Musing on Society Today
Rehearsals are going well. We have run both acts twice and they are flowing well. Tonight we do our first full run. We had a cast member drop out at the last minute earlier this week. I get one of her lines. That meant having to change what I do at the end of one of the numbers, but that makes it easier for me. I'm feeling pretty good about the show right now.
I had a good Labor Day weekend. The weather wasn't great for most of it. It didn't stop me from going to the barn on Saturday and Sunday. That's good because it's the last time I will be able to go Saturday and Sunday for a long time. This coming weekend I won't go at all because I have a sitzprobe on Saturday and an all-day, all-night rehearsal on Sunday. Saturday night we are going to see a couple of our friends perform in Young Frankenstein at the Elmwood Playhouse. I'm looking forward to that. I like Nyack and I haven't been there in a few years. It's such a charming town. I insisted we have dinner there. Kevin was thinking of auditioning himself, but he's skittish about musicals given his lack of dance skills. Curtain Call is doing the same play later in the season. Kevin has a chance to try out for that. But they are also doing A Few Good Men in the spring and that's the play he's aiming for.
Anyway, in the midst of everything else, I am trying to do more reading. I read a book this week (in fact, I devoured it), called The Farm. It's a dystopian novel about a facility for surrogate mothers. Wealthy women pay to keep these surrogates at this spa-like home where they were constantly monitored to produce the healthiest babies possible. The surrogates have little contact with the outside world. Their emails are monitored and they can't use phones. They have specialized diets, required exercise sessions and weight monitoring, and have to put headphones on their bellies for a certain amount of time each day to make the fetuses listen to enriching music. They have regular ultrasounds and irregularities mean abortions. The hosts, as they are called, are paid generously for their time and receive bonuses for a live birth. White, educated hosts are considered "premium", but the organization preys on immigrant women looking for any way they can to improve their lot in life.
This makes me think a lot about how our society tries hard to set up a system where poor women have babies for rich women. I have to laugh at the anti-choicers who think it's a unicorn and rainbow world where any poor woman who can't afford a baby simply gives it up for adoption and everyone is happy. Poor women are not baby factories for rich women. No woman owes her baby to someone else. I hate it when an infertile woman, or even any woman who had issues with conception and birth, will say something stupid like, "How could you have an abortion when I can't have a baby/had such trouble having my baby?" Well, your infertility is not the result of someone else's abortion. Those two events are mutually exclusive.
Reading this book came on the heels of following the IVF journey of a couple I follow on YouTube, Jessi and Alessio. Their audience often asks why they don't adopt. They said something that made a lot of sense to me. They said the current adoption system in this country isn't about the children. It's about the parents. Who does it benefit? Adoption is expensive and time-consuming and it's more focused on giving a couple of baby instead of giving a child a home. That made sense to me. If it were all about the children, adoption wouldn't be so hard. The adoption system in our country is about rich families wanting to have a newborn baby that is the correct race and is healthy in every way. Meanwhile kids are languishing in foster care with no chance in life. Do you know how many homeless people are kids who aged out of foster care?
A few years ago I read a novel called Before We Were Yours, which was about the Tennessee Children's Home Society. This was an organization that used all kinds of cruel and unethical tactics to rip poor children from their parents and sell them to wealthy families. This is a great illustration of how children have always been seen as a commodity to be bought and sold. Patriarchy always sees women as babymaking factories. They not only have to make babies for their husbands, but they have to provide babies for wealthy families too.
Of course there is another reason for poor women to have babies in our late capitalist hellscape. Thanks to the handful of advances feminism managed to push through to help women, American women have some control over their finances and their reproductive health. When given choices, women are not as eager to keep breeding, thus birth rates in this country are falling. This means a shrinking labor force. The smaller the labor force, the higher value of that labor. The ownership class of this country doesn't want that to happen. They need poor people to make more babies they can't afford so they will be willing to take any jobs they can find for as little money as possible. Capitalism demands a job shortage and not a labor shortage. The hypocrites in government and big business want to ban abortion because they claim it's for the babies. No. It's for the ownership class that wants a cheap labor supply. It's for the government that wants more poor people to create a steady supply of soldiers in the military.
I am sure this post will need a lot of proofreading, but I am not up to it now. I will go over it and make changes later. I think I need to continue to make notations about what I do right and what I do wrong in my posts. I stopped doing that. I need to restart. I need to pat myself on the back for doing well and pointing out ways I can improve.