Letters to the Editor
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speaking of pontificating
So, let me get this straight. You think it is ok for women to get abortions but only so long as the agonize over it and consider some Bush like standard of whether it goes beyond cruel and unusual punishment toward the fetus.
Yeah, lets go all Geneva convention on this cytoplast. The last thing we want is some woman waking up six weeks after some guy dumped her and tossing her cookies in the toilet without stopping mide puke to consider the true value of the blessed event wreeking havoc with her digestive system.
No she must ruminate over her one night stand and feel shame for her weekness and responsibility for that "living thing" within her womb. To do otherwise would be the worst of woman and life, someone who would cast away a few fertilized cells like so many soiled tissues. What a horrible woman for doing that.
Meanwhile, while she agonizes over committing the next eighteen years to either a blessing or a curse, and all the costs and medical expenses and pain and loss associated with it, the father of that child, which this auther neglects to mention in anything more than passing, is tossing her life and her future away like the tissue he did not use before impregnating her.
While, she gets to suffer this author's guilt, he doesn't. How totally unlike centuries of religious responsibility. She could have been stoned, burned as a witch, sent off to a school for wayward girls, or just placed on welfare. She could get an abortion and reset her life, but like the author so eloquently argues here, that would be so immoral.
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That's an awfully high "we"s to content ratio
Rather than go back and snip each gossamer strand of argument spanning the yawning gaps in logic in this dissertation, I'll state my position quite simply:
Abortion is a morally neutral act.
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men are responsible for respecting life, too
As a liberal woman, who is pro-choice, I can say for certain...I personally did not need or want an abortion, ever.
But I had an abortion when I was 20 and then last year, when I was 35. Both times, it was the father of the baby who was pressuring me to get the abortion.
When I was in college, the father was a little younger than me and barely had a part-time job, so I could understand why he was afraid to take on the financial responsibility and we were going out for only 1 year, anyway.
Last year, it was a married senior executive of a national television station, the first and only time we had sex without a condom, it was like the second time we slept together. (I had no idea of the existence of Plan B and neither did he). He made sure to lead me to the abortion clinic, get us a private room and stood guard to be sure I went through with it. And then he handed me $1000 cash to deal with the additional medical expenses that we knew would come up with follow-up tests and exams.
And this didn't stop him for wanting to see me, either, instead he decided he would find another way to get his release without risking pregnancy (he refused contraception, you see, very aggressively...the same way the few men I attempted to go out with in New York 27-48 years old, since my divorce, refused contraception, so I didn't sleep with them...why don't you have a talk with them? they refused to wait for me to get the pill- I didn't want to risk my health taking the pill when I wasn't even having sex for a year- and they didn't want to use condoms...we're talking extremely successful, single, white collar professionals with a couple of grad degrees...they should know better, right?? They didn't even care about STDs! I got tested after I had sex with only 1 person in the last 2 years and thankfully everything was negative. These guys said they never got tested, for anything, HPV, HIV, Herpes etc.
SO, I didn't have sex with anyone until I became so lonely I agreed to go out with this guy, despite his marital status. I still would have kept the baby, because my clock is ticking so loudly. My ex-husband had used condoms for 10 years, since he was so fearful of having a family, and I never got pregnant.
I am extremely annoyed to read about this constantly being framed as a woman's choice. I am a college educated, white collar professional. I voted for mostly Democrats in my lifetime. I am not religious. But I can tell you the pain is horrible afterwards. And it was THEIR choice. The men, not mine.
I was extremely depressed for months. Not one person asked me how I felt emotionally before/during/after the procedure and whether I really wanted to go through with it. Sure they made me sign paperwork stating I agreed to it all, but they never took me aside, away from the presence of these guys who accompanied me and asked if I was being pressured into it. I think this is part of the guilt felt by the pro-choice movement...as if they can't admit that any part of this is iffy.
I would love to give Frances Kissling the names/phone numbers or addresses of these 2 men, so she can pay a personal visit to them (one is in Brooklyn and one is in New Jersey) and she can talk to them about individuals acting responsibly towards the creation of life. Because the weekend after the last procedure, when I was holding my belly, in a fetal position on the carpet, and saying I wanted it back, badly...there were no pro-choice or pro-life folks around helping me through it. I feel terribly guilty and I would have loved to raise that baby.
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maybe we should "respect the life creating process"
by making contraception illegal too, and before you get too excited there's no unnatural refraining from sex during fertile times of the month allowed either.
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Who is the audience for this article?
Who supports, right now, already, all the steps that can reduce the need for abortion?--steps such as sex education and easy availability of contraceptives? Answer: Pro-choice advocates.
Who opposes any step to reduce abortions other than the criminalization of all abortions? Answer: Anti-abortionists.
Who is out there calling abortion a wonderful thing? Nobody except the authors of satirical articles in "The Onion."
Who are the women who are so morally insensate about abortion that they take it lightly? Right, there are hardly any such women. If there are, I really want them to be first in line to get abortions, so they will be the last people to have children.
Who is cavalier about "abortions of convenience"? No one. An abortion is never "convenient." It is just almost always better than the alternative.
Once upon a time, supporters of abortion rights all knew this. They knew that abortion was a miserable solution to the problem of an unwanted pregnancy, but morally a solution that was much to be preferred to an unwanted child. But that was before the "pro-lifers" learned the exquisite trick of hiding their real agenda, which is the punishment of sexually liberated women--"you do the crime, you do the time" (nine months pregnancy the minimum sentence)--and switched to their current PR crusade about saving the "babies" and protecting women from the "abortion lobby" and the evil "pro-abortionists." There are NO pro-abortionists anywhere, but never mind. Now we have the excruciating experience of having to read sensitive screeds by pro-choice pro-lifers. They grudgingly support legalized abortions, but they believe that it is VERY IMPORTANT that we all know how much they suffer over the taking of each unborn life. If only they understood that this fact about how sensitive they are has no relevance whatsoever to either our national policies about abortion or to any individual woman's decision about her own abortion. The great mistake of these pro-choice pro-lifers is to think that they have something to tell this woman that the woman does not already know.
Who is supposed to read this article and change as a result? Somewhere in Rush Limbaugh's diseased imagination is a feminazi who is so enamored of abortion that she wants contraception to fail, but if she existed, would SHE be changed by this author's appeal? The rest of us have always known that abortion is a bad day on the calendar, and if forced to be involved in any way have dealt with the difficult feelings in various ways. It has not helped if there were rabid protesters outside the clinic calling abortion "murder." But somehow it is the lowest blow of all when ostensibly pro-choice writers tell us that we still haven't felt bad enough about it.