The woman thing

March 10, 2006 in Abortion

(This is the second part of my abortion series. See the intro and the first part, “It’s all about the sex.”)

In the intro to this multi-post rant on abortion, I said, “Instead of arguing the immediate issue of abortion, the issue of body control…etc – which other people who have more vested in those questions do much better than I ever could – I want to explore the larger issues…”

Which was a dumb thing to say. Because the more I researched “pro-life” positions and groups and legislation, the more I realized that the movement was primarily concerned with bodies.

Women’s bodies.

Take this heart-felt editorial written by a man who regrets his girlfriend had an abortion back in 1978:

I, like many in the late 1970s, experienced some of the liberal viewpoints of the era. During college, I had been with a woman and she became pregnant.

My family didn't have any other male progeny. I was the sole male Schultz remaining on the family tree – as my father was in poor health and would soon pass away, never being a grandpa. The ability to father a son meant a great deal to him, and to me. However, the action of the young lady aborting our son has left an indelible scar on my soul to this day.

As a young man who impregnated her, I offered to marry. However she feared the reaction of her family. We were both Catholic.

As the father, I never had the chance to prevent her action as it was "her body." Was this fair to the father who wanted a son, and offered to marry her?

As a result of this, I have become ever more adamant that abortion leaves permanent scars on those in my position; scars I have now. There was no danger to the mother. There was no impediment to her obtaining the abortion. And, I had no way to influence the outcome for a son who now would be about 28 years old and bear my name.

This emotional scar has altered my perception on both sides of the abortion issue.

Yes, the woman can claim it is her body and she can do anything with it. But what about the potential father? What right does he have? What option does he have but to live with the fact that he will know for the rest of his life that he lost a son, and potential heir, in a family where out of five males on my father's side all were unable to sire any children? Even my birth to my parents as they reached their 39th birthday was quite a surprise, as they were told they could not have children.

I wonder what my son would have been like. But with legalized abortion, I'll never know the joy. I have to live with the permanent scar for an action I did not want.

To this day I wonder about my son. What would he be like? However, I was deprived this due to perceived familial pressure.

In the meantime, I love the boy and girl I conceived in marriage. I contend that the rights of the father who wants to be a dad need to be debated.

This is just a letter from one Utah man, not the entire anti-abortion movement, but there’s a not-so-subtle subtext to his words that seems be common to many opposing abortion.

Basically, the “lost child” was the valuable “heir” to his family, the boy that would carry on his family’s name, the child to compensate for the family men’s inability to “sire.”

For all we know, he could be talking about horses.

And that’s the deal. The boy is a valuable commodity in the family name. The mother of the boy a precious vessel to carry his son to term.

In other words, the fetus is his right, his property as male “sire.”

The mother? A baby machine.

A central idea running through the anti-abortion movement is that a woman is not in full control. She needs guidance to find her “true calling”: motherhood. If introduced to the pleasures of sex without the influence of a paternal, benevolent male guide, she will trod the path of licentiousness and lust. If introduced to dangerous feminist ideas, she might prefer to pursue a career, become a lesbian, or, worse still, both. If left to decide the fate of her fetus, she might make a mistake and abandon a sire’s heir.

Or, as Amanda says, women are like sheep.

Most [abortion protestors] are absolutely floored at the very idea that women’s decisions should be examined at all – to them, only the doctor who performed [the abortion] is morally accountable because he had the job to direct the amoral sheep-like woman towards the “correct” decision of not aborting and he fell down on his job of providing guidance.

Consider Ellen Goodman’s words in a recent editorial about the South Dakota abortion ban:

Even this week, with superb irony, Governor Rounds promised tender care for the women he would force to continue their pregnancies. Representative Hunt explained that women themselves would not be prosecuted under the law because any woman choosing abortion was ''not thinking clearly." (Tell that to the US soldier who made a 700-mile round trip to the clinic that January day.)

Unfortunately, women are not sheep. Identical to males in genetic makeup, with the exception of a single chromosome, women are able to reason, have individual consciousness, desire, enjoy sex, and contain the multitude of hopes, envies, aspirations, and ambitions equal to even the most complex of men.

Any given woman may be equal to, or even superior to, her male counterpart when considering a thorny problem. Such as pregnancy.

Lately there’s a lot of rhetoric circling the ‘Net, like the letter I posted today. What about a man’s right to “choice” in the debate? Can’t he have power over the ultimate decision?

There is a point. Men are strangely absent from the content in this debate.

Not that they should have an equal say (or superior say, if the abortion ban stands) in deciding the fate of a fetus – after all it is the mother who bears the child, whose body is ravaged by the trauma of pregnancy and birth, who is expected to do all the difficult work, the feeding, clothing, and raising of any children.

Not that men should have the right to duck any financial obligation to a child if the mother opts to bear it. (Trust me, as a father of two toddlers, paying half your salary is ridiculously painless compared to the hands-on work of raising kids.)

No, men belong in the debate because they must participate in conceiving a child. Where’s all the hubbub and furor surrounding the easy virtue of men? Why aren’t pro-lifers working to curtail male sexuality? If we sequester boys into heartland monasteries, keep them buckled into elaborate male chastity belts, we wouldn’t have to worry about abortion rights, would we?

Men don’t think they have the power of choice?

Of course they do! A man’s choice is simple. He can choose with his c*ck.

Don’t like abortions? Don’t f*ck.

Update: Here's a related post that popped onto Feminist Blogs during my rant:

But no matter. It's no coincidence that this case is being taken seriously now. The anti-choice, reactionary, theocratic wingnuts want to put women in their place, like the good old days, when men were told that "boys will be boys" and women were either virgins or whores, and children were bastards. Back then there was a lot of hostility about how women tried to trap helpless men into marriage, while putting women on pedestals and waxing poetic about nice girls and good wives, and the power behind the throne. All the while, the cast-off women and girls had these dubious choices: a) a back-alley abortion, b) going through forty weeks of pregnancy with all of its risks and complications only to give the resulting child up for adoption, or c) going through forty weeks of pregnancy with all of its risks and complications to be a single mother with no support. Either option also got you branded a slut, moral panics about womens' behavior, and a lecture about keeping your legs closed. Much like now, in fact.

Links…

March 10, 2006 in Links

The Last Best Place got its hands on the menu of the Abramoff-owned restaurant that Burns staffers treated like their own cafeteria.

Woman fired for displaying an Air America bumper sticker on her car. And you think we have it rough in Missoula.

Maryland ditches touch-screen voting machines. Viva democracy!

Justice O’Connor slams the GOP for judicial interference. And we’ve just replaced her with a guy who salivates over the prospect of executive authority.

Joshua Micah Marshall has more on the “Fancy Ford” attack website, with links to other bloggers’ reactions.

Now we know why Murdoch bought MySpace.com.

Louisiana Republican distributes essay charging “welfare-pampered blacks” with waiting for government help to save them from Hurricane Katrina. Between this, the “Fancy Fred” site, and North Carolina Republican congressional candidate Vernon Robinson’s commercial, there’s a pattern emerging…

Creeps: Ralph Nader and Bill Napoli

March 10, 2006 in Creep

I was battling insomnia last night and trolling the web when I came across this interesting post on Michael Bérubé’s site about Ralph Nader, and a story in the NY Times from 2000 called, “Nader Sees a Bright Side to a Bush Victory.”

Huh? That can’t be right!

Read on…

…[Nader] called the possibility that a court packed with Republican appointees could overturn Roe v. Wade a “scare tactic.” On Sunday, Mr. Nader said in a television interview that even if Roe v. Wade was overturned, the issue “would just revert to the states.” Just?

[snip]

He said he did not in any case believe for a moment that Mr. Bush would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade. “The first back alley death, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble and they know it,” he said. He described the party’s opposition to abortion as just for show, “just for Pat Robertson."

Bérubé:

The idea is that an actual abortion ban would go too far: the first back alley death, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble. Well, maybe and maybe not, folks. You might think, along similar lines, “the first hideous death by torture in the War on Terror, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first unconstitutional power grab by the executive branch, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first data-mining program of domestic spying, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” or “the first systemic corruption scandal involving Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham and Tom DeLay, and the Republican Party is in deep trouble,” and you’d be, ah, wrong, you know.

And, in some part thanks to Nader’s insistence that the two presidential candidates in 2000 were indistinguishable, we now have Bill Napoli, who, as I’m sure you know by now, said this in an interview:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Napoli says most abortions are performed for what he calls "convenience." He insists that exceptions can be made for rape or incest under the provision that protects the mother's life. I asked him for a scenario in which an exception may be invoked.

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

Now we have a creep with violent misogynist fantasies dictating what South Dakota women do with their wombs. He’s coming after your wombs, too. And he’s not stopping there. He wants to outlaw contraception. And then, who knows? Sky’s the limit.

Ultimately, the loss of the 2000 election cannot be put solely on the shoulders of Nader. If Gore/Lieberman hadn’t taken a hard right after the primary, if black-robed partisans on the SCOTUS hadn’t halted a Florida vote count, if liberal supporters of Gore had reacted with fury and action, if the media hadn’t pushed a quick resolution on the country, if if if. But Nader was part of the problem and lured many to vote for him by spinning the illusion that there’s no difference between the two parties.

Only now there’s a war in Iraq. Massive tax cuts for the wealthiest. Slashed public programs. Domestic spying. The Patriot Act. We’ve lost a war, a major city, and now we may have lost women’s reproductive rights.

I have learned two lessons from this:

ONE. Talk about splitting the Democratic party is nonsense. That would only ensure Republican dominance for the next…oh…generation? Two generations? Hello theocracy? Vote Democrat and vote often.

TWO. Criticizing Democratic candidates for not chasing after the issues you’re interested in – choice, Iraq – is only talk. If you want the Dems to change the way they do things, you’ve got to become a Democrat. Join the party. Work on the campaigns of the people you agree with. If you’re an advocate of choice, make choice your “litmus test.” Support with financial help and time the candidates that support choice. Work against the candidates who are anti-abortion.