For the story to have worked the way the foreword said it was supposed to work - not as an anti-abortion/anti-FGM polemic, but as an exploration of the extent to which we should or should not be able to alter our bodies - it should not have premised the entire thing on two hot-button current political issues.
It could have never mentioned abortion or FGM, but been, say, about a mother whose daughter has a compulsion to remove her own limbs, in a world where anything you do to your own body is legal. Then it still would have been gross, but been a lot less smug.
As it was, it read exactly as if the point was, "So, you pro-choicers think a woman should be able to do whatever she wants with her own body, huh? Well, how would you feel if what she wanted to do was FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION? And how about if she also wanted to GENITALLY MUTILATE her infant daughter? Not so sure now, are you?"
As you say, too, the entire premise was so unlikely. Laws emerge out of real cultural concerns, not as "spherical cow" thought experiments. Allowing FGM comes out of a specific environment; so does allowing abortion. Just because both involve physical alterations doesn't make a culture likely to see them as morally and legally identical.
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Date: 2011-12-09 09:37 pm (UTC)It could have never mentioned abortion or FGM, but been, say, about a mother whose daughter has a compulsion to remove her own limbs, in a world where anything you do to your own body is legal. Then it still would have been gross, but been a lot less smug.
As it was, it read exactly as if the point was, "So, you pro-choicers think a woman should be able to do whatever she wants with her own body, huh? Well, how would you feel if what she wanted to do was FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION? And how about if she also wanted to GENITALLY MUTILATE her infant daughter? Not so sure now, are you?"
As you say, too, the entire premise was so unlikely. Laws emerge out of real cultural concerns, not as "spherical cow" thought experiments. Allowing FGM comes out of a specific environment; so does allowing abortion. Just because both involve physical alterations doesn't make a culture likely to see them as morally and legally identical.