So far it has been assumed that the only pregnancies which are aborted are accidental ones and the only foetuses destroyed those whose mothers could not bear the thought of their becoming children. In a just world this would be the case, but the world is far from just. Too many women are forced to abort by poverty, by their menfolk, by their parents. Poverty has many faces; it may be the poverty of the young, the unmarried, the student, the unemployed, the female or a combination of these.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how societal injustices and poverty influence women's choices regarding pregnancy.
Germaine Greer's quote emphasizes that the assumption about abortions being solely due to accidental pregnancies overlooks the reality faced by many women. In a world where justice prevails, unplanned pregnancies would be the primary concern, but many women encounter factors such as poverty, societal pressure, and personal circumstances that compel them to consider abortion. This broader perspective reveals the need for a more compassionate and just understanding of women's reproductive choices, which are often influenced by systemic inequalities.
In practice
In a discussion about women's rights at a conference, one might quote Greer to highlight the impact of socioeconomic factors on abortion.
It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation.
Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people's behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.
The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.
Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.
The more there is on offer, the more you don't want. Fifty options of cereal does not hone an epicurean expertise in the finer points of puffed rice, it murders appetite.
The shallow, as intimated, consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
Nada is found within. It is a music without strings which plays in the body. It penetrates the inner and outer and leads you away from illusion.
Politics disappears; it vanishes. What remains constant is human life. So I try to develop a perspective in my writing where politics is just one of the pieces of furniture in this furnished world. It is not the purpose. It is not the goal.
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
Amongst the learned the lawyers claim first place, the most self-satisfied class of people, as they roll their rock of Sisyphus and string together six hundred laws in the same breath, no matter whether relevant or not, piling up opinion on opinion and gloss on gloss to make their profession seem the most difficult of all. Anything which causes trouble has special merit in their eyes.
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