{"id":1926,"date":"2005-11-04T01:00:47","date_gmt":"2005-11-04T08:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1926"},"modified":"2005-11-04T01:00:47","modified_gmt":"2005-11-04T08:00:47","slug":"why-most-americans-support-parental-notification","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1926","title":{"rendered":"Why Most Americans Support Husband Notification"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cathy Young<\/a>, responding in part to my post here<\/a>, writes:\n\n

Incidentally, in various polls, about 70% of Americans favor a law requiring a woman to notify her husband — some polls include “partner” as well — if she’s having an abortion. So either the vast majority of Americans support male patriarchal ownership of women, or there is something else at stake.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another possibility – one that seems more likely – is that the majority of Americans haven’t given enough thought to the question to have an informed opinion. Husband notification is an obscure issue, and it’s likely that many of the people who were polled never knew about the potential downsides of such a law. If this were a hotly debated, much-talked about issue, the pro-choice objections to husband notification – both its sexist roots, and the concern that such a law might lead to women being punished by their husbands through emotional abuse, or through spreading the word that she’s had an abortion, or through cutting her access to shared family resources – would be much more generally known. My speculation is that if that were the case, we’d see radically different poll results.<\/p>\n

Cathy’s post implies that if lefties criticize a sexist (racist, homophobic, etc) policy <\/em>, that’s in some way equivilent to accusing anyone who supports the policy of being “a fascist, a neanderthal, or a male chauvinist pig.”<\/p>\n

I don’t think that’s the case. I can think of nonsexist reasons for someone to support a husband-notification policy: Maybe they want to encourage fathers to be more connected to children (as fathers would be, in a less sexist society), for example. It is because <\/em>I think non-sexist people sometimes support sexist policies that I make the arguments I do; I’m hoping that, if I can convince someone that a policy is rooted in sexist assumptions, that will make them less likely to support it.<\/p>\n

(More on this general subject here<\/a>).<\/pracut>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cathy Young, responding in part to my post here, writes: Incidentally, in various polls, about 70% of Americans favor a law requiring a woman to notify her husband — some polls include “partner” as well — if she’s having an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion-reproductive-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}