Digby wrote an interesting post about how the sexual—and therefore hidden—nature of abortion makes it easier for people to make blanket condemnations of women who have them. While Ann takes offense and rightfully points out that women have told these stories, I see the larger point. People are circumspect about abortion, since it’s about S-E-X and with sex, it’s always easy to point fingers, since it happens behind closed doors and it’s always worse when someone else does it. I’m big on telling stories but have my own limits, for the obvious reasons. Also, I’ve never had an abortion.
Still, I see the value in telling stories. I never had an abortion, but I know that I would if I had to, and I know because I did once think I was pregnant. There’s no raped-and-bleeding-gonna-die-fetus-has-no-brain drama to make it an “allowable” situation. When I was afraid I was pregnant, it was a most mundane set of circumstances. I was a senior in college. My periods tended and still tend to come like clockwork. One month, it didn’t.
In retrospect, I probably skipped my period due to stress. It was a hard year for me. I had been sexually assaulted a few months before, and was trying to deal with that, and dealing with that is pretty inconvenient for everyone around you, so don’t expect much support. My mother was getting divorced and I had to simultaneously call her now ex-husband a bastard for sleeping with a much-younger woman while defending our President from impeachment for the same behavior. My boyfriend at the time was flailing between periods of telling me he loved and adored me and periods when he was banishing me from sight, and I didn’t have the self-esteem to tell him to shove it. I was trying to assert my independence by dating anyway, and found myself falling for a anarchist punk dude who my roommate was also angling for. I was trying to graduate. I was editing a magazine. I was writing a thesis on The Handmaid’s Tale so I could graduate with honors.
I didn’t skip. I just didn’t. But I did.
My roommate says to me, “Oh, Amanda, I’ll hold your hand while you take a pregnancy test,” but that never happened. Then again, I never pushed it, because I am and always will be a loner.
I called my sometimes-boyfriend, my inconstant lover and told him I was probably pregnant. I wanted him to offer to pay for the abortion. He offered instead to marry me.
I nearly threw the phone against the wall. Instead, I told him it may not be his. He said he didn’t care.
I made the case to him that I suppose I’d have to make to some panel in the wet dreams of your average anti-choicer: I wanted to graduate. I didn’t want children. I didn’t want to marry a man who tells me on a regular basis that he can’t decide if he loves me today. I couldn’t believe that I was in the situation of not even knowing who got me that way—I, who had been Ms. Faithful up until my boyfriend started to play games with me. I told him that if I was pregnant, I was getting an abortion and we could all go on our merry ways and live our lives and grow the fuck up. He calmed down and agreed I was right.
I wasn’t pregnant, but my period never did come that month. I finished school with a GPA of 3.8. Eventually, I managed to get out of the relationship. I grew a backbone. I ended up taking a path that led to making the national news for my colorful defenses of reproductive rights.
In the years past, I’ve had ample time to reflect on my situation in light of how the great oppressive system we call the patriarchy is built out of a million little cuts. Anti-choicers try to isolate the act of forced childbirth from its context and imply that it’s not a major factor in getting women under the boot, but as you can see from my situation, it iss.
That’s why so many feminists were so mortally offended by Lord Saletan’s condescending article about mandated ultrasounds. He tries to balance his sentimentalizing about a peanut-sized fetus with a bit of humor, but it’s really corny humor:
If I were a legislator, I’d offer four amendments to any ultrasound bill. First, the government should pick up the tab. Second, the woman should also be offered a six-hour videotape of a screaming 1-year-old.
Cute, but not the point, especially since the vast majority of women who get abortions have or will have children at some point. The information really necessary to make the “right” decision isn’t lurking in an ultrasound or a video of a screaming baby. The state can’t run a reel of you woefully agreeing to quit your job to stay at home with the baby, because he makes more money anyway. The state can’t run a reel of a future night when your eventual ex-husband mocks your post-baby droopy breasts and asks you to come to bed with your bra on (happened to someone I know). The state can’t show you a video of your ex-husband screaming into the phone that he will have full custody even if he has to sue you into oblivion to get it. The state can’t show a video of you crying in the middle of the night wondering where the baby you gave away is, and if some Bible-thumping nutzoids have her now. What’s utterly insulting is the idea that someone asshole Republican legislator introducing an ultrasound bill knows better than you do what the ramifications of your decision is, or that the ultrasound is the issue. Or, worse, he probably has guessed correctly that a forced childbirth will cripple your career and possibly leash you for life to a man who is unduly cruel and controlling—or at least will turn you into a fetal incubator for said Bible-thumping loonies—and that’s what he is hoping will come to pass.
177 Responses to “Nine months for a pound of flesh”
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My periods tended and still tend to come like clockwork. One month, it didn’t.
In retrospect, I probably skipped my period due to stress.
Been there, done that. Finals week while transitioning from horrible disappointment of a boyfriend A to a newer, better boyfriend B. That was also the week in which I saw anti-abortion messages everywhere. Seriously, who the fuck carries a totebag with a giant silkscreened fetus and the “it’s a child not a choice” slogan around campus? I didn’t even know they made those things. It made me so angry, I just wanted to slap her. If I had been pregnant, it would have been controlling, insincere, emotionally fucked up boyfriend A’s. Would little miss judgemental handbag have helped me five or ten years down the road, when I had to hide until the divorce was complete so he couldn’t do anything crazy?
Your narrative brings out two important points. When you’re in love, you don’t do smart things and a child will tie you to someone forever.
I did have an abortion. This was a while back and the man I was obsessed with was selfish, manipulative, etc. I usually used a diaphram but one night he wanted me and didn’t want to stop. I was too timid at that time in my life to say stop. And I got pregnant. I went alone to the clinic to have an abortion and never once thought of having this baby. Of course, he did, but I was strong enough to convince him it was my decision. Inside I knew that this guy was a jerk and I didn’t want to be connected to him for the rest of my life. But love is not rational and one’s self respect modulates throughout your life.
I now have two teenagers and have not regretted my decision for a minute.
Agreed. It’s really easy to tell ourselves “oh, I support a woman’s right to choose but I would never do such a ghastly thing myself” up until the point where we’re faced with (even the possibility of) an unwanted pregnancy. Like, for example, this utopia of being able to give the gift of a child to a couple that can’t have one — how does the six-plus months of dealing with nosy coworkers badgering you about the details of the widdle baby only to turn against you and let you know how much they disapprove of you for giving up your child when they find out you aren’t planning on keeping it? How about trying to explain it to mom and dad, or hiding out from them for several months so that they don’t see what’s happening? How about all the people who feel like they own you now and put their hands on your stomach, loudly declare what foods you can and cannot eat, not to mention what you drink (caffeine? alcohol?). Heaven forfend you be addicted to cigarettes — good luck trying to quit with the help of magical fetus chemicals. And finally, no matter how mercenary you may think you are at the start of the pregnancy, there is always that outside chance that you may decide you want the little bugger after all and can’t give it up for adoption. Or, if you are able to hand it over, your protestations of wanting to put this all behind you will be for naught if your records get unsealed or the child decides they have to know you eighteen years’ later when you have another life set up.
“he probably has guessed correctly that a forced childbirth will cripple your career and possibly leash you for life to a man who is unduly cruel and controlly—or at least will turn you into a fetal incubator for said Bible-thumping loonies—and that’s what he is hoping will come to pass. ”
Word. Nuff said.
great post Amanda -thanks
Abortion may not be an unmitigated good, but it’s a mitigated good, and frankly, that’s as good as most things in this world get.
I have a good friend who, at age 17, became pregnant the first time she had sex–she and her boyfriend screwed up with the condom. (No, I was not the boyfriend; it’s irrelevant anyhow).
She was an athlete and had aspirations for a college scholarship. She skipped not one, not two, not three, but four periods before she put two and two together. By the time she went to her parents for help, she couldn’t find a clinic in her home state who could perform the second-trimester procedure; she had to go with her parents to Wichita for the abortion.
And what became of this poor, benighted soul? She graduated high school just fine, went on to get a college scholarship, graduated and got a decent job. Her boyfriend–who to his credit had helped her through the whole thing, and paid half the fee for the procedure–ended up her husband. She’s got a child now. And she doesn’t regret the decision she made when she was 17, because the child she’s got now has a better life with more stable parents than the child she would’ve had then.
It was good for her to have the option to have an abortion–even, God forbid, a second-trimester abortion. My friend is living a better life because of it. Her child is living a better life because of it. And I can’t see how that’s better than forcing her to become a mother when she was still a child herself.
When people skip their periods, that’s one thing; but few ever connect missed periods with miscarriages so early as to be unnoticable. Between 50 and 80 percent of pregnancies end in spontaneous ‘abortion’. Lots of women breathing sighs of relief mistakenly think they weren’t pregnant at all. [If you’re Rh negative like me, these people need gamma globulin shots to prevent the next pregnancy (if the fetus is Rh positive) from serious distress or in utero death.]
My point actually is, Teh Lord is teh original abortion ‘doctor’. Sorry if I’m stepping over someone’s line!
Nothip, thats correct
Although, we have to face the truth about abortion
Abortion is an affront to the creative nature of God, it negates God as Creator.
Abortion denies the power of God to right a wrong, to show forth His glory, it negates God as redeemer.
Abortion makes that which is good, the birth of human life, into that which is evil, the death of human life, and then calls it good, the very definition of blasphemy.
Abortion negates the resurrection power of God as it takes flesh that is alive in it’s earthly abode (the womb) and kills it, while God takes that flesh which is dead in it’s earthly abode (the grave) and desires to make it alive.
Abortion’s desire is to take that which was composed from the chaotic array of elemental molecules into a symphony of life infused with an eternal soul, and turn it back to the entropy of randomness, chaos, nothingness, uselessness, decay, death.
Abortion is against all that is hopeful, all that requires faith for success; for it’s solution; annihilation, it’s goal; death, it’s dream; breaking God’s heart, it’s vision, satan’s ultimate power. Abortion is a counterfeit, for the clawprints of satan are everywhere to be found in its performance.
Abortion disguises hate as love, bondage as freedom, choice as maturity, sin as righteousness, political correctness as wisdom.
Abortion pits men against women, mothers against their children, fathers against God.
Yes, Abortion is satan’s feeble attempt at killing God himself, for Abortion is a metaphor for satan; it is his coat of arms, his family crest, his logo, his brand, it belongs to him……for he laughs at its willing proponents as they craft their own self-destruction, mantled in self-deception.”
“When you’re in love, you don’t do smart things and a child will tie you to someone forever.”
So true. I got pregnant at 18 with my First True Luv, who I Luv’d as only an 18-year-old-girl can Luv, and I didn’t get an abortion. I ended up spending 9 years in a mostly unpleasant and abusive marriage with him and I’m never going to stop needing to see him and speak to him on a several-times-weekly basis, for the rest of my life.
Somewhat similar to Jeff’s story about his friend and her child, I wouldn’t have my nieces and nephews right now if my sister-in-laws didn’t have their abortions before they met my brothers. By their own unapologetic admission and “words of advice to a young woman in college who might face such a situation,” they said that the pregnancies themselves would have completely changed the course of their lives, their options when it came to school, their future careers, and adoption wouldn’t have put them “back on track”. How things would be different now if they didn’t have their abortions. Would I have ever met these two women? What would my brothers be doing instead– would they be married to other women or still single? And they don’t regret their abortions for one minute. The arbitrariness of fate can be bitter-sweet. Especially when it comes women and our reproductive decisions–or lack thereof due to anti-choice/contraception propaganda and laws, as Amanda has already mentioned.
Meagan, I negate god(s) as creator. I don’t do it by supporting abortion rights; I do it by using logic and reason.
If abortion doesn’t fit into your superstitious fantasies, don’t have one.
Yes, Abortion is satan’s feeble attempt at killing God himself…
So, a miscarriage is…god’s feeble attempt at suicide?
meagan, I hope you cut-and-pasted that from somebody else, cuz the misuse of the word “it’s” is making my eyes water.
I don’t think women should HAVE to tell their personal stories just to access inalienable rights. No-choice deadbeats wave “holy” books to end run the constitution and law and to assume standing where they have none. I’m not a signatory to the bible or religious dogma — why should it usurp my human rights?
The onus should be on religious fanatics to show what business they have giving themselves a vote in anyone’s medical appointment, legal appointment or temple visit. Women who want to share their stories and broaden the pool of knowledge — as teachers, artists, sharing humans, etc. — should be supported and applauded.
But anyone who suggests that persecuted segments of society should continually re-fight for rights which are theirs by “humanizing” their situations to people determined to persecute them are being unbelievably obtuse.
People often talk about abortion as if there are two equally fanatical sides. There aren’t. Believing the constitutional protections and rule of law apply to ALL isn’t a “side” nor is it radical. Religious fanatics should show standing. People passing judgment on the abortion “issue” should be made to explain why they aren’t bloviating on other medical procedures involving reproduction and the sanctity of “life”: are they around to make men testify about monogamy and ability to provide child support for 18+ yrs when Viagra is dispensed? If not, why not?
Damn. That should have been “women’s reproductive decisions,” not “women and our reproductive decisions.” Stupid me.
Abortion makes that which is good, the birth of human life, into that which is evil, the death of human life, and then calls it good, the very definition of blasphemy
I hate to break it to you, meagan, but everybody dies. Sorry.
Great post, Amanda, and very well stated. I’ve been down that road myself–the shaky relationship, the period that didn’t arrive. It was reassuring beyond words to know that if I had been pregnant at 22, while putting myself through university, I would have had access to a safe, legal, early abortion.
My first known pregnancy [h/t to Cheyenne for making the point about ‘the original abortion doctor’] ended in miscarriage at eleven weeks. I was heartbroken. The ER doctor said that I was hemorrhaging and needed a D&C. At the time, my husband and I were away from home, on his business trip to a conservative part of a conservative state. The medical staff could not have been nicer or more attentive, but never far from my mind either then or now was that the dilation and curettage was identical to a common first-term abortion procedure. I just hadn’t chosen it. They might not have been so kind if I had… Certainly the op wouldn’t have taken place in a hospital emergency room.
We went on to have three children, but I had to at least face the possibility of second-trimester abortion in the two last pregnancies because I underwent chorionic villus sampling to screen for genetic defects. CVS (the procedure, not the pharmacy!) gives a diagnosis as early as eleven weeks, as opposed to amniocentesis, which usually takes place in the second trimester.
The women I’ve known who’ve chosen abortion over an irretrievably damaged pregnancy haven’t written articles about it. Usually the story spills out over coffee; it is an intimate confession. Now we no longer have the luxury of privacy. The brave attorney who wrote in Newsweek about aborting her anencephalic fetus–that took guts. I wonder how many people have threatened her?
Ellie, women shouldn’t HAVE to tell their stories to get rights. And we shouldn’t have to engage in a political struggle just to do the right thing with avoiding wars, getting universal health care or anything. Things should fall into our laps, but unfortunately, things do not. Life is unfair.
I love how meagan, when faced with the ugly truth of how her religious beliefs are blatantly anti-woman, went on a rant that resembles nothing so much as putting your fingers in your ears and yelling, “LALALALLALALALALAL I CAN’T HEAR YOU.”
Thanks, “meagan.”
When you troll like that, it doesn’t persuade anyone that you’re right, and it does persuade more and more people that (A) abortion is, as Jeff says above, a mitigated good, and (B) the modern American strain of Christianity has completely jumped the shark.
Keep up the good work, “meagan.” You’re helping us bring about an enlightened, secular society.
“But anyone who suggests that persecuted segments of society should continually re-fight for rights which are theirs by “humanizingâ€? their situations to people determined to persecute them are being unbelievably obtuse.”
Not that I disagree with the spirit of your argument. I don’t. However, replace “people determined to persecute them” with “people in the segments of society with the majority of the money and power in it” and you will see why it would actually be obtuse to suggest otherwise. Because those two groups of people generally are one and the same.
Just once, I’d like to see someone present an anti-choice argument that doesn’t involve any mythologies. That would be kind of refreshing.
“Abortion disguises hate as love, bondage as freedom, choice as maturity, sin as righteousness, political correctness as wisdom.”
So, “abortion” is a Republican? I didn’t see THAT one coming…
Amanda, thank you. Just, thank you.
“So, a miscarriage is…god’s feeble attempt at suicide? ”
No, mis-carriage is an act of nature.
You don’t get to be God and detroy human life.
People, open your eyes at this evil! the womb should be the safest place for a little baby.
Abortion is terrorism! have a heart! Please!
Meagan: ROTFL. (wipes tears from eyes) That was a hilarious parody of a pro-forced birth fundie…
Wait. That wasn’t a parody?
(slowly backs away before she realizes that as a non-Christian, I already negate God)
Your misogyny is terrorism. Grow a heart—and a brain. Your made-up sky friend has no bearing on my life.
Speaking of religious fanaticism making life even more unbearable than it already is on this planet, did anyone catch Christopher Hitchens on The Daily Show last night, discussing his new book “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” Yeah I know Hitchens is a sexist douche, but I liked it when he brought up religion’s contempt for the “*birth canal” as he described it while making his point (*”immaculate births” of prophets). He supposedly tears religion a new one in this book, which is why I’ll probably give it a read while hanging out at the local Borders. Not because I have any love for Hitchens or his precious Vanity Fair…ick.
So some things that happen are “nature” while other things are “god.” Hmph.
There is no god. Humans have the capacity to control their lives; in essence, humans are our own god. Not that I feel the need to assign anyone the role of “god,” because there doesn’t have to BE a “god.”
The state can’t show a video of you crying in the middle of the night wondering where the baby you gave away is, and if some Bible-thumping nutzoids have her now.
Sounds good, but totally inaccurate.
Today’s adoption industry allows, nay pressures, the placing parent(s) to choose an adoptive family from a catalog. So no, you wno’t be wondering who has the kid. You’ll be asking yourself, Did I choose right?
If you opted for some particular level of openness in adoption, and the adoptive family doesn’t keep their agreements for contact, you get to live with it–in 49 states, your open adoption agreements are not enforcable. If you want to end contact because your life has changed, be prepared for endless recriminations from the family that is raising the child you bore as well as the burden of your child contacting you in the future to hold you accountable for your choices.
As an adoptive parent I’m more strongly pro-choice than ever, because adoption does not in fact end a pregnancy or end the relationship between mother and child. It’s not an alternative to abortion, it’s an alternative to child-rearing. IMNSHO, a great alternative for a couple of categories of unintentionally pregnant women, but it’s not for everyone.
Very helpful discussion - too bad there were not 2000 such stories on the desk of Justice Kennedy before he tried to write th opinion in Cathcart II. The foes of abortion used the approach commonly used in death penalty cases - lay out life history in minute detail. No doubt the pro-equality women’s rights side will now do likewise, and it has far more material to work with. I predict the tide will turn and Kennedy et al will think better next time and stop ignoring the equal protection issues.
How hard it is to be a good husband or male partner in a child-rearing venture is probably worth a bit more attention. If one could have votes for those who are minors then the resource allocation in US society would be less skewed in favor of those who are not rearing minors. At the least, the voting age should be reduced. The “billions for bombers but bake sales for schools” problem needs to be corrected structurally. Most poor child-rearing husbands/partners are not absolute flakes just by choice. To a large extent, they are that way because of an economic/electoral system that gives child rearing costs less than adequate attention.
Maybe if free trade economists thought of parents of minors as specialized “ranchers,” parents of minors could more effectively lobby for government resources allocated to them in accord with the (uncounted) minor voters they are responsible for. Now that the government is in effect a 40% partner in any US economic venture, including child raising, it is critical to make sure the US has a true “one person one vote” system that more effectively enfranchises minors. The immediate innocent victims of a less than wise decision to have a child (or an all to common “child ranching” venture that fails to thrive) are the minors who, not incidentally, are disenfranchised.
Amanda,
Your very intelligent, please reject abortion.
Being a Mom is the most rewarding thing thats happened in my life. To hell with the “career” Amanda.
Find a christian man, get married and have a baby.
You won’t regret it.
God-Bless you
Just so it can be born into a world dominated by unthinking religious nutcases who’d see to it that every aspect of it’s born life is a painful struggle?
I’ve never understood how people like “meagan” can have such a weak grasp of their own faith. Seriously, “meagan”, how can the Creator of the universe and all it contains be thwarted by anything that I do with my one mortal and limited life?
How weak do you think your God is, that my decisions can derail anything already divinely planned?
Think, girl! God gave you a brain that’s actually bigger and more important than your uterus.
HAHAHHAHAHA. I think this is a parody. Because nothing would make me happier than being married to and having kids with someone I loathe for his woman-hating, egotistical, superstitious bullshit. I’m dying. You must be a parody, meagan. But thanks for showing what I say is true—this is all about trying to get women trapped in thankless servitude.
Reproductive freedom is about all of the above and one more: no democratic government can require a man to be a father or a woman to bear a child. It is about equal protection of the laws. If a government can require a woman to be pregnant or to have an abortion then it is a totalitarian regime, not a democracy.
Anti-choice, or the government owning a woman’s body is slavery, it is the ultimate boot in her face. It is an illegitimate government that protects neither life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.
So, it will have to be overthrown, won’t it?
“the womb should be the safest place for a little baby.”
I’m sensing a whiff of teens-4-christ here.
Yeah. It ain’t a baby. Get over it.
Shorter meagan: Devote yourself to a life of domestic servitude. It’s the cat’s pajamas! I like it, so it’s the best choice for all women! Leave careers to the menfolk. We women don’t deserve to follow our dreams or pursue endeavors outside the home.
OK, maybe it wasn’t shorter.
I have no problem with those who practice their religion and privacy and leave others alone but these people who keep trying to create a theocracy in America are just plain nuts. There is no reasoning with them at all. I have a coworker who used to work at planned partenthood and they would these fundie nuts picketing outsie all the time and harrassing women and this is in New Jersey so I can’t imagine how bad it must be in other parts of the country.
The reason that this battle keeps going on is that abortion rights are not set in stone. I think that Roe vs Wade was the right decision but congress needs to pass a freedom to choose act or something in order to back it up because a court decision can be reversed at any time. The right to choose right now is on very flimsy legal ground. If a democrat wins in 2008 the democrats need to pass a bill like this.
Amanda,
This is not a parody, I swear. I’m speaking from the heart. I suggest you talk with http://www.jillstanek.com/
she was a nurse at a hospital that performed live abortions. She held the poor little babies and waited for them to die. She testified before congress.
Please Amanda, as a Catholic christian, I’m to help. Reject Satan, accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savoir.
Is there a good “meagan” and a fundie “meagan”? Weird.
Now I know “meagan” is a parody — in all the time I spent as a practicing Catholic, I never heard anyone use the phrase “accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior”… that’s fundie-speak, not Catholic-speak.
Meagan went from complimenting Amanda on her post and then agreeing with other commenters, to (two minutes later) jumping into “we have to face the truth about abortion” and “the womb should be the safest place for a little baby” and “to hell with the career.”
Are there three different posters named “meagan” around here?
bwahahahahaha! this *cannot* be for real. that is the bestest. troll. ever.
At this point in my life, I probably would not choose to have an abortion if I accidentally got pregnant. We’ve been together for almost 7 years, married for a year, and we have fairly stable jobs. It would be a bit of a stretch, but we could probably manage it, and my husband would be a great dad. However, since we’re doubling up on the birth control (condoms AND the Pill), the chances of that happening are pretty remote.
If circumstances changed, or if I was 25 again? That’s a whole different story.
Please people, how could we let this barbaric procedure to take place.
Choice?
You already made the choice to lie down with the man. If you happen to get pregnant, you have a moral obligation to have that baby.
Separting sex from responsibily is whats destroying our culture.
“she was a nurse at a hospital that performed live abortions. She held the poor little babies and waited for them to die. She testified before congress.”
meagan, so this jill stanek person should be persecuted* for perjury, is what you’re saying?
*yes, i mean persecuted.
“You already made the choice to lie down with the man. If you happen to get pregnant, you have a moral obligation to have that baby.”
Yes, because getting raped is a choice.
Now I know “meagan� is a parody — in all the time I spent as a practicing Catholic, I never heard anyone use the phrase “accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior�… that’s fundie-speak, not Catholic-speak.
Bingo. I would guess that meagan can’t even tell us which encyclical declared that artificial birth control isn’t allowed.
Come on, meagan — if you’re really Catholic, you should know this one off the top of your head. No fair Googling it.
Do you realize that “Being a Mom is the most rewarding thing thats happened in my life” is an argument for why you made your choices, not an argument for why we should make ours?
I’m sure that motherhood can be an amazingly rewarding enterprise. Congratulations on finding your own happiness. Realize that since other people aren’t you, their lives won’t be yours, either.
If parenting is so infinitely rewarding, why not tell men “to hell with the ‘career’” and get them to run to fatherhood? Oh, right, because our economy doesn’t work if everyone’s at home with the kids. Well, then, how about some people rear children while others work, and it’s up to each individual to make choices about if and when to have kids, and…
Oh.
Abortion makes that which is good, the birth of human life, into that which is evil, the death of human life, and then calls it good, the very definition of blasphemy
Weird. My dictionary claims that the very definition of blasphemy is “a : the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence for God b : the act of claiming the attributes of deity”
Being a Mom is the most rewarding thing thats happened in my life. To hell with the “career� Amanda.
Find a christian man, get married and have a baby.
You won’t regret it.
Oooh. I get it, now. I can play that game, too!
Look… Kicking puppies is the most rewarding thing that’s happened in my life. To hell with the “finding a Christian man, getting married, and having a baby” Amanda.
Find a puppy, kick it and point and laugh.
You won’t regret it.
Do I win?
Mnemosyne, thats great to hear! Now, I would kindly suggest you drop the birth control and go to natural family planning (the catholic church recommends this).
would you like some information on Natural family planning?
I don’t think she is a troll at all. I know the abortion debate is framed as men trying to control women but some of the most fanatical anti-choicers I have seen have been female.
Meagan, could you please explain your first two posts?
“great post Amanda -thanks”
“Nothip, thats correct”
I don’t have a moral obligation to do anything of the sort. You might. But I have a moral obligation to get the little parasite out of me asap.
Please, please keep meagan around! She is hysterical. Can we give her Scooby snacks for especially good performances?
“she was a nurse at a hospital that performed live abortions”
she didn’t perfoprm the actual abortions, but provided post abortive care.
You already made the choice to lie down with the man. If you happen to get pregnant, you have a moral obligation to have that baby.
Martha Mendoza’s son got the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and died in the womb. She had an abortion to remove his body three weeks after his heartbeat stopped.
But, hey, I guess she had a “moral obligation” to carry that rotting corpse inside of her until she died of septic shock rather than have — gasp! — an abortion, right?
Oh sweet Jesus. NFP IS birth control. It’s doing something to avoid getting pregnant. Just because it’s not a barrier or a chemical doesn’t mean it’s not done to AVOID PREGNANCY. If you weren’t trying to avoid getting knocked up, you wouldn’t bother with NFP. Come off it.
Who the fuck cares what the Catholic church recommends? Do you make your decisions based on what The Wizard of Oz recommends? Same
QLH: I wasn’t being thruthful in the begining- sorry
Mnemosyne, thats great to hear! Now, I would kindly suggest you drop the birth control and go to natural family planning (the catholic church recommends this).
Thank you for confirming that you are a liar, meagan. What does the Bible say about bearing false witness, hmm?
Oops, I left the “thing” off the end of my post. “Same thing.”
Meagan: Didn’t your god say something about lying? Like, that it was bad?
scummy bear– it’s not at all surprising that some of the most anti-choice (in every respect, not just with regard to reproduction) people are women. what could be more terrifying than to dream the dream of the life that could have been had one not been duped? better to scream so loud one cannot dream at all…
Jenna, Sarah, how could you be so cruel?
“But, hey, I guess she had a “moral obligationâ€? to carry that rotting corpse inside of her until she died of septic shock rather than have — gasp! — an abortion, right? ”
no she doesn’t, the baby has died.
in all the time I spent as a practicing Catholic, I never heard anyone use the phrase “accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior�… that’s fundie-speak, not Catholic-speak.
The baptismal vows mention specifically rejecting Satan, although the ‘accepting Jesus blah blah’ part of them is worded completely differently from meagan’s fundie speak. Personally, idiot-pious Catholics are kinda offensive to me. Either know your shit or keep a healthy distance from playing apologetic.
the womb should be the safest place for a little baby.
Uh. Not by a long shot. The infant mortality rate in the United States is roughly 7 per 1000, or .7%
The most recent studies I’ve seen place the miscarriage rate at between 34% to 75%, depending on the ages of the couple.
That doesn’t count abortions.
So, um… the womb is kind of not really all that safe for the bay-bees.
Reject Satan, accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savoir.
Why, when Satan has done me so much better?
You already made the choice to lie down with the man.
You don’t think much of babies that you consider them punishment for fucking, meagan.
I love the sock puppets. I read on some crazy white supremacist’s website a little lesson on how to troll the intertubes. Basically it involved making a blogger blog to drive clicks to the mothership, googling for keywords to find target blogs and forums and then drive-by trolling. Most telling was that this man recommended always posting under a woman’s name.
I think “meagan” may have taken this advice. Why she insists on calling herself catholic I’ll never know, because she is spouting heresy. Jesus is not your personal Lord and Savior in the catholic church.
To whom am I being cruel?
You just proved us right. Sometimes abortion is done to remove an ALREADY DEAD fetus from a woman’s uterus. Abortion is done for a number of different reasons. If you want to ban it to punish the “slutty, immoral bitches who remove responsibility from sex” you’re also affecting women like the one Mnemosyne described.
“accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior”
how more catholic can you get, this is what we confess every week at church.
Would any of you be interested in becoming a Catholic?
God-Bless.
re: Meagan - I continue not to understand is the embarrassing immaturity of those Christians who think that by spouting some Christianese or relating the basic tenets of their religion in the most obnoxiously ostentatious way possible they will actually persuade someone who disagrees with their religious tenets to rethink matters.
This analogy is rude, but it’s like they are going into a department store, they find the major bathroom appliance section, find a model standard grade toilet on display, drop their trousers and relief themselves while advocating loudly for the public use of a toilet in such a way, all the while pitying the non-taking-a-dump-on-Sears’-showroom crowd gathered in horror and mistaking these ersatz-train-wreck-rubberneckers as an audience to be persuaded and flock to be fleeced.
They would be more effective if they were to say “I am a conservative Christian who believes strongly in my faith, it changed my life, and I would hope that readers who read a passionately written article from one point of view would intellectually engage one from the opposite point of view [here.]” But no, it seems they ALWAYS go instead for the public shit in Aisle 9.
Meagan, you’re playing a character. Well done, but you’re taking it too far.
“Why, when Satan has done me so much better?”
No, he hasn’t Amanda, he’s deceiving you.
Let’s see if I can get the inflection right (checks out one of Jack Chick’s tracts kept for this occasion)…
er… ahem…
HAW HAW HAW!
Meagan, honey…you’re just making it worse. It’s the profession of faith, not the confession.
Honey, no it’s not. You’re on a forum with a ton of former Catholics. This shit isn’t going to fly. Try harder.
“You don’t think much of babies that you consider them punishment for fucking, meagan.”
They are not punishment Amanda and my husband and I do not “fuck”, we make love.
Amanda,
It’s Ok, you’re still immature, I understand. You’ll eventually grow up.
Okay, shoelimpy. It was funny, but cut it out.
No, he hasn’t Amanda, he’s deceiving you.
Oh no, hon, your blue-eyed Jeebus is deceiving you. But no, we’ve figured out you’re shoelimpy, since you know nothing about Catholicism. Buzz off.
That’s how you can tell Jeebus and Jesus apart.
Jesus looked more like Osama Bin Laden.
Amanda, my broader point is that people citing the “ick” factor are just finding a new way to excuse inaction in the face of persecution. They should be doing more to challenge the persecutORS rather than adding to the burden of the persecuted.
Personal stories won’t alter the debate because even no-choice hypocrites get abortions at the same rate — possibly higher, given their inclination to foster ignorance about contraception and safe-sex. The blame for abortions obtained by Churchy’s family just gets plopped onto the depravities of modern society.
News and current affairs media should be doing their job — or made to do it — when another bible thumping phony is bloviating about how much he or she loves life. Rather than allowed the automatic higher moral authority, theofascists need first to explain why other commandment-related medicine isn’t being persecuted with the same energy. That would cut to of what’s really going on more effectively than personal stories would sway the unswayable, which, again, while expanding the cultural pool of knowledge, continue to allow people who have no right or standing to judge outside the rule of law.
Let THEM be judged.
“Oh no, hon, your blue-eyed Jeebus is deceiving you.”
Amanda, why are you being so cruel? Jesus is my Lord. Why would you make fun of His name? This is very hurtful.
I’m trying to provide a little guidance for you, not hurt you.
Meagan, do you realize that you’re among both men and women, right? Paul would be ashamed.
megan/shoelimpy is no longer entertaining. time to ban.
Thanks for telling your story, Amanda. No, it shouldn’t be necessary to tell our stories, but it makes a difference.
I had an abortion in similar circumstances in my early twenties: birth control didn’t work, no money, no supportive relationship with the guy, would have had to go on welfare, etc, etc. At the time, I thought I would make a terrible mother, and I was right. It was legal and safe, and I was grateful for that.
I had a child at 37. In between, I finished college, graduate school, got a job, a health plan and grew up enough to be a responsible parent. I have a great relationship with the biological father and the non-biological father of my child. We have a great family and we love each other.
Does this refer to my coment, Em? Because if I’m wrong, I’ll be glad to correct that bit of knowledge; I’ve not been a practicing Catholic for more than 20 years, and I may be a bit rusty.
But I did really think it was the Profession of Faith (a.k.a. the Nicean Creed.)
meagan - yep, I *gasp* choose to sleep with a man. He’s called my husband and I’ve been married to him for fifteen years. We already have two children. I am NOT having a third. According to your faith, this means that I have to either give up sex with my husband altogether or take the crap-shoot of NFP (my cycle is extremely screwed up, and I am hyper fertile - I have had unprotected sex exactly twice in my life. Their names are Aaron and Robbie.)
Since both options suck, we’re doing our own way. Contraception, sterilization, and yes, if called for - an abortion. I hope it’s not called for, I’ve got enough crappy medical stuff going on in my life without adding in some minor surgery, but it’s better than the alternative.
Being a Mom is the most rewarding thing thats happened in my life.
That’s nice dear. Now go home and leave us alone or we will kidnap you, and force you to get a PhD in evolutionary biology.
No? Well, I know evolutionary biologists who think that their education and their research is the most rewarding thing in their life. Doesn’t that mean they get to force their ideas of fulfillment on YOU?
Run along now - go tend those precious little darlings. I’m sure at least one of them is hungry, poopy, sleepy, etc. They always are - particularly when you are trying to write!
No, no, I was talking to/about our current troll, specifically that Mass includes no confession of accepting Jesus as Lord in the manner she’s suggesting. You are correct about the Nicene Creed as far as I remember. |=)
So, “Meagan”, people who make love will never seek abortions. Is that what you’re saying? so you mean it’s only the immoral sluts that fuck who seek abortions? WRONG.
No, honey, you came here so you can spread the word of the Lord, and feel Righteous. Then you can tell your fellow churchgoers that you Wandered in the Den of Satan and braved the elements to preach the Gospel of the Lord. You can now revel in the Knowledge that you are Right with the Lord. In other words, you are doing this because it makes you feel good about yourself and allows you to earn some “street cred”.
Frankly, “Meagan”, although I’m sure your anti-abortion position is sincere, your so-called “guidance” is not anything but an attempt to reaffirm what you believe and to inflate your ego. If you really did care about Amanda and others, you would have given their discussions some serious thought and consideration and been willing to dialogue with them on an more intimate level than spouting crap about Satan and God.
So, be careful not to fall off that high horse, ok?
Banned, but that was pretty funny. Poor shoelimpy has more energy than talent at his bizarre little performance art.
the clawprints of satan
Forgive me, O Heavenly Beast, but I like this turn of phrase.
my husband and I do not “fuck�, we make love.
That might be your problem right there.
That was fun, glad it’s over.
Good post BTW.
No, “we” don’t. That may be how you or your faith finds the truth of abortion to be, but as it turns out, many people do not share your god or your beliefs on his will. I understand it may be a tough concept to grasp.I do love it when fundies try to pretend to be Catholics when they don’t have the faintest idea about church doctrine and practices. I’m guessing ol’ shoe/meagan couldn’t have named two of the seven sacraments if you held a gun to his head.
Who’s shoelimpy?!
Tune in next week for our next installment of, ” I Know Your God Is A Joke, So What Is Mine?”
Mnemosyne, why do they pretend to be Catholics? Do they imagine that a Catholic has some kind of credibility at Pandagon that a Protestant fundie doesn’t? It seems so weird,
Meagan, you’re, ummm, kinda playing for the other team…
A Devil can quote scripture and all.
Oh, and to be on God’s team? ….ehhh, I do believe the first element of true christianity is compassion for another, including the point of view. That would mean to engage…
Instead all you’re doing is playing Don’t Shoot The Baby, or the Woman GETS it, bwah ha ha…
Or whatever
Man, oh, man. I missed all the fun(die)!
I was never in a position to need an abortion (although I had a scare like Amanda’s), but I would have if I’d needed to, in high school or college or even a few years after college. And I was very glad the option was there if needed. Now I do (gasp!) stay at home with my kids (well, work from home) and I’m happy, but I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, for sure! And, for every woman who feels that being pregnant made her pro-life, I’m sure there must be at least one for whom it made them pro-choice. I’d always been pro-choice, but being pregnant made me even more pro-choice than I had been before. All of my pregnancies have been planned and wanted, and I was still pretty physically miserable. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.
It’s great how you can figure out what’s evil and not by looking for clawprints. No need to reflect on ethics and morals, no need for philosophy, because there’s SATAN’S CLAWPRINTS all over anything bad.
Meagan: You already made the choice to lie down with the man. If you happen to get pregnant, you have a moral obligation to have that baby.
So, it’s OK to have an abortion if you have sex standing up?
(Come off it, everyone: Meagan’s a parody.)
The question I inevitably wind up posing to anti-choice fundies is heuristic and multi-part:
Can you make that into a flow chart?
Would just like to point out here that abortion ends a pregnancy. In most cases this also means that the fetus is killed, but if the fetus is already dead, the procedure to remove it is no less an abortion.
The reason a fundie might be trying to imitate a Catholic is because their relationship to Catholics on abortion is similiar to their relationship with Jews on Israel—they hate the Catholics/Jews, and are deeply interested in pretending they don’t on this particular issue for political reasons.
Shoelimpy is this guy who pretends to be a fundie on a bunch of different blogs for the dual purpose of mocking said fundies and mocking people who are concerned about said fundies.
What Sarah said - who is Shoelimpy?
Oops. Hit submit just a second too late.
Thanks for filling me in. I’m sort of disappointed that Meagan’s not real.
It’s great how you can figure out what’s evil and not by looking for clawprints. No need to reflect on ethics and morals, no need for philosophy, because there’s SATAN’S CLAWPRINTS all over anything bad.
I thought Satan had hooves. Or maybe that’s a satyr.
Satan’s a shape-shifter, zuzu. He often takes the form of an abortion doctor.
“I thought Satan had hooves. Or maybe that’s a satyr.”
You see. They can’t even construct a consistent mental image of Teh Devul’s appearance. Shouldn’t you know what your susperstition’s boogey-man looks like?
kali
Mnemosyne, why do they pretend to be Catholics? Do they imagine that a Catholic has some kind of credibility at Pandagon that a Protestant fundie doesn’t? It seems so weird,
Seriously, what is the deal? Is it because Donohue denounced Amanda, so they think Catholics have a special cache here? Or that there are no Catholics/ex-Catholics here to point out their failures at imitation (”confession of faith” has to be a classic!).
More on topic, there needs to be more discussion of abortion stories b/c even holy rollers are liable to “forgive” the real stories of third term abortions. Even shoelimpy/meagan claimed aborting a dead fetus wasn’t really an abortion, though it is. It’s harder to create the strawbubblehead when the reality of women’s lives are brought into focus. Women KNOW why they want abortions, and it’s never a spontaneous decision to have surgery.
The fundies have an uneasy relationship with the Catholics. They like to shout it to the hilltops when the Catholics fall in line with them (abortion), then damn the Catholics to the devil when they don’t (death penalty). I’m sure there’s also some uneasiness in there about the fact that some Catholic “groups” (Irish Catholic) are historically Democratic despite their disagreements on certain “non-negotiable” issues.
My mother is a dedicated Democrat, a dedicated Catholic and a dedicated anti-abortion supporter–she feels that the social equality, anti-poverty, pro-welfare, pro-”people” platform of the Democrats (okay, I’m not going to argue about how well Democrats actually support each idea on that list–but they have a better track record than Repubs) are more important reasons to vote than the pro-choice stance she disagrees with.
Been there, have the baby to prove it. Although ours happened after a failed sterilization. And here’s the deal: I actually like being a mother, I like having le babe, and I think that my husband does too. We’re pretty content about it all.
BUT, we would have been happy and content if le babe had never happened. He’s definitely changed our outlook on life and our future–but that’s not an indication that our former outlook and our former planned future were inferior. Just different.
Meagan: Misuse of punctuation makes Baby Jesus cry.
Ms Kate:
Heh. Ms Kate wins the internet for today.
When I was a senior in college, my then-girlfriend thought she was pregnant. It turned out that she was just a week or so late, but it was still a tense few days. I have no idea what we would have done had she actually been pregnant.
Shoelimpy is this guy who pretends to be a fundie on a bunch of different blogs for the dual purpose of mocking said fundies and mocking people who are concerned about said fundies.
At Eschaton he usually appears as “annieangel”. But I always thought he was a real wingnut. He definitely seems to have it in for “liberals” (I put that in quotes because wingnuts seem to define a liberal as anyone who disagrees with them for any reason).
I don’t know about all that. I can’t imagine that a baby could survive inside a womb, what with the lack of oxygen. That’s probably why fetuses leave the womb before they become babies.
I find it simply amazing that One…in this case, our Amanda,
Can lay out a life, with all the bows and ribbons,
the fairies and the maypoles, all the tags and tatters
And all the twop and twaddle.
In this terribly public way.
I am amazed and envious.
And I admire.
And I think I’ll try to be that way.
Amanda, thank you for sharing this story. Something similar happened to me.
I was 19, a sophomore in college and sleeping with a man who was older and married. He had an open relationship with his wife, which consisted of her pretending not to know about his desire to suck dick and his on-again/off-again relationship with me, that ended up lasting about 3 years. I saw him as this older and wiser figure who was gonna fix my life and help me learn how to be a stronger person — which he did — but often in spite of his behavior, not because of his condescending attempts to tell me how I should act and what I should do. It took me a while to really see that his life was very strange and fucked up, and that he needed me so he could feel like there was some way in which he was smart, cool, capable, and mature. After we broke up, the tables quickly turned and he became this whiney dope who couldn’t just make a damn decision about his life; instead preferring to create drama then mope about how hard his life was with all this drama.
I was 19, and I had missed my period (I had never missed it before), and I was flipping the fuck out. Every time I was in the Walgreens I would stare at the pregnancy tests and try not to cry, but I was never able to buy one. I didn’t tell anyone, I just got really REALLY depressed and tried to handle it alone. Either way, there was *no* doubt that I was going to get an abortion. At that point, I had no desire to have a kid *ever* and I knew that my partner wouldn’t let me give his kid up for adoption (he had already made that clear). I didn’t want to bring a child into his screwed up marriage (he already had two kids) and I didn’t want to keep it.
Then one day I was bleeding. I’ve never been so damn happy to get my period. I had an appointment at planned parenthood for a pregnancy test set for two days after I ended up getting my period. To this day, I wonder if it was a missed period or some kind of lucky miscarriage.
DK, we all can guess what “meaghan” would say, but I’m happy that you got past that sticky part.
It makes me wild to see how smug some married folks are about Our Right to F*ck and how exclusionary they can be of everyone else’s.
Posts like meagan is why I left the Catholic movement and became an Unitarian Univeralist. The Catholic wingnut movement — led by Donohue — is all about controlling women’s lives. Nothing else. Amanda and Melissa were forced to quit the Edwards campaign because they told the truth about the Catholic church on their personal blogs.
I came to this thread late, but in my (non-Catholic, but also non-fundie) church creeds are referred to as “confessions of faith” with “confession” essentially meaning “profession” rather than, say, a confession of sins. It’s just the jargon I’ve always heard.
Someone brought this up upthread, but I think it needs more emphasis: The role of males in all this. I have YET to see or hear a Fundie or Pro-choicer seriously talk about the MALE involved in any unwanted pregnancy.
Maybe I have lived a particularly poverty-stricken life in a particularly anti-woman state (I’m a Texan!), but if a single woman finds herself unwantedly pregnant here, there is no “going on Welfare” for a while. The full welfare benefit in Texas is $75 a MONTH. If you recieve, say, free housing or cash from relatives or friends, you are ineligable for the $75.
Ok. Try living on $ 75 a month. It’s not even enough for diapers, let alone rent and food and utilities and formula. It’s worse than a joke. Yet the dialogue goes on as if this is a real option.
The ONLY way a woman can carry a pregnancy to term and raise a child is if she has a partner, and not one making $5 an hour. In my experience, MOST men under thirty are really not up for the family thing financially, and will bail and feel no compunction about it whatsoever. Even if young men WANT to “do the right thing”, never. in my experience, did they have good enough wages to actually do so.
Much of the time, it is just NOT financially POSSIBLE to start a family, and pretending otherwise is adding insult to injury.
Add to that the ZERO social/religious pressure on men to marry before they are “ready”.
There are seriously SERIOUSLY two ENTIRELY different realities and storylines here: the Female, who must do the IMPOSSIBLE and manage to care for a child 24/7 while simultaneously earning a living, and the Male, who goes scott-free until he decides he is ready to marry, if he ever even decides that at all.
Hey, we HAVE DNA testing now. They CAN involve the males to the same degree as the females in the Blame and the Sin and the Anguish and the Condemnation.
But all I see is the onus being laid on females, and males flitting through the storyline like magic ghosts…at least according to the Fundie way off thinking.
But no! It’s all “You chose to lie down with a man!”. Feh.
(My Incredibly great solution to get the fundies off our backs is to get legislation introduced to make it the law that any male responsible for a pregnancy MUST pay the mother, oh, $30,000 a year for eighteen years. You know, becasue he chose to lie with her! He has to pay for the post-born! Gotta pay for your “sin”!)
When I was born, abortion wasn’t legal in Canada. My biological mother was 17 when she had me, and I’m an adoptee. You can probably connect the dots and figure out where I’m going with that, but I’ll tell you: They never, ever mention what happens to the children of women who are forced to be pregnant. Do they think we’re supposed to be grateful? I never even met the woman, but when I think of the most probable scenario my reaction is, “You did what to my mother?!”
I can’t quite parse it. They seem to think that you would know, somehow, if you were aborted, but there’s no there there.
I really believe that these people don’t believe that people own their own bodies. In order, I think they believe that your body belongs to their God, your culture, and your government, respectively, which is how they can attempt to enforce a religiously-dictated lifestyle and also be simultaneously antiabortion, anticontraception, antifeminist, and pro-executions, pro-war, and pro-conscription. It isn’t hypocrisy. It’s a coherent belief system, predicated around other people’s ownership of people’s bodies. “My body is mine” may be the most subversive statement you can make right now.
Well, have to say that “Meagan” has the babble of a 17-year old fundie new mom down pat, complete with spelling mistakes.
Reminds me of a teenager who came up to me at a cafe while I was reading a book and started babbling on about how I should’nt be reading those Evil Books but be reading the Bible instead and I should listen to her tell me all about Jesus….
I picked up my books, stared her straight in the eye, told her a) I wasn’t interested, and b) she was stinkingly rude for interrupting my reading. Then left.
Seriously, I wonder how many fundies have some form of mental illness.
Interrobang, that’s the most coherent explanation of the fundie outlook I’ve seen. The Voices of Authority own women’s bodies for procreation, and men’s bodies for violence and conscription… unless of course, we’re talking about the sons and daughters of the Rich Voices who can then go elsewhere on the globe to get their abortions and avoid the draft.
“NFP IS birth control. It’s doing something to avoid getting pregnant.”
You know what they call people who use Natural Family Planning?
Parents.
At Eschaton he usually appears as “annieangel�. But I always thought he was a real wingnut.
At Sadly No, shoelimpy and annieangel appear on the same thread, claiming to be boyfriend and girlfriend. It’s really unclear whether they believe any of the crap they spout, but they are definitely there to stir up trouble and be the center of attention.
This “meagan” persona is really interesting though. My first thought is that it was two (maybe three) different people trading out the keyboard–probably 12-14 years old, giggling around the computer at the silly adults who don’t know they’re being scammed. If it’s got Shoelimpy’s/annieangel’s IP address, I suppose it still could be.
I was dismayed at some of the comments on adoption as a choice where you’d have to still fear for your baby, not knowing “where the baby you gave away is, and if some Bible-thumping nutzoids have her now.”
That is one possibility, if you chose a closed adoption but there are others, particularly open adoption with its full range of openness. To make that work though, you do have to be fully aware of the possible choices and of what would work best for you. That doesn’t negate the difficulty a woman chosing adoption would have to face. I haven’t read your work for long now, so maybe you’ve spoken to this in the past but it would be nice to see something on the impacts of adoption. Given its North American roots in shame and hiding the consequence of “inappropriate” sex, there is a lot of rebuilding that needs to happen there. If women are to be fully impowered then all choices need to be truly available.
I support the choice of abortion but I worry that often it isn’t actually a choice - for a whole variety of reasons: lack of health care, lack of access to good information about prevention of pregnacy, societal attitudes about use of those methods (compare Amsterdam with the United States), attitudes about getting pregnant “out of wedlock” . . .
And then to read once again that American law-makers still don’t get it. That somehow, women clearly aren’t terribly bright, and only make this “choice” because they don’t understand that they are killing something . . .
I wish I could say that Canada is better but our access to abortion services is terrible here, too. We are just quieter about it.
You’re right about that Ginger. I am just so friggin’ sick of fundies and Catholics on their high horses about how superior they are for not using birth control even though they use NFP. They’re actively *trying* to prevent pregnancy but because they’re not using the same method(s) “those people” use it’s not really BC.
Well, it’s not really BC b/c it DOESN’T FRIGGIN’ WORK. /snark
With all these comments, I don’t really have anything to add, but I wanted to say that this is one of the best posts I’ve read on a blog in a long while. Thank you for it.
“…unless of course, we’re talking about the sons and daughters of the Rich Voices who can then go elsewhere on the globe to get their abortions and avoid the draft.”
Or their sons can go to the Texas Air National Guard to avoid the draft…
For the rare woman who can let a baby go after giving birth to it without it being a huge tragedy, good on her. But I’m afraid that I have trouble believing that there’d be much adoption if women weren’t guilt-tripped into having and relinquishing babies. The fact that the adoption supply market plummeted after Roe is a testament to that.
I had a similar experience, Amanda. When I was nineteen, I moved in with the man who would become my husband (and who is now on his way to becoming my ex-husband). We had quite a bit of sex, despite the fact that he was adamantly pro-life and made a point to remind me quite a bit.
One day I went to Planned Parenthood to get my birth control prescription refilled, and we found out I was a few weeks late. They gave me a pregnancy test that came back inconclusive, and told me I had to come back next week to take another one.
I went home and told my (ex-)husband-to-be. The color drained from his face, and he said, “I’ll pay for the abortion.”
Like that, his pro-life views disappeared. It was fairly easy for him to be pro-life when he looked at it all as an abstraction, but when he was faced with the hard reality that he might become a father at the age of twenty, the debate quickly came into focus after that.
To his credit, ever since then he’s been fiercely pro-choice.
Fortunately, we never had to go through with it. The second test came back negative. But I’ll tell you what - if it had come back positive, I would have gone for the abortion and had no second thoughts about it. Because I was nineteen years old, and I had no business being in charge of another human being. I would have done the hypothetical baby NO FAVORS by bringing it into this world, and I certainly wouldn’t have done myself any favors, either.
Amanda, thank you. Loved it.
I don’t want to feed the troll, but, in response to this:
“Find a christian man, get married and have a baby.”
I found a Christian man, Meagan. I thought he was great. And he turned out to be a cheater and a liar who disrespected me and other women. Ever heard of Ted Haggard? Jimmy Swaggart? “Christian” isn’t synonymous with “honorable”. You Christians are just like everyone else, so get off your high horse.
“You chose to lie down with a man.”
Yeah, in my case, I chose to love and trust a (Christian) man who turned out to be abusive. Had I been pregnant (I wasn’t) with no access to safe and legal abortion, I would have been faced with either raising a child alone with few job prospects, or sharing custody with a horrible and despicable person.
Things are not as clear-cut as your simple life might lead you to believe. Your uterus is yours, your choices as yours. My uterus, my body and my choices are mine. And I’m grateful you aren’t making the big decisions for me, because you don’t know how to reason and you can’t spell.
Might I suggest that this blog is not the place for you to proselytize? Because none of us care. Go to your local bus stop or mall and spread the Word of God there. I’m sure they’ll be much happier to hear from you.
Texas Air National Guard
HEH.
There’s no other situation that is systematically treated such that when you do A such that A involves a small chance of B occurring, you are treated as though your intention was to have B happen.
Rhetorically, sex is only treated this way because of a belief, exclusively religious in nature, that sex is evil. There is no secular reason to believe that sex is sinful, and thus no reason to treat sex with birth control as being different from other actions that have an equivalent probability of resulting in certain outcomes.
When the lens of strict ideology is removed, it also makes social sense to see a separation between sex and pregnancy, as two related but not identical things to which a person can consent. Evidence? Look at how much better off families are in places where access to contraception and abortion are available. Look at individuals who were better able to provide a good family life because they delayed having children and had a number they knew they could care for. Look at the drop in infant and maternal mortality, and the culture of child-rearing that focuses on quality over quantity. Wherever pregnancy is treated as a separate, specific decision with its own set of responsibilities, children receive better treatment within the family.
*gurgle* What’s up with this “abortion is okay if there was rape or incest” hoo-ha? Isn’t that just a frank admission by pro-lifers that a fetus is just a potential human, not a human? I can assure you, I wouldn’t think it was justified to shoot a newborn baby in the forehead because it was the product of rape or incest.
Lavender, the logic is probably along the lines that rape victims didn’t consent to the sex, t herefore they shouldn’t be punished, unlike those sluts who should’ve kept their legs closed. The idea is that if the consequences of consensual sex for recreational (i.e. non-procreative) purposes are really, really dire, unmarried women will stay chaste out of fear. As will married women who don’t want children or don’t want more. As will the women who wanted to be pregnant but found out their fetus didn’t have a brain. Hey, making an omelette requires breaking a few eggs.
Oh, and coupled with that “diseases and pregnancy are the God-given consequences of doing stuff that makes your ladybits feel good,” is a deep suspicion of any woman who claims to have been raped. If you can tell yourself she’s making up this horrible thing because you’ve made that the only way to get an abortion, then you can pretend that bad things only ever happen to dirty whores. Bad stuff doesn’t happen to good girls. If it does, that’s proof they weren’t pure enough.
Thank you for the story, Amanda. For many, it is the most complelling way you can make your point.
In all the replies to pseudo-meagan, one point you all know well was somehow not provided.
had no other context so it would appear that pregnancy from rape or any nonconsensual sex [anything less than your “enthusiastic mutuality” criteria or what ever you called it] was being swept under the rug. It is not worth unbanning this twit to find out what “her” response would be. I expect its not the last we hear from this person.Oh great, get distracted and read /. for an hour and come back and somebody covers your point for you while your comment is going stale in the buffer. [shorter greensmile: I agree with Raincity and Lavender]
There is a commercial (and corresponding billboard) that shows in my area featuring a 17-year-old girl who is pregnant. She’s crying. She says she’s alone, and she just wants to know what other girls did - and how it worked out.
It advertises the ‘Vitae Caring Foundation,’ a group that exists “to encourage a greater respect for human life and reduce the number of abortions by using mass media education for long-term cultural change.” Most of their commercials focus on all the great people we’d have if it weren’t for abortion (one of them suggests we’d have a cure for cancer and AIDS), and one not-so-subtley claims that the lack of cereal trails and toys on the floor will keep you up at night if you abort. One features a black woman who talks briefly about how her people had choices made for them for hundreds of years before stating on abortion, “I think I know about rights - and no one has that right.”
From their website:
Save teh BAYBEEZ! Brainwash teh womenz!
Oh, I get it! It’s like Blue’s Clues!
Oh, and while I’m thinking about it: “natural family planning” can work, depending on how religiously (heh) you keep track of your charts and temperatures and all that stuff — think Billings method, not rhythm method. My mum’s been doing it for years.
Not that I’d recommend it over anything but totally unprotected sex, but just sayin’.
Did the phrase “satan’s clawprints” cause anybody else to develop a Loverman (Nick Cave) earworm?
hahaha. so is meagan/shoelimpy also “jasper”? cause i just found jasper stating
yes, they have the choice not to sleep with men they don’t intend to have a baby with. Separating sex from responsibilty is why this culture is so corrupt.
at that awesome jill stanek site.
Amanda:
Your story gave me a flashback to my own pregnancy scare. I was 20, maybe 21?–wasn’t in a relationship, but slept with a dear friend who was having his own “dark night of the soul,” and needed somebody to hang on to. We used protection, but as we all know, nothing is 100%. Like you, my periods were like clockwork–until then. Day 3, I got out the calendar and counted again. And again. And again. Day 6, I went to the bathroom every 1/2 hour “just in case I started,”and was sleeping about 11 minutes a night. By Day 9, I had the following 3 options worked out: 1. call the local women’s clinic; 2. run away for a year, give the baby up for adoption, then come home; 3. drive my car into the path of an oncoming truck. (I had a VW beetle–the original, with nothing in the front end: not a collision you’d walk away from.) Day 14, my period arrived–and stayed for the next 14 days. My doctor’s verdict was that it probably was a miscarriage; clearly a case of “God” going, “Whoops! Dropped my omniscience for a second! What was I thinking? Sheesh! Let’s fix that!”
Had I known then I was actually infertile (never more than 8 weeks pregnant ever, and eventually had to turn in all the equipment)–I would have worried a lot less. But it did make me realize how lucky I was to have any choices at all at the time. Let’s face it, for as long as women have been getting pregnant on this earth, there have been abortions–through means herbal, chemical, or surgical, safe and un, legal and illegal–and there always will be. And with that reality, there is a responsibility to make sure they are clean, and safe–and legal. Period.
*no pun intended*
Sigh. I may never be able to use this username again here after this, because this? This is a braindump. I don’t even _expect_ this to make sense to non-me people.
I’m religious. I believe there’s a moral difference between a fetus and a human, but I don’t believe fetuses are incapable of pain, or - if we’re going to talk about souls - definitively without souls. I don’t know whether I’m right. Neither does anyone else.
I just don’t really believe that ending a potential life in the fetus stage is a bad thing to do. That’s all. I’ve worked in places where medical care was pretty crappy, and I tell you what, if you leave it up to the “Will of God”? A lot of born little babies go to meet Him (/Her, whathaveyou) before they’ve had much of a chance in the world. And even in places with good medical care, the miscarriage rate seems to indicate that welcoming blastocysts and fetuses into the Great Beyond is on the divine to-do list. If I am going to thank God for penicillin and the MMR vaccine, and for the neonatal ICUs and good prenatal care that brought me my siblings, I am also going to thank God for RU-486 and Depo-Provera. If having medical control over our destinies is something we’re supposed to do, then for heaven’s sakes, let’s do it. I’m not going to die of gangrene from a splinter, and kids don’t get rubella anymore. And people who are pregnant don’t always have to give birth. I would call that mercy, right there.
I am not from a denomination that pushes abstinence, and I have had the typical college pregnancy scare (and took Plan B, because, hey, it does prevent abortion). I was in a situation where, for medical reasons that aren’t anyone else’s damn business, an abortion would have been my first choice. I have never cried as hard as I did the day I definitely wasn’t pregnant. We’ve all been there, or will be there, sooner or later.
purpleshoes:
you make perfect sense to me.
During my young-woman-pregnancy-scare, I learned that I was apparently telling the truth when I said I wouldn’t personally have an abortion, because even facing down having a baby at 22, I leaned towards giving it up for adoption (meanwhile, my boyfriend was leaning heavily upon me to abort it). Turned out I was stressing myself out of having my period, though. I took the pregnancy test, it showed negative, and I swear to God my period started about two minutes later. It was freaky.
Oddly, now that I am 29, I think I WOULD have an abortion. I don’t want a kid, and there would be a lot of anger from my parents and his parents, I suspect, over “giving their grandchild away.”
purpleshoes:
you also make perfect sense to me. moreover, I think you do an eloquent job of explaining how religion can inform very humble and very thoughtful belief about the good of medicine and personal decisionmaking. Nothing to apologize about that.
It’s great how you can figure out what’s evil and not by looking for clawprints. No need to reflect on ethics and morals, no need for philosophy, because there’s SATAN’S CLAWPRINTS all over anything bad.
It’s true, it’s true!! I saw Satan’s Clawprints all over the sugar in the sugar bowl every Easter morning, when I was a kid! And we know how evil sugar is! (Of course, my Mom always told me it was the Easter Bunny’s pawprints, but I knew better…!)
I thought Satan had hooves. Or maybe that’s a satyr.
Satan has hooves on his feet. The claws are on his hands.
Dang it, why didn’t the blockquote function work?
[…] Digby and Amanda have some good points on the difficulty of discussing abortion. From Digby: Abortion, I think, has always been difficult to talk about because it had to do with sex — and therefore, in some people’s minds, sin. […]
Meagan/Shoelimpy/Whoever
People, open your eyes at this evil! the womb should be the safest place for a little baby.
Actually, no, it shouldn’t. The womb is a reasonably safe place for a blastocyst, an embryo and a foetus. But a baby is the name a foetus obtains after being born, and it *isn’t* meant to go back inside. Even the little ones.
Find a christian man, get married and have a baby.
You won’t regret it.
Are you going to stand guarantor in case she does?
No, really. If I have someone telling me that I won’t regret something, I tend to find myself wondering how the hells they know. Going on past experience, they’re probably 110% wrong, anyway. I have depression - I can regret anything and everything.
Choice?
You already made the choice to lie down with the man. If you happen to get pregnant, you have a moral obligation to have that baby.
From this statement can I extrapolate that you believe that young women (and young men) should be taught about the wide variety of contraceptive choices which exist? Things like the contraceptive pill, the IUD, the condom (which has the advantage of blocking the transmission of most sexually transmissible diseases when used correctly), spermicides, diaphragms, even the rhythm method. If not, why don’t you think these are relevant in the battle against the abortion rate? Surely preventing the necessity for an abortion in the first place is a good thing?
I choose not to get pregnant. I choose to remain childfree. I choose this because of the aforementioned depression (I figure it’s not fair to bring a child into the world with a minimum of a 3 in 8 chance of depression as an adult, and with a certainty of one depressed parent). I also don’t take the pill - I take Zoloft, which destroys my libido. Mind you, I tend to find that the choice to remain childfree and still have sex seems to cause certain groups to suffer from “head go asplode”, but hey, can’t have everything.
Separting sex from responsibily is whats destroying our culture.
Speaking as someone from outside the US of A, can I just mention that your culture is the one which is doing such a lovely job of overriding most of the others around the planet? I don’t think you have to worry too much about its destruction. Particularly not while the rest of the Western world still exists.
Purpleshoes:
You make sense to me as well. In fact, your description of your faith sounds to me a lot like the way my father describes his. Since I consider my father to be someone who tries his hardest to live a Christian life, this is a compliment.
Amanda, I found your comment, “For the rare woman who can let a baby go after giving birth to it without it being a huge tragedy, good on her. But I’m afraid that I have trouble believing that there’d be much adoption if women weren’t guilt-tripped into having and relinquishing babies. The fact that the adoption supply market plummeted after Roe is a testament to that. ” to be mixing two different things.
Yes, certainly, the guilt tripping about adoption is insane. You would think from the way some people go on about it that it was a civic duty for those that get pregnant:
a)to maintain the pregnacy
b)to supply babies to professionals who can not have biological children.
(Setting aside the rhetoric about “duty to God,” which makes this even worse).
And yes certainly, when abortion was somewhat of a more viable choice*, many women did turn to it.
Why they turned to it is not really clear, however. Or rather there are a multiple of reasons. Only a few of which are:
a) they couldn’t bear not knowing what happened to the child (especially at that time, open adoptions were still unknown, and even today, I am not sure that they are given proper legal recognition)
b) they were finally able to avoid the shame connected with having sex and with getting pregnant
c) they didn’t have to deal with people constantly prying into their choices (abortion does provide some measure of privacy, unlike a pregnancy really can’t be private).
What I don’t know, is if we abandoned our societal repugnance to sex and our separate repugnances to the consequences of sex and of willingness to part with a child, how the ratio of choices would look nor does that matter, really. What does matter is that the choices are there and presented fairly.
I’d say that in a functional sexual society we would end up with widespread use of effective STD and pregnancy prevention, easy access to abortion and support for those who wished to carry to term, followed by support for keeping the child or finding an adoptive home on acceptable terms.
*I say somewhat more viable because it isn’t like access to abortion is readily available.
i am continually astounded, even after all these years, at how “concerned” men are about sticking their noses into our uterus’. (is there even a plural for this particular organ?)
it’s some kind of schizoid thing for them. they seem certain it is some sacrosanct, state owned holy relic to be used to incubate their progeny and thus the next and coming version of their dear and fluffy lord, but they fear the vagina and clit as some toothed bloodthirsty de-masculating orifice and filthy grasping rasps…
i don’t get the whole male jousting with death and disgraceful unholiness to reach the holy grail of reproduction thing, but it is so plainly obvious in the discourse they continue.
men make themselves fearful fools and irrelevant.
i’ve come to appreciate the women around me. the more of us who do, the lesser the males who try to put us under controls become.
what you described is the female condition. living, breathing, enjoying and suffering as a whole human being, even while the state and society would happily deny you that right.
i thought we won this fight back in the 70’s. i had no idea i’d wind up fighting it again for my own daughter 30 years later.
it’s time we get pissed and say enough gang. voices matter.
I did have an abortion 20 years ago. Bad relationship, stupid guy, yada yada. The choice seemed so easy at the time and I didn’t think twice. With each passing year, the nagging sense of guilt gets worse and worse. My moment of reckoning came 11 years ago when my then 16 year old daughter got pregnant. I was livid and the first words out of my mouth were “I will pay for the abortion”. Her immediate response was “I can’t kill this baby”. She went through the pregnancy and had the child. The adoption agency was there on delivery day to take the baby away immediately and she didn’t even get to hold her little girl. She knew this was best for her and her baby and wanted that child to have a chance at life. My wise and compassionate 16 year old daughter opened my eyes. Adoption is also a choice, and one that won’t kill an innocent child. Please think about it.
I know Shoelimpy (what a gorgeously poetic name! ((no, seriously, I love that name))) is gone, banned again, but I can’t believe no one’s made the obvious comment: Don’t fuck men. Fuck women. 100% guaranteed to never, ever make you pregnant.
Maybe I should set up a recruiting booth at pro-life events.
SouthernBelle:
“Adoption is also a choice, and one that won’t kill an innocent child.”
Oh yes it does!
http://www.lsj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061129/NEWS01/611290349/0/special
YMMV
My mother spent 30 years depressed and miserable because she put her first child up for adoption.
When my sister was pregnant at 15, she asked my mother if adoption was going to be a good idea and mum patiently explained how she’d felt all that time - my sister opted for abortion. She knew there was no way in hell she could manage, either after giving birth or after adoption.
I would not wish what my mother went through on anyone.
Yes, adoption is a heart wrenchingly difficult decision. My daughter wrestles with pain daily, but the pain is not what it would be had she chosen the easy way out and made a quick trip to the abortion clinic. Luckily, she receives a yearly update from the adoptive parents with a picture and brief summary of the child’s status. The child is obviously loved and cared for and ALIVE.
I am not a religious nut and think the bible is a bunch of hooey. My objections to abortion are merely based on the fact that a fetus is a developing HUMAN BEING and abortion is the taking of a human life.
I remember the day I had my abortion. I was in the waiting room telling myself that this is what I had to do, this was my only choice. I was somewhat nonchalant and cavalier about the whole thing. But it was not my only choice. My daughter showed me that. Yes, she had to go through her junior year of high school “knocked up”. Yes, I must say I was embarrassed at times at her condition. But we made it through the pregnancy and delivery and sent the child off to have a better life than she and I (a single mother myself) were able to provide.
The pain my daughter experiences from having given her child for adoption is minimal to the pain she would be living with had she just snuffed that life out. That is what I have been dealing with for many years. I took a life, plain and simple, and I have to live with that for the rest of my days.
so how does that apply to all the people out there who are like me, and feel thankful relief when they think about their abortion and the child they didn’t have?
SouthernBelle:
“I took a life, plain and simple, and I have to live with that for the rest of my days.”
From the Wikipedia:
“Flagellation (from Latin flagellare, to whip) was not uncommon practice amongst the more fervently religious. Various pre-Christian religions, like the cult of Isis in Egypt and the Dionysian cult of Greece, practiced their own forms of flagellation. Women were flogged during the Roman Lupercalia to ensure fertility.”
Oh, historical perspective, is there anything you can’t do?
Adoption is also a choice, and one that won’t kill an innocent child. Please think about it.
Choice for me, but not for thee!
so how does that apply to all the people out there who are like me, and feel thankful relief when they think about their abortion and the child they didn’t have?
You’re a sick, hideous sociopathic murderer, and probably a slut as well, so your opinions don’t count. Obviously.
I remember the day I had my abortion.
I got mine, so fuck y — uh, I mean, “please learn from my mistake.”
keen - do I get a badge, or a certificate of some kind?
I usually just lurk, but I needed to share my story, because it isn’t the norm.
I had an abortion 4 years ago when I was 33 years old, happily married, and financially stable. It was a few years after I had ended fertility treatments that had been unsuccessful , and I thought I was infertile. In fact, we had just adopted a beautiful baby girl. Due to my fertility problems, and lack of regular periods, I didn’t find out I was pregant until my fifth month. I only found out because I went to the doctor concerned that my breasts were changing. Neither my doctor or I had any idea I was pregnant- after all, I was supposedly infertile- until I had an unrelated urine test.
So, here I am, five months pregnant, coping with the challenges of a brand new baby. I was hysterical. I didn’t feel I could cope with 2 babies so close in age. I didn’t want to be pregnant then. I was furious that after all the fertility treatment, I couldn’t get pregnant, but when I didn’t want to be pregnant, I was. Also, a five month pregnancy without symptoms? What the hell was that all about? The sonogram didn’t show anything wrong with the fetus, but I had a bad feeling about it. I had drank, taken loads of fetus-harming medicine, sat in the hot-tub, etc. during those five months. And I had been on a diet and actually lost weight. I knew I didn’t want to parent a baby with severe disabilities. I was terrified.
I had an abortion- a late second trimester abortion. For reasons that some people would consider horribly selfish, considering the late stage of the pregnancy. Even some people that are okay with abortion would find that late an abortion unacceptable. I made it in just under the wire- a few more weeks, and it would have been illegal to abort. But that’s when I found out I was pregnant.
The trolls (and maybe even some regulars) are probably shaking their heads and calling me a selfish slut. But you know what? I am a really moral, loving person. My husband and I, however, knew that if I were to give birth to this baby, we would not be able to do a good job of raising two children so close in age, one with possible disabilities. I know, I know, women do that all the time- twins, for example- but we just knew it would be too hard for us. If that makes me immoral, so be it.
My parents, sister, and even two friends were so unsupportive of my decision that it has caused me great pain. But even with that, I do not regret my decision for one minute. I regret getting pregnant, I regret having a symptomless pregnancy that caused me not to find out until my fifth month, and I regret telling the unsupportive people. But I do not regret the abortion. Even with such a nearly-formed fetus. I believe that in a very difficult decision, I chose the best solution. That fetus didn’t have a brain stem yet, so it couldn’t feel pain or loss. My husband, daughter, and I would have suffered, however. It wasn’t an easy choice, but it was the right choice. And I will go to the ends of the earth to ensure that all women have the same choice as I did if they are ever in a situation to have to make that choice.
caarthur,
Flagellation. . . huh? What is your point exactly?
philosopher,I was just recounting my journey from where I was 20 years ago to where I am now. I was adamantly pro-abortion, even had the “AGAINST ABORTION. THEN DON’T HAVE ONE” bumper sticker on my car. Time and life experience brought about a change of heart. “Thankful relief” may one day turn into a different emotion. Be prepared. . . it might happen to you too.
sure, it never hurts to be prepared for all possible outcomes, no matter how unlikely.
i will also add that 30 years later, my mother still does not regret her abortion either. y’know, since personal experiences are now general truths and all.
I was adamantly pro-abortion, even had the “AGAINST ABORTION. THEN DON’T HAVE ONE� bumper sticker on my car. Time and life experience brought about a change of heart.
So you used to be a reasonable person, and now you’re not? A shame. I hope everyone can learn from you that age is a poor indicator of relative stupidity.
Junk Science, so now I am unreasonable and stupid. End of conversation. . . you won. Yay for you. I guess I should just keep my stupid mouth shut.
I didn’t think I would change anyone’s mind. I just thought my opinion, as a woman who has an abortion story and an adoption story spanning two generations, might be interesting and relevant to the discussion.
All you smart people enjoy the rest of your discourse.
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