomes to emotional flashbacks, to recurrent neuroendocrine nightmares, the sort of nightmare where you keep returning to your childhood neighborhood and you're not sure why, and you know you don't belong there anymore, yet you still return, step up to your old door, and ring the bell. Nobody answers. It's the wrong house. Your house is gone."

[smokey nj]

1. Thanks for posting this.

[Scout]

2. I LOVE that book, I highly recommend it. n/t