Anti-Feminism on a Pre-Teen Howrse Forum

I am the happy mother of two wonderful daughters.  My oldest girl loves horses and owns one that lives at her grandparents’ farm.  She also visits an online forum that allows her to breed horses at a virtual horse farm.

But just like many online communities, it has a fair number of anti-feminists.  After visiting this site for a few months, she discovered that at one time it was possible to give your horse an abortion.  If you bred her at the wrong time and you didn’t plan it right and you wanted to undo your mistake, you could give your mare an abortion.  Of course this angered many of the Christians on the site that demanded that howrse.com disable this feature.  And just like in the real world, the Christians go their way.

You have to understand that these kids take this site very seriously and get very attached to their virtual horses.  So they have a favorite mare and they want to have a foal.  They have the mare covered.  But then they discover that they need money to cover the vet bills for their mare and all the other costs that a pregnancy entails.  The forums are full of kids that are freaking out because they don’t have the money to pay for the costs of the pregnancy and no way to undo the mistake.  Want to guess what happens to a pregnant mare on howrse that doesn’t get the medical care that it requires?

Just like in the real world, they get sick and die. 

This has led to a number of interesting conversations with my child about the implications of the pro-life world view.  We agree that it is terrible that so many women die because religious fundamentalists are offended by women excercising control over their own body parts.

This world view is so powerful to many people, that they get offended by a pixelated horse character on an internet forum getting an abortion.  We agree that this is insane.