Today is a day of mourning and rage amongst those who believe in the rights of pregnant people. The Supreme Court ruling striking down Roe V. Wade is a massive step backward, and may presage similarly retrograde attacks on everything from contraception to gay marriage. It’s bad news all around.
Over in the Men’s Rights subreddit, though, the regulars are feeling pretty cheery. For years, MRAs have complained that they have no “reproductive rights” — by which they mean, no right to a “paper abortion” that would allow them to legally opt out of having to pay child support for children they fathered. And so they take a certain malicious pleasure in seeing women’s reproductive rights trashed.
RecoveringCoomer won himself 712 upvotes for this declaration:
I’ll support women’s right to choose, as much as they support men’s right to choose.
If she has a right to kill the fetus, because she doesn’t want to be a mother, I should at least have a right to financially and legally abandon the baby, and not be forced to fatherhood.
If it is your body, your choice, well then, my wallet my choice.
RandylVlarsh added:
[S]lavery was abolished over a century ago… Just not for men. …
I choose not to be forced to give you my hard earned dollar, or to be your slave/workhorse
ImJustHereForCorn asked:
Well shit, are men just walking ATMs …
Men have every right to abandon the family and not be expected to pay, if a woman has every right to up and kill the prospects of that family before it even starts
Sinner12180 turned it into a chant.
My money, my choice! Keep your laws off of my income!
Today’s Supreme Court ruling, MRAs contend, will force women to face the “consequences” for their actions.
FactsArentHate gleefully posted:
HER body?
HER choice?
HER responsibility!!
PREACH IT, BROTHAH!!
StinkingDischarge, living up to his name, put it a little more crudely:
They may now actually have to show some discretion about who they let creampie them.
Efficient_Creme_3067 had a list of women’s alleged birth control failures:
So my question is, a woman’s right to choose….what? What is she choosing? She chose to not be on one of the 13 forms of contraceptions. She chose to have unprotected sex. She chose not to buy the “plan B” pill. Women have all kinds of rights to choose. What they are demanding, is being able to kill an unborn child as a last resort “parachute” for making a ton of bad choices before that point. The issue i have with it, this “last resort” is hurting another living creature. That’s not ok.
Now that women’s most fundamental reproductive right has been taken from them, Men’s Rights Redditors argued, things are equal, and isn’t that what feminists want anyway?
As pasta4u explained this logic:
Equal rights.
You get them by either bringing down one groups rights in line with another or raising the other groups up.
Men have no abortion rights. So this is the end results of what feminists want.
HeLiedTheyTried put it like this:
With today’s Supreme Court ruling we’re closer to gender equality on this topic than we were yesterday. …
I’d prefer that equality be achieved by providing everyone of all genders a choice, but if there’s any group out there that claims to “just be about gender equality”, they should be celebrating today’s advancement towards that end.
Some MRAs took a moment to link the abortion debate to their own pet political causes.
For CriticalConvo, it was the (non-existent) draft:
Just curious, do all these women also support mens right to choose not sign up for the draft? What happened to my body my choice?
Down-on-earth, perhaps taking a cue from one or more recent mass shooters, declared that it was really all about making more babies:
Everyone up in arms today over this issue. This is a declining birthrate and emigration issue, not a rights issue at all. If you are on the right or left side of politics trying to argue for either side of the issue, then you are missing the bigger picture of what is going on in the world.
SpideySurreal wanted everyone to know that he wouldn’t support women in any way:
I’ll tell you one fact mate, you couldn’t pay me to ‘support’ any women’s right or issue. How less they think of Men, how horribly our own mothers, sisters and daughters treat us, I’d rather take a bullet to the brain than support their feminist garbage. You enjoy your cause though!
EmirikolWoker managed to explain the abortion ruling in a couple of sentences that were wrong in every detail, and then some.
Most pro-life people are women, and women make the majority of the electorate. Therefore, if abortion is banned in any given state, it is because the majority of women oppose it.
That’s not how politics works. That’s not how anything works. Also, abortion rights are supported by a clear majority of American voters, with women (as one might expect) somewhat more supportive than men.
I found only a few commenters in the Men’s Rights subreddit who were upset by the ruling, mostly because they did the math and realized that if women can’t get abortions, more children will be born — and more men will have to pay child support.
Deeptrance83, though, had a rather different reason for opposing the ruling.
They’re coming after contraception next. They want us enslaved. They want us controlled. These are the same people who put us in a box for alimony and child support slavery. These people are the enemy of our freedom. Time to burn it all down, how much more proof do you need?
Well, some proof would be nice, though I do think he’s right about the contraception thing.
But it doesn’t require an elaborate conspiracy theory to explain the death of Roe; the Republicans have been quite openly been setting up for this for decades. And the Democrats have done precious little to try to stop them.
American politics have been in a dark place for some time now. Unfortunately all indications are that things will get darker, considerably so, in the years to come — and with the active assistance of the increasingly illegitimate Supreme Court. This is a bitter taste of things to come.
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If it eventually gets as bad as some are fearing, we’re going to have some leopards-ate-my-face moments when the consequences of right-wing politics hit the poorer conservatives in a very bad way. And then they’re to going blame and attack liberals for it, no matter how much we remind them that “you voted for this, you drips!”
Let’s pretend that conservatives manage to hold the courts for a very long time, and they stop at the NRA’s interpretation of the Second Amendment when it comes to forcing laws on the country which the vast majority of Americans disagree with (I don’t put that anywhere near certain, but let’s pretend) and go all “states rights” on pretty much everything. Democratic politicians remain all bluster no real action to counter this. That might keep liberals from ever going all violent revolution in any meaningful way because blue-state liberals mostly still have what they want and the red-state liberals would have to fight their own state first before they can even think about taking on the Federal Government.
At that point, the states would effectively be independent nations which are part of something sort of like a combined European Union / NATO… except with more domestic terrorism and military conquests and corrupt governments and also no state can leave. Okay, so a really crappy version of the EU. We’d just be pretending to be a unified country at that point. In that case, would it be better to fight to reunite, on the grounds that all Americans deserve better, or fight for the official acknowledgement that we are no longer one country? (And also fight for any actions/changes which are implied by the latter.) I don’t know, just overthinking things maybe.
Rights this. Rights that. They are just happy someone is being hurt.
Not sure if anyone else mentioned, but this corrupt SCOTUS also struck down Miranda rights yesterday. Very timely, no?
If you protest and get arrested, DO NOT SPEAK TO ANY COPS.
https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/supreme-court-rejects-promise-miranda-rights#:~:text=While%20the%20decision%20in%20Vega,a%20critical%20avenue%20for%20justice.
@Seth: If you’re protesting, that has always been a good idea, but when it comes to a serious crime, well, anything you don’t say to the police can be used to cast doubt on anything you later say in court, because juries are generally ignorant and the system is rigged, so you’re potentially caught between a rock and a hard place there.
Their argument is basically “if person A has bodily autonomy I should not have to pay taxes” or something?
They’re pathetic.
@Snowberry
The system has always been rigged. At this point they’re just disposing of the illusion that it was ever intended to be fair in the first place.
Also, Democratic politicians never really wanted to counter anything that the GOP is doing simply because it’s their agenda as well- in many ways, their difference is not in ideology so much as in tactics (I.e., one is openly regressive, the other talks a lot about supporting minority rights but makes “reforms” so incremental that they may as well not be happening- assuming that they don’t simply make excuses about how the time isn’t right for it yet. And the time is never right.)
That said, neither party would actually want the states to outright devolve into their own sub-nations. The federal government would lose too much power if that happened, and the major players in Congress would never tolerate giving up their power to that degree.
Maybe because abortion represents a BENEFIT for women (and women alone). It’s not about rights, it’s about benefits. They just lead water to their Mill.
CNN Said the same thing, but why feminism never campaigned against child support back then? Now THAT things turned ugly, they want symphaty from MEN? Nah, eat shit and die, for all i care
@Joaquín
You forget about how men don’t have to give birth. They just get to cum and done. Their child support is their responsibility just like having to give birth would be the woman’s.
Personally. I think men should have to pay child support the second a woman knows she’s pregnant and they shouldn’t be allowed to get vasectomies now since a woman can’t get an abortion.
Oh and if they get a woman pregnant and she miscarried. They get to go to jail. Just like she could have to. They put a child in danger after all.
When I had my first miscarriage. I was messed up. I was young and didn’t know what to do. There was so much blood. It was a planned Parenthood that got me medical treatment. My friend drove me nearly 3 hours to get to it. They made sure I wasn’t bleeding to death. They made sure I wasn’t septic. The doctor was so paitent and gentle with me. She explained what had happened to me. She explained I needed to be on hormonal birth control for several months before it could actually prevent pregnancy.
She let me go nonverbal and waited till I was able to talk about it. For 16 year old me. That was a life saver. That was the start to really healing.
She gave me resources to help me get off drugs. She helped me find counseling services. That woman. That service. Truely saved my life.
No one should ever have to go through what I went through but that experience made it barrable.
When I went into the clinic. Protestors we’re outside. They shouted at me. Threw God’s name at me. Called me awful things. I was just a child there to get treatment. And there were adults screaming at me.
But an escort came out. She took us in. She held my hand. And she prayed with me when I got in.
That entire process I didn’t have a man give a shit about me or what happened. It was all woman who took care of me and made sure I was healthy. It seems like men just want to cause pain.
lol did that actually make sense inside your head
@Joaquin
Well your guys also want to get ride of birth control so both men and women won’t have that.
Men must be pretty responsible cumming inside of a person when they don’t want kids. Don’t cum inside a person if you don’t want to pay child support. How about that
@LouCPurr
Apparently he missed the fact that if a woman gets an abortion, the man doesn’t have to pay child support.
Poor Joaquin doesn’t understand that all forms of birth control can fail. Also, many of our lovely birth control choices involve hormones that can fuck us up and give us cancer. For over fifty years, people with uteruses have been messing with their hormones so men can rawdog them. But he’s soooooooo maaaaaaaaad that women expect to have another way to control our fertility.
@Joaquin
Well for me currently there is only one birth control I can use that is going to actually prevent pregnancy. American law makers want to get ride of it. And I’m someone who wants child.
But let me guess “eat shit and die “is what you would tell me as that kills me. Nice. I’m sure you care so much about babies
@LouCPurr
I was surprised when I learned almost all the birth control methods available for cis women have nasty potential downsides. It’s what made me realize I should just get a vasectomy and be done with it–since I don’t ever want to be a parent, the fact they’re not always reversible doesn’t bother me.
I wish I knew what to say/do regarding the Supreme Court decision; I just feel so powerless…
Ah, I see Joaquin here is one of those “both women and men have equal responsibility, therefore women should be on all the birth control and carry to term and men should be able to walk away scot free” persuasion.
Yo, I still lurk around here, I just never say anything. This shit has me sick, though. I’m going to be calling my doctor on Monday to discuss a tubal ligation. I’m not currently in a relationship or looking for one, but by the time I am, all of our contraceptive rights and (safe) options may be gone… and I’ve always known I don’t want children.
Why do these fucks want so badly to see women pregnant against their will? Let’s be real, it’s about ‘keeping us in our place.’
Two words:
General strike.
Demand the overthrow of the whole rotten system.
And if they respond by starting a physical fight, you finish it.
@Joaquín
Nope. Also trans men. And roughly half of nonbinary people.
It’s cute that Joaquin thinks child support is enforced in the United States.
@Buttercup
I doubt it’s even enforced in Argentina like he says.
Odds are he knows that one guy went to prison for neglecting his kids and he thinks it’s a great injustice
@ joaquim
Forgive me, but I’m not quite sure that’s correct.
I’ve just checked with a friend. They explained to me about your “1,000 Day Plan”.
For non-Argentine Mamotheers, that was something brought in as a concession when abortion was legalised. Basically, as soon as a woman realises she is pregnant, she can get state support. That’s part cash, but also stuff like free health products and, once the baby is born, food and nappies etc. The benefits last for 1,000 days from when the woman claims them.
The idea is that, if properly supported, women might not feel the need to get an abortion purely for financial reasons.
But my friend says that there is no requirement for men to pay child support before birth.
And my friend works in the Argentine govt; so, unless you can point me to some evidence to the contrary, I’m afraid I’m going to have to defer to them.
(govt website here)
https://www.argentina.gob.ar/salud/1000dias/que-es-la-ley-de-1000-dias
So glad that I got a vasectomy and will never put anyone through this.
Welp, looks like it’s official now. US rights aren’t “privileged” (can be taken away at any time) unless they have sufficient history. In practice this means “continuously existed in England since the Magna Carta” for things the Federalist Society doesn’t like, but “non-continuously since a mythologized version of the antebellum south” for things that they do.