abortion and porno and gays oh my! (pt 1)

It looks like I’ll be volunteering at Planned Parenthood a couple of hours a week. I’d been thinking about doing this for awhile, so when I saw a position open at the local branch, I quickly submitted my resume. All was fine and good, until a friend vocalized what had already been gnawing at the back of my mind; the possibility of association with a controversial organization handicapping future job opportunities. That this concern was put forth by a friend, one who is a self-defined radical feminist, just goes to show how crippled we all are by fear. It was this same fear I heard expressed by people opposed to the war who didn’t go downtown to protest; that no matter what they thought of America entering an unprovoked war, the cost of permanently bearing the stigma of an arrest is far too high just to make a public stand against Bush’s folly. While I am not generally prone to paranoid Big Brother conspiracy theories, there is something suspicious about instilling from childhood on a terror of one’s “permanent record”- a closed and secret recounting of every grade and deed, inaccessible to the subject, but a brutally revealing dossier forever open to any and all future universities, prospective employers, and bank loan officers. I suspect this is why schools (at least public schools) have dispensed with beating children; the controlling mechanism in corporeal punishment only works during and immediately after the paddling. Once the welts fade and the humiliation is forgotten (or at least repressed), the child is free to behave as he or she chooses, until the next time he or she is caught and punished. Instead, we calmly explain to children that every minor misdeed, every poor grade and every defiant act, will echo throughout the rest of his or her life, resulting in a miserable, pointless future. Is it any wonder that we’ve become a nation of cowering, passive sheep?

So abortion…while I know a great deal of our collective energy is wasted on this subject, I can’t help but question why certain people are so morbidly obsessed with restricting a woman’s right to choose. For a long time I accepted the conventional wisdom that abortion opponents believe as they do because of religious teachings, an honest and sincere conviction of the universe being a metaphysical construct. And while I personally find the evidence proving the existence of the Great Cosmic Creator highly circumstantial and flawed (the book is true because it says so in the book), an awful lot of people are convinced, and not wanting to descend into the utter blackness of being a lonely misanthrope, I have to accept the faith of others with respect and tolerance. But more and more, I’m starting to question whether religious faith is what’s really behind this mania to outlaw abortion. Certainly, dogma is a factor- at least as a rationale, but I think at the heart of the anti-abortion movement is a terror of something much more primordial and dark: fear of sex.

Consider this: if I truly, genuinely believed that each and every abortion committed was MURDER, the snuffing out of a human life no less than if one person guns down another, it would be vital that ANYTHING be put forth as a solution to this massacre. Certainly, if I believed this to be an unending slaughter worse than the Holocaust (which their rhetoric claims), I would cheerfully embrace any and all options that reduce the number of killings. Yet interestingly, there is more than a little over-lap between the anti-abortion lobby and the forces that continually block access to birth control and sex education for teens. While I would not suggest that everyone opposed to reproductive rights is also part of the absurd, doomed “abstinence-only” movement, my Internet search failed to discover ONE website that suggests theology-free sex education and easy access to birth control as possible solutions to stem the “genocide”. There are, I’m sure, a couple of people out there who are opposed to abortion while also believing that everyone is entitled to frank, honest information about sexuality. But except for the two angry e-mails I expect this post will produce, their voices are lost on the wind.

This past Saturday was the thirty-forth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade verdict, which Cardinal George of the Chicago Roman Catholic Archdiocese commemorated with a special mass. He seemed sincerely moved as he spoke of the forty-seven million souls lost since 1973, but curiously absent from his pious concern were the millions of additional abortions performed in this country prior to that year. Combing through the endless websites dedicated to stopping legal abortion, I have yet to find a single organization that mentions even in passing that Roe v. Wade did not invent abortion, that women were terminating pregnancies long before it became accessible, safe and legal to do so. Perhaps that’s the whole point; in the utopia of an America where Roe v. Wade is reversed, situations will still arise where women will need to seek medical assistance in ending pregnancies. But unlike today, the abortion will return to the back alley, where in shame and fear women will endanger their health and freedom. The Pro-Choice movement defined the cause with the image of the wire hanger, a grim reminder of a dark and barbaric past. But this may have been a miscalculation; for those who would over-turn Roe v. Wade, the wire hanger offers a message of hope. If the agenda is transform America into a nation where the sexualized are forced into the shadows, beyond the protection of community and the law, then the wire hanger becomes a sacred totem, a punishment visited upon the fallen woman.

It’s interesting that the opponents of abortion don’t even pretend anymore to aim their argument to changing the viewpoint of the American majority. Their admitted agenda is to erode the courts and clog the political system with far, far right-wing zealots. If this seems an over-simplification on my part, please, go ahead and run a Google search. The language of these sites has nothing to do with winning new converts, and everything to do with raising the blood-thirsty rage of their (minority) base (the ‘against God’s will’ argument certainly doesn’t work on those who do not believe, nor does it even work on those who do believe in a divine creator whose will they might not be so eager to claim special understanding of). The (self-styled) comparisons between the anti-abortion groups and the Civil Rights Movement ring false, if not outright absurd. While both initially began arguing an unpopular position rejected by the vast majority of Americans, moral high-ground combined with the strategy of passive resistance altered the fundamental way millions of white Americans viewed race, successfully “opening their hearts”, to use Martin Luther King’s term. But after thirty-four years, the percentage of anti-abortion Americans has actually shrunk, holding at the roughly thirty percent it’s been since the 1980’s. Yes, three out of ten Americans would like to push abortion back underground, but- perhaps not coincidently- about thirty percent of Americans want to impose prayer in school, are panic-stricken at the mention of ‘gay rights’, think the Earth is five thousand years old, and actually thought “Everybody Loves Raymond” was funny (I’m not sure there’s a connection with this last one). Where the danger lies is in that in a country where only about half the electorate votes, a single-minded thirty percent becomes a dangerous majority.
to be continued...





















let's be honest...our women are cuter