Pro-lifers have successfully framed the abortion debate in their own terms. As they croon about the sanctity of life, and how a fetus is a living thing, they have framed the debate as whether or not one is for abortions. But in reality, the debate is about whether or not a woman has a right to abortion, legally, which is something separate entirely. For example, I support women's legal rights to wear spandex mini-skirts. Yet, personally, not only would I not wear one, but every time I see someone wear one, I feel slightly nauseous.
Furthermore, many people who support a woman's right to abort are not in favor of abortion. They simply acknowledge the reality that abortions will happen whether they are legal or not. The question is whether they will be done safely in a doctor's office, or dangerously in a closet, using a coat hanger.
Pro-choice people must reframe the abortion debate: It is not about whether or not one supports abortions, but about whether, given that they will happen anyway, one wants those abortions to be safe or to endanger the lives of the women to happen.
To those pro-lifers I ask: Are your principles of sanctity of the life of a fetus worthy endangering girls? If so, would you be willing to look into the eyes of a frightened fifteen-year old's family at the funeral and tell them that? If the answer to either of those two questions is no, then maybe it's time to acknowledge that it is possible to be pro-life and opposed to abortion while in favor of a woman's legal right to abort.
1 comment:
WORD. SING IT, SISTA.
agreed 100%
LJ'd abt this in freshman year. copy/pasting it here.
FASCISTS ATTACK BALTIMORE
I may turn this into an editorial should I magically acquire the ability to harness my incoherent rage into something intelligent, well organized, and passably witty. Right now it's just an embryonic rant (ha, ha, ha) so bear with me.
There's a graphic anti-abortion exhibit outside my dorm. Mostly they're going ignored by apathetic students trudging their way to class or Spring Fair (the weather gods are cackling evilly right now), but I am nothing if not pissy and confrontational.
Stupid. I haven't been exposed to such arrant nonsense since Loose Change premiered on youtube.
It wasn't their standard anti-abortion rhetoric that made me want to spit venom; they have a perfect right to stand outside in the cold and bellow, just as I have the perfect right to laugh at all their wasted efforts from the warmth of my dorm. What really got me was their portrayal of the word "choice." There's already an inherent semantic inequality in the monikers for the opposing camps: it's hard to semantically exploit "pro-LIFE," whereas "pro-CHOICE" has fallen prey to the demented moral calculus of cynical propagandists who equate genocide- also a choice- with abortion.
Case in point: a huge poster showcased the different "choices" made by humans. Footage from concentration camps with insets of swastikas and Jewish stars was inscribed RELIGIOUS CHOICE. Pictures of lynchings were captioned RACIAL CHOICE. A snapshot of a bloody fetus hacked apart by an abortion completed the equation in huge white letters: REPRODUCTIVE CHOICE. The poster associated the word "choice" with genocide and lynchings, turning a reference to free will and personal liberty into a savage attack.
I tried to argue, protesting to the guy who came over to shake my hand and greet me as one of "the good people who is doing our work" that I was sickened by their equations. Genocide? Lynchings? I was in Auschwitz this winter, you asshole, don't you DARE compare the suffering and torture of entire races and classes and categories of people with the expelling of a zygote/embryo/first trimester fetus that has taken my body hostage.
"Well, the Jewish side of my family went to Treblinka," explained the woman who chose to deal with me (her unassailable no-nonsense demeanor scary enough to ward off the most persistent and liberal of troublemakers) as if that justified her cynical exploitation of a cataclysmic tragedy to advance her misguided fascistic political agenda. Forget the Holocaust; a lot of (similarly misguided) people have issues with its "idolization" in Jewish culture. Instead imagine a black kid; how would it make him feel to see his brutal history splayed (noncontextually) across a huge billboard to further the Jesus Camp cause?
I made this point, among others, to my interlocutor, who shot me down with rambling, off topic explanations about organ trafficking and the money made off fetus parts.
Adi: You know that even if you overturn Roe v Wade, people will still have abortions, right, in back alleys with fucking, like, coat hangers that will sterilize them and deform the babies they fail to abort? Isn't it better to provide a safe, clean service for desperate girls that won't permanently damage their bodies or deform but preserve the fetus?
Woman: *mutters something about, like, Terry Schiavo, and how if I were rendered brain dead by a car accident "on this very street," organ snatchers would be at perfect liberty to make money off my entrails. She denied claims of overpopulation and the accompanying draining of resources. She shrugged off people's inability to care for the children they do not want to have, citing "drug use" as a reason for poverty and social decay rather than, oh, I dunno, overpopulation and incompetent parenting.
"You're placing far too high an emphasis on resources and money," she informed me, "I have friends who have tons of children and not a lot of money."
"Wonderful," I responded, "but what about people who aren't married? What about people who aren't emotionally or financially prepared to raise the children they don't want to have?"
"Well, I'm not married," she said (big shock) "so I don't have kids." "Er, you know that you can have kids without being married, right?" I asked, rhetorically. "No, you absolutely cannot," she responded emphatically, "without the nuclear family unit civilization would fall apart."
I stared at her openmouthed and walked away, shocked. Forget glib moral arithmetic that equates Nazis with 17-year-old girls whose only crime was a weak condom; this woman didn't believe in contraception and decried overpopulation as a myth. I feel almost inadequate for not being able to correct her, to shake her into cognizance of her stupidity. In more forgiving moments, I believe that people like that are just willfully naive; in more realistic moments, I see this for what it really is: fascism masquerading as morality. This woman demanded an explicit, restrictive framework (abstinence till marriage, marriage for the purpose of recreating the 2.5 kids, white picket fence paradigm) that excludes and alienates the millions of people for whom the nuclear family unit is an outdated, oppressive institution. In her equation, non-reproductive, non-marital, non-heterosexual sex just didn't exist. All children were wanted and raised well and right; poverty, hunger, or abuse are figments of the liberal media's expansive, dangerous imagination. 16 year old girls who were impregnated through rape or incest or poor choices just didn't exist. Marital abuse, homosexuality, or people who choose not marry just didn't exist. She claimed to respect personal freedoms for all people, but denied them to everyone who didn't fit into her framework. This, to me, is a hell of a lot more Nazi-like than expelling a clump of cells from your body.
Yes, I felt inadequate for not being able to hammer in my points coherently. I was so mad I could barely organize my thoughts. And now that I have, I just feel sick, and not all that convinced of my own intellectual prowess, or for the future of this country.
And also I have to go to class and really don't want to walk past them again.
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