Women Hating Women Loving Babies

I usually, for reasons of personal and psychological health, choose not to participate in broad public forums like Facebook regarding controversial political issues. Give me a closed group or a great blog, I'm your girl. Facebook status threads, notsomuch. However, a friend of mine from college posted something about her concern regarding the troubling implications of the recently passed bill HR 358, or "Let Women Die Act" as it's been termed in the media. I am always so pleased to see old friends post unexpected things regarding women's rights and issues of similar ilks that I couldn't help but get involved. It IS troubling. The implications of a bill that allow doctors to choose willy nilly who they value more, woman or wombdweller, extend way beyond the usual pro-life/ abortion rights debate. This speaks to what Lauren Berlant writes of in her book The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citzenship regarding the American obsession with futurity and the primacy of the fetus in questions of political viability of it v. the woman who carries it. Women's rights as citizens are decreasing on the regs. All around us. Yet it is interesting to me that it seems like no one really cares very much anymore. . . chiefly women. Their arguments for their rights are startlingly absent. Operating in a rather insulated political world where I take for granted the progressivism I'm around, I had forgotten until this morning just how misogynistic women can be. How self-loathing we have become. Couch it in religious ideology, political slants, whatever you want -- when a woman's life is less valuable to most women than the fetus residing within her, we've got us a big problem. And my friend on Facebook asked, "Where's the media coverage?" WHERE IS THE MEDIA COVERAGE? Turn on the TV, log onto Facebook, pull up the CNN homepage. The Occupy Wall Street news is everywhere. People are outraged. People are active. Where is their outrage regarding the state of women's healthcare? Where is the bustle over how disenfranchised women are becoming and how widely accepted this seems to be? In this 21st Century when anyone can do anything anywhere and we are all working so tirelessly for LGBTQ rights and issues of class, where are all the feminists? It really kinda freaks me out.