My real point is probably that I don't want only the general consensus to determine my highly personal moments of transition. I find that consensus can also contradict my personal or intimate need to know when something is "new" for me. Whether it is health or habit. There is a highly personal, mine, health and habit. But when the general public starts to penetrate so much into this intimate area, I build up resistance.
I begin to question, as I do now, the entire construct of my previous life. On the one hand, this can be very enlightening, on the other hand, it can be very frightening.
An example: In Germany it is legal for a woman to have an abortion until the third month of pregnancy. It is common for her to swallow the contraceptive pill until she is on average thirty years old. Aborting a pregnancy is a highly intimate decision, but it is nevertheless considered a legal as well as moral decision for the general public.
But what is generality? Is it a judge who sentences me for having an abortion from the first day after the third month? Or is it not rather my very direct social environment that might try to influence this matter? It always depends on who I am dealing with. Is it the doctor? Is it my husband? My family? Who is it? It is always those people I decide that I will allow to have an influence on me. Not the ones I don't want to be influenced by. Isn't it also the growing life inside me that I want to "listen" to? My personal attitude towards what I define as living?
Fortunately I never came into this dilemma. However, as far as the contraceptive pill is concerned, I would decide differently today than when I was a young woman. The entire market of contraception on the one hand and artificial insemination on the other hand is exactly that for me: a sales market. If I decide not to become pregnant, I have other means that seem worth considering. Women should educate women, not primarily school or the state.
Yes, you raised a good point. We can equally define everything as "new" when we speak of a constant change in human existence, biologically and socially, planetary.
But what bothers me most is the loss of individual choice. This must and should be possible, because if I am only presented with external, i.e. legal, moral, cultural, political, economic, biological, psychological factors and consents, then I lose my sovereignty.
Thus a physician must not refuse to help me and, for example, refuse a medical certificate and suggest to me that I am only imagining my suffering. It is ultimately up to me to decide whether I classify myself as healthy or sick, fit for work or not.
At present, however, the lawmaker says when I have to be considered sick. That is an absurdity. It is a gross violation of my sovereignty and presents me as common property, as the property of those who want to force me to obey. This is the opening of Pandora's box. And probably only time will make us forget again that what has escaped from the box as a poisonous and foggy vapor that misleads the senses may finally dissolve into sound and smoke.
I see. I can understand what you say. It is a matter of individual choice, as you say, but we must know that our choices have consequences and that choosing carries responsibility, so it is not simply about doing what we want. All of society and other external agents try to intervene in our decisions because, in theory, they want to control us and make us do what they think is right, that's not the way and in a perfect world that would not happen, but we must know that, despite this, we do have to choose wisely and be fully aware of what the decisions we make mean.
In the end, it is something very intimate as you said yourself, because nobody should tell us how to exercise our freedom, and nobody can tell us what is right and what is not, because no one knows exactly what state we are in and what we can and cannot do, and what is the best we can do, which would be the right thing to do, and since no one knows that, it is a personal decision that we must make and face.
I don't know, but its complex.