Posted on 04/14/2002 8:09:13 AM PDT by The Giant Apricots
What the Choice is All About
by Sarah E. Hinlicky
For a long time it baffled me. To be specific, it baffled me from the first time I heard what exactly an abortion is - I must have been 10 or 11 years old - till last week. I could never ever, for the life of me, no matter how hard I stretched my imagination or suspended my moral judgment, understand why anyone would want to be pro-choice.
I could get the "pro-life-for-me-but-not-anyone-else" point of view, I could conceive (ha!) of the "government-shouldn't-legislate-morality" perspective, I could even sympathize with the "our-country-isn't-there-yet" argument.
But I just couldn't figure out why anyone in her right mind would say that abortion is a right that all women should, must, and ought to have in order to be truly free in a just and democratic society, and thus all other rights should bow before it.
What does the dismembering of fetuses (if you insist on calling them that) have to do with justice and democracy?
And so it was that I spent lo these many years of my life assuming that pro-choice activists either have some sort of inexplicable blood lust, or live in perpetual denial of reality.
But this past week I finally got it. I don't know how they managed to communicate their message so poorly all along that it took me nearly a decade and a half. This is it: when it comes right down to it, pro-choice activists are not talking about fetuses at all.
They're talking about fear. They fear a future in which men control the bodies, lives and futures of women. And that's why we've been talking past each other all this time.
I first began to see the light (so to speak) about two months ago, talking to my old friend Catherine. Catherine does not hesitate to express her opinions or launch the conversation into dangerous topics. We started with capital punishment, and from there it was a short leap to her fears for women during the new presidential regime.
Choice will be taken away, she said, and you know what follows from that. Men impregnating women, keeping them home, beating them up, destroying their career chances, abandoning the infants, children starving on the streets, and the final re-institution of the 1950s.
I was, needless to say, somewhat stunned by the course of her logic. You think we'll get a better world by killing the children? I said.
You think anyone will care to look for solutions to economic and domestic problems when they can just knock off the main players in the drama?
Around and around the debate went. It expanded and contracted and went nowhere. At least we trusted each other to say what we really thought, no small accomplishment in the discussion of this particular issue, but by the end we had to admit that we'd reached a standstill and we might as well quit. (Ironically enough, afterwards Catherine went on to say that she thought our society was hostile to rounded female bodies because it fears fertility in women, and isn't that atrocious?)
The conversation percolated quietly in my brain until this past Thursday, when I went to a public debate on abortion policy over at Princeton University. The main draw: Peter Singer, notorious Australian "bioethicist" who is famous for advocating such things as bestiality and infanticide (the former only if it is mutually pleasurable, the latter presumably not).
His arguments were surprisingly unpersuasive, for they relied upon vegetarianism (?!). The really interesting speaker, in fact, was a student at the university, joining her illustrious colleague on the pro-choice panel.
She spoke very fast and very passionately, and as far as I could tell she only contradicted herself once. But there was this phrase that she kept repeating: "an incubator of the state."
It was her tag line, her emotional hot button, and every time she said it you couldn't help but have a little thrill of 1984-ish horror run up and down your spine. Bearing babies for Uncle Sam? Kitchen, children and church, like Hitler used to say? My uterus a public utility?
What could be more grotesquely offensive to my sensibilities - all of them, as a woman, as a Christian, as an American, as a modern (or even postmodern) - than that? I'm not an incubator of the state, no way.
It took a little while to snap out of the haze she had cast over the crowd. Pro-lifers are certainly not advocating incubation for the state; the phrase misses our point entirely. In the meanwhile, though, I had missed hers too. It took some reflection to get it. She really feared, like Catherine, that some nameless faceless bureaucrats out there (probably men) had it in for her, wanted to punish her for being a woman, being fertile, being (worst of all) sexually active outside of chaste Christian marriage.
She thought that that is what the pro-life side is all about, and she saw her life and future and career and hopes and dreams all threatened.
For her, it's not about life, or babies, or responsibility, or sacrifice. It's all about control. Who's going to control my body, me or the nameless faceless state?
Well heck, I can hardly blame her for choosing herself over them.
The question is, who's got the better grasp on reality? What is this really all about? Is it about saving the lives of innocent babies, or is it about keeping adult women under control?
By sheer coincidence (God's way of remaining anonymous, as the old French proverb goes), the very next day I stumbled across a novel in the library called The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood, copyright 1986. It's a movie now too, I guess, and I must have heard the name tossed about on the breeze, so I thought I should read it, ignoring the three 20-page papers I have due in less than a month.
It's a story of a theocracy in not-so-far-distant America, renamed the Republic of Gilead, run by nasty men who take some stuff in Genesis as prescriptive rather than descriptive. Women are divided into their three (and only) functions: Wives, who look pretty and with some luck bear sons, Handmaids who bear sons (for Wives who can't) but do nothing else, and Marthas who cook and clean. They lead regimented lives, every step and bite and word under scrutiny, but men come and go as they please.
Women who perform all three functions, for poorer men, are disdainfully called Econowives. All marriages are arranged and pleasurable sex is permitted only with prostitutes (called Jezebels, of course). Procreating is the only goal in life for women. Love is not a factor. Women who fail in their appointed duties are sent to clean up toxic waste in the Colonies; they only last a couple years, at most.
The moral of the story is not too hard to figure. Men must not control female sexuality, but they obviously want to. Abortion must stay legal. Love must stay free, marriage breakable.
If not, we will have social totalitarianism upon us, and all the progress of the past 40 years will be swallowed up by another interminable reign of the uterus. It's a well-told story, and properly terrifying. Imagine having my books, my school, my tank tops taken away! Imagine having my Bible turned into an instrument of torture! No, I don't want that either.
But is that the threat?
It clicked, finally. When I as a pro-life woman am talking to another woman who is pro-choice, we are not talking about the same thing. I am talking about my horror that the most vulnerable humans in our country are being slaughtered at the rate of 4,400 a day because they can't be paid for, because the boyfriend doesn't want that, because social disapproval has overcome the mother, because fear is the number one motivating factor. But she is talking about her horror that her education might be ended, her rights revoked, her career squelched, all because she has chosen to have sex with a man and nature has taken its course, or worse yet she has been raped by a man and nature has taken its course, and someone out there had decided to punish her for violating their morality.
We're not talking about the same thing. No wonder we can't understand each other. No wonder we can't persuade each other.
As a matter of fact, though, she raises some good questions. Is the pro-life side always motivated purely out of love for the unborn child? You don't need to go to the extreme of abortion clinic bombers to find exceptions to what should be the rule.
Pro-lifers often have strong feelings about chastity and sexual responsibility. Is there a certain amount of satisfaction in the thought that these women are being disproved in their casual sexuality? Or that single irresponsible men are being brought to account for their own wanton behavior?
Or that sex is manifestly not just about having a good time? Is there even a hint of that in there?
I'll tell you right now: that has to go. Not one of us is one hundred percent chaste in word and deed and it is not our business to judge. Life judges harshly enough as it is. Single mothers are the heroes of our time for not taking the easy way out, and we ought to be telling them that. We ought not to be moralistically informing the world that sex has its consequences and they should've seen it coming. They're smart enough to figure that out for themselves. And it shows very little love for people in situations of genuine personal distress.
But I have some questions for my pro-choice friend too. Who does she think is out to get her? Does she really imagine a conspiracy of control-freak middle-aged white upper-middle-class corporate men who want to turn her body into another profit-churning manufacturing plant?
In this prosperous job market, are they really out for her career and her job power? Do they really see her as a machine whose main purpose is to produce babies? I think it's fair to say that her enemies, in this society and at this time, are far more interested in her not producing babies - inconvenient, demanding, messy things that they are. The man most interested in her sexuality is the one who can profit from it without any cost to himself, and he's the one who'll keep her pigeonholed, as non-wife non-mother non-commitment, by his true commitment to abortion availability.
The sad irony for my pro-choice friend is that the abortion regime is far more likely to produce men indifferent or hostile to women than one in which love, marriage and children - the package deal - is given the highest priority.
An honest assessment of sexual dynamics in this country is in order. It is bizarre that possibly 50 percent of marriages fail. It is bizarre that so many abortions are deemed necessary. It is bizarre that pregnancy has been logically disconnected from sex. It is bizarre that broken relationships are the standard experience of modern people. It is bizarre that commitment seems irrational. It is bizarre that is so hard for young folks to fall in love, promise themselves to each other, get married and stick it out.
You've got to wonder about a society when the most natural thing in the world has been turned into the most unnaturally difficult thing in the world.
(Un)fortunately, it's also our only hope.
Enmity has been there between men and women since the beginning of time and shows no signs of abating. There is only one place where a man and a woman can really come to terms with each other, without the games, without the hostility, without the pretense and without the clothes. That is in marriage, operated on trust, and formed in love. Falling in love is the only thing that softens otherwise calculating and manipulative creatures; staying in love, loving willfully and deliberately and permanently against all the odds, is the only way to keep the enmity at bay. This is how men stop seeing women as meat, objects, possessions, trinkets, subplots; this is how women stop distrusting, deceiving and wheedling for power that they physically don't have.
According to that illogic, women who couldn't nurse would be less-capable mothers.
And before you claim biological superiority as usual, have you heard of a lady named Andrea Yates? Susan Smith?
...still blatantly false.
My point, is, INDEED, very relevant. In fact, it is just what many pro-choice men probably hope for.......that if the woman gets pregnant, she will take care of the abortion herself, so the blood won't be on his hands.
The most rabid "pro-choicer" I know is a single, middle aged man, who has no interest in taking responsibility for any offspring he might produce. He told me so one night while he was drunk on too much wine. :(
Oh look, instead of the usual maternal supremacy twaddle, we have a contention based upon an old, incoherent drunk....
Well done!
Any fool on this board willing to admit to a little common sense knows that a low-life type of guy who doesn't want to have anything to do with a girlfriend's pregnancy would just love NOT to know about it. Oh, I forgot! The only low-lifes around here are the women who trick men by getting pregnant.
I may not be a professional debater, but then again, I know a little bit about human nature.
Right, right.
(Did you write it? If you did, get off the forum and finish those papers! Signed, Substitute Mom.)
Sure it is.
If you want to claim history, you'll have to take all of it, or it bears no weight...and until 1839, fathers were guaranteed custody of all their children, infants included; it was that way for all of time before then. Maternal custody is relatively new.
But in any case, I've got to go take care of business.
Been vaguely entertaining.
It's like one of those surreal fairy tales of wicked witches.
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