I found the website of Irene Vilar today via Feminine Genius. I feel like my head is swimming when I try to wrap my mind around what Ms. Vilar appears to be saying. Much of it is confusing ethnocentric-experiential-post-modern mumbo jumbo, but the stark reality of what she has done is like an exclamation point at the end of a very long and confusing paragraph. This dear woman. This dear confused wounded sinful woman.
This statement of hers especially struck me: “As speaker of testimony, I wish to stand as representative of women who have remained silent about the power struggles of their reproductive bodies, especially of those whose bodies have acted out the emotional life and dramas of their families and countries. I wish to distance myself from the at times hyper individualistic mode of memoir writing, though I will inevitably remain forever such a writer. The story begins with a double bind: I’m fated to be misunderstood and my body will never forget the life interrupted that shall die with it.”
Power struggles with their reproductive bodies? Marxism applied to motherhood. Marxism in which the oppressed class is the woman and the oppressor is her fertility and the product of that fertility–her children. A tiny baby the size of a “.” as her oppressor. And, so, to continue reliving the class struggle and finding her freedom, she conceives again and again and has abortion after abortion. An “abortion addict” she calls herself.
It is the ultimate irony, the ultimate warping of the feminine. Woman, who is designed by God to be particularly sensitive to nascent human life and particularly suited to its fulfillment and flowering, seeks her own fulfillment through the destruction of that nascent life. It is so twisted that I have a hard time grasping it.
Dear sad empty sick Ms. Vilar. I just ache for her, even as I feel perplexed revulsion. Blessed Mother, Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for her.
oh this is very sad. I will be praying for Ms. Vilar.