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Women still bear the vast brunt of the physical, emotional, and organizational labor involved in contraceptive use — whether any devices are available at all, whether they are safe or not, and when they fail. For the majority of the world’s women modern contraceptive measures such as the pill, condoms, injectibles, or IUDS are simply not an option—a situation that is exacerbated by the matricidal policies toward abortion and family planning by many of the world’s wealthiest countries (only family planning based on abstinence was supported under the “pro-Africa” Bush administration — a policy with extremely deleterious consequences for the ability of anti-retroviral treatment to prevent the spread of AIDS as well as for rates of maternal and child mortality).
Access to safe, affordable, or free abortion is similarly limited.
Famously, there is no country in the world where women have the
legal right freely to make up their own minds about termination or
continuation of pregnancy. Thus, despite the emphasis by many modern
democratic nations on the protection of various individual rights
and freedoms, women’s reproductive rights remain in an essentially
pre-modern condition—a condition decried by both Firestone and
Beauvoir as biological feudalism.
”
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Mandy Merck (Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone (Breaking Feminist Waves))