The Haves and the Have-It-Nots

[trinityvixen]

Reading the news is depressing me. Watching The Daily Show depresses me. Things I got hooked on during the election campaigns are now biting me at every turn. The only slim relief is to read the Op-Eds at The New York Times and feel like I'm not alone. There's all this stink about how the Democrats are out of touch with the people. Well, excuse me, very much, I'm one of those people that they are in touch with, even if I think their ability to apply themselves is sorely lacking. Basically, it's like being told I'm out of date all the goddamned time, and, even when people doing it rail against Bush, it doesn't fix the problem of me feeling like old news. If tomorrow's moving the way the Christian Right says it must, I would rather be old and fair than new and theocratic.

But I came to a recognition of my own yesterday, something most people already knew but which has really clarified things for me, and reassured me that, yes, I am a Democrat. When I think back on all the things I argued for keeping or protecting, almost none of them are rights or priveleges I would enjoy myself. I am pro-choice, but I almost certainly will never be in a situation where I am pregnant against my will (knock on wood) or inclination, and even still, I'm not sure I would go through with the abortion process. That's just my choice. I'm pro-gay marriage, but I don't intend to get married any time soon if at all, besides the fact that I'm not gay. Doesn't affect me, personally, if gay and lesbian couples can't wed, but it would hurt friends, and in the spirit of equality, I say let them wed, let them unionize, but recognize them, damn it. I'm pro-stem cell research, something which I potentially could benefit from, but most likley not in my lifetime, I would guess. It could be 50 years before that's possible, maybe more. DNA's only 50 years old, and do we know all there is to know about it? Believe it or not, stem cells may be infinitely more complicated, especially as to their clinical application. But I'm for the research. I'm ALWAYS for research. Study twice, decide once, Dubya.

I am fiscally conservative, which, honestly, can be quite selfish--why spend today what I'll have to pay a lot more for tomorrow? But more than that, I'm anti-tax cut right now, in favor of spending the money to arm our troops and protect our nation better, among other, you know, less important things than what brought most people to the polls (you know, stupid things like education, welfare reform, etc). I'm not in favor of privatizing Social Security even though, as a younger person, that means I'm less likely to suffer as I will have a lifetime to provide for myself until I retire, versus those who would be older and still under the privatization cut-off. My real concern with that issue is the loss of benefits to people who would otherwise be funded by my generation, now not if we have our own investment portfolios in place of SS. Prescription drugs should be pushed aside for generics to the elderly, too, again, not directly affecting me. Health care, dental, yeah, I care about myself, but I'm pretty healthy and I'm not concerned with my immediate survival on those scores (at least, not now that I have the wisdom teeth out).

I thought about this. The big issues for me--mostly social issues--aren't my fight. They're someone else's rights that I want kept, expanded, protected, guaranteed. And that, to me, is the heart of America, the reason we disengaged from the colonizing empire and based our new nation on principles of freedom for all. If I fight as hard to protect your rights as I do my own, so long as our rights end where the other's begins, that's democracy, that's equality, that's liberty, and that is freedom.

Whereas the problem I have with Republicans is that they're the THOU SHALT NOT HAVE to my 'Have it, if you got it' attitude. It's an incredibly patronizing GOP these days, too, which is my No. 1 pet peeve in just about any situation. If someone talks down to me, tells me things are being done for my own good even though they're precisely what I don't want now or ever and pretends that it's better that I don't have what I want, I get really, really pissed. What's worse is the 'thou shalt not' attitude of the GOP has gone farther right such that when they tell me what I believe is wrong and evil, they add the fires of damnation to my denouncement.

THOU SHALT NOT HAVE ABORTIONS (Aka Republican Joe): they're wrong, and evil, and you're going to go to hell for destroying life!
Me: But I don't believe that something that can't live outside of a woman's body is alive. Talk to me about partial-birth in the third trimester, then I believe you find me more accomodating to this...
THOU SHALT NOT HAVE ABORTIONS: you're a murderer, and for corrupting others and spreading false word, you will burn in hell and every baby that dies will be on your head.
Me: It's not a baby.
THOU SHALT NOT HAVE ABORTIONS: LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION!
Me: Actually, the egg and sperm were alive before that. Still, the zygote that occurs after can't survive on its own. Therefore, it's an extension of the woman's body, practically a parasite, and hers to choose what she does with it.
THOU SHALT NOT HAVE ABORTIONS: You're responsible for all the damned souls that go and get abortions! You cannot wash your hands of your sin!
Me: But I don't believe that it is a sin.
THOU SHALT NOT HAVE ABORTIONS: IT IS! WE WILL MAKE IT SO!

Etc. etc. etc. I might just have to have more of these THOU SHALT NOT v Me mock debates. It's a lot more cheering than, say, talking to an actual Republican. I'm still pissed and I would see smugness everywhere, especially, methinks, in a New York Republican.

Comments

[earthrise.livejournal.com]

This is what many anti-choice people don't understand: abortion is not a recreational practice. Having a baby is *serious* business. It takes planning on all levels of life, and the ability to understand and deal with the fact that there will always be a being out there for whom you are responsible. If you're not able to have a baby, you should be able to have a contingency plan in the case that the possibility of having one accidentally comes up.

I know that as an adoptee you probably have interesting views on that last bit. However, just realize that I've never heard of cases whereby people have abortions flippantly. It just doesn't happen.

[viridian.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree with you about abortion being not a flippant decision for most people. That doesn't factor into why I think it's morally wrong - I wouldn't go so far to say that abortion is murder, but there's something that I just think is viscerally wrong about terminating a potential life for reasons that are anything less than health issues or rape/incest issues.

It really comes down to personal responsibility for me. I think that if you can't afford a baby then it's your responsibility to make damn sure you don't get pregnant in the first place, and if that fails, to try to carry the pregnancy to term anyway and give the child up for adoption, and ONLY if that's not an option because of financial or health (or personal situations that would make it harmful for the woman to be pregnant for nine months - I can think of countless situations that would be very, very bad for a woman and a reason why abortion would be an acceptable choice.)

Often there's just not enough that can be done -- chances are if you can't financially afford to have a baby you probably can't afford to miss work due to pregnancy, or all of the prenatal health care, etc, so I realize that it's not always an option and abortion is the decision that's come to because it's all that's left. I still don't think that it's morally right - it's sometimes just the least of many evils.

That aside, I still don't think that abortions should be made less available, because it's a personal choice and not one that I think should be made based on one's moral convictions about the matter. I would never say to someone that they shoudn't have the right to do whatever the hell they want with their own body, and the fact is that it's not an ideal world and there are far too many things that make carrying a baby for 9 months and then giving it up just not possible in many cases.

I guess my position is unique in that I empathize with the side that says that it's wrong, wrong, wrong, but I disagree with what they want to do.

[viridian.livejournal.com]

Also, anecdotally, I have heard teenage girls talk about having had abortions, if not exactly "flippantly", in a manner that sounded like they wrote it off as something bad that happened to them, and not something that they chose to do and felt bad about. There was no sense of having taken responsibility for their actions or having learned to be more careful or anything.

I realize that there's no way to judge what was really going on in the heads of these girls, but it just seems like if it's something that you can share with random people (myself being one such random person), then it's not something that you've taken very seriously, you know?

[earthrise.livejournal.com]

a) They're teenagers. Having to take on something as huge as an abortion isn't something that typical teenagers would have the emotional capacity to grasp, nor articulate in any way to strangers.

b) People also talk about cancer to strangers. I think that's almost more private than having an abortion somewhere in your past.

It's all because abortions are connected to dirty, dirty sex that makes it such a taboo subject. If you've had an abortion, you've had sex, and that makes your problem something dirty and something that you could have prevented.

The sheer magnitude of physicality on this years' ballots just makes me ill. It's all about what we can and can't do with our bodies, and it's sickening.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I've given some thought to the abortion problem.

I agree that, while I've not heard them speak about it, there are people like Michelle described, for whom abortion is a form of birth control. There always will be, especially if sex education isn't brought up to standards of a) sanity, and b) modernity. They'll abuse it and be great posters (along with the dead fetuses, gotta have those) for the pro-life wing.

However, they are a minority. Most people who go for abortions aren't proud of it, suffer terribly as the debate rages around them, uncaring, unconcerned with the victims being told they are murderers for aborting babies that they couldn't have carried, were placed there by violence, or that would have had no chance at a life with the mother or anyone else. What the pro-life wing needs to realize is two-fold. One, they must admit they are not, in fact, 'pro-life.' They are anti-abortion. This is as important a distinction as the next one I'm about to make: people who are 'pro-choice' are not 'pro-abortion.'

Let me clarify this, and how it applies to the women having abortions (and let's make that distinction, even though it seems needless: IT IS WOMEN WHO SUFFER WHEN THEY HAVE ABORTIONS. Men are at fault for pregnancy just as much, but they pay nearly nothing for it). Pro-life people want to protect the fetuses, so why aren't they really pro-life? Because they don't care about the child or the child's well-being. All they care about is preventing it from growing full to term. They don't explain the options most of the time. More often than not, it is the pro-choice people who mention adoption as an option when I talk about this issue. Pro-life people aren't practical, they argue from 'moral high ground' and pretend like economics and issues of rape/incest don't matter. Life of the mother, yes, they make an exception for, but, if the child could survive the mother's death, not a few of them would probably see that as the natural order of things and see the mother as selfish for wishing to survive by killing the baby (whereas it would be nobler to die and let the child live). They don't care for the pain and joy of people, so they cannot be said to be caring about life. They're caring about existence and are really better defined by their stance as anti-abortion.

Pro-choice people, on the other hand, are NOT pro-abortion. Honestly, I don't like abortion, or, more specifically, I hate that we have a country where such as option is ever necessary. And don't kid yourselves, pro-lifers, there are plenty of times where it is physically and, in cases of rape/incest, morally necessary. I hate that there are relatives who have sex with each other or with younger relatives that they get pregnant. I hate that there are rapists, period. I hate that the miraculous ability to generate life inside another can be manipulated to produce a child born not of love but of violence. I would never punish a rape victim by forcing her to bear the child of her attacker. It's disgusting. If a woman got pregnant because of not using a condom or other method of birth control, I'm less sympathetic to her getting an abortion, but I cannot live her life for her. I would hope that, in her situation, I would a) have protected myself first, and b) barring that, not gone through with the abortion, because I'm not personally capable of it, I suspect.

I hope that's a sufficient demonstration of how I am only pro-choice but not pro-abortion. Every time I use it with pro-life friends, they insist that compliance with abortion is tantamount to support. I can see how, in cases of, say Vichy France, this would be a valid argument. However, we're not talking about mass murder carried out in the hands of a superior force. Abortion is not war waged by cocky assholes with guns. On the 'side' of abortion, if you want to call it that, are people who are often threatened, bullied, and sometimes murdered merely for offering women a choice. It doesn't do any good to have the choice if there's no one to perform the operation. They're the hunted, and the pro-lifers have all the weapons, especially now that Bush is back in DC for 4 years yet.

[earthrise.livejournal.com]

I haven't even read this whole thing yet, but:

NOBODY is "pro-abortion." Anyone who wants to protect the right to receive an abortion is in favor of giving a woman the right to choose to have one. That is pro-choice, not pro-abortion.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Of course not, and you know that, and I know that. Nonetheless, in discussions with friends of mine who are both rabid anti-abortion folk, I was told there could be no bones about it: I was pro-abortion.

The patent ridiculousness of this is clear to most pro-choicers, but I have had no luck convincing people of the anti-abortion crowd that there can be a difference. The problem with trying to use examples to clarify my position is that there are few if any examples that stand up in the moral choice category at an equivalent level to abortion. Most issues are just not this intense because most choices don't involve 'life' versus 'survival,' and few have the sexual politics associated with abortion. Like you said, the stigma of sex being dirty for women, especially unmarried, nonmonogamous women (aka sluts....::growls::) makes abortion that much more stigmitized itself.

But yeah. It may be hard to believe, but I have been called pro-abortion. I know the people who called me that are intelligent people, but the lack of room to budge in their opinions about pro-choicers...gah...

[earthrise.livejournal.com]

Well, the first place to start fighting is in the way that you refer to yourself and those who disagree.

I think that it's very important to turn the labels around; the current use of "pro-life" and "anti-abortion" set up a certain dichotomy that doesn't serve those who are pro-choice very well (who's really "pro-death?"). I prefer the term "anti-choice," because that helps transform the actual fight: that it's not about wanting to have abortions, it's about choice.

It may seem picky, but so much of this election was pure semantics...

Simple answer

[thekit.livejournal.com]

Fund research into ectogenesis

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/1/124441/622

All babies carried to term, no matter what circumstances, in a plastic tank. Mother doesn't have to quit school, be pregnant, or face the danger of delivering the child.

Problem solved.

If anyone worries about lack of attachment to the baby, pro-lifers keep on advocating adoption as an alternative to abortion so a lack of attachment would be a bonus rather than a liability.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The other thing I've considered is how to 'take back abortion' from the right-wing. They've painted it as dirty. They paint sex as dirty, as you said. They won't teach anything but abstinence, keeping with the theme of the 'thou shalt not' doctrines. If they would concede and teach REAL sex ed in all schools, that condoms work and 'loving someone enough' doesn't for example, abortion would be, I suspect less of a problem in general. We also need women who've had them to speak out. It's difficult because it's not something to be proud of. But rape isn't something to be proud of either, yet were women not to speak out, victims might suffer in silence, feeling alone and abandoned. The message should be 'you're not alone,' as it is with other sexually-oriented effects on a woman's life. It's hard to find a message that would work because it's not like gay pride, where you can come out and say, "I'm here, I'm queer, get used to it" (oh, and let me get married, damn you!) And, to be honest, may pro-lifers would be outraged that any "You're not alone" campaign would be just that, a celebration of the murder of innocents etc etc.

That doesn't change the fact that we need more women to speak up about abortion, specifically women who've had them. These women don't have to be pro-choice, they can be, older and wiser now, anti-abortion. But let's get the experience stories from women who've been to the frontlines in this 'war' not just the rhetoric from the social justice equivalent of the chickenhawk. By the way, in case anyone didn't know by now, that means men? HANDS THE FUCK OFF. Some might find that approach unfair. Well, pregnancy and abortion being regulated by the government--90% men, at least--is unfair. Life is unfair. But abortion is, and always will be, primarily a woman's territory. Men can't understand it. If they want the babies they father, tough. They shouldn't have placed their spunk where it wasn't wanted. If they want those kids that bad, have them theirselves, why don't they? If men could get pregnant, abortion would never be challenged. Ever. As is, anti-abortion stigmatizing and campaigning and law making are just modern methods of repressing the woman's right to move toward equality. Men used to do it with the Bible...oh, well, not much has changed then.

[/mini-feminist rant]