One of my biggest frustrations with the Abortion Debate is the way that it has been framed. It has become this overly simplified rhetoric war, mainly by the far right labeling people as murderers and baby killers. I'm not sure why I am so concerned with this rhetoric and wondering what we can do to reposition this debate away from this "Pro-Choice" vs "Pro-Life" dichotomy. But I believe our politicians and leaders have to find a different approach to this rhetoric war so that we can move beyond this division in our society. This idea shouldn't be seen as all that radical - look at the death of Dr. Tiller, something has to change, reason and compassion have to find a way to prevail.
The attempt to rethink the abortion debate took a different twist for me when one of my best friends committed suicide. My friend was adopted. Her adoptive family is and were amazing. She had the love of her parents and wide array of extended family. Despite all this, she was always disturbed by the fact that she was adopted. She hated not knowing what happened to her during the first six months of her life. She hated that she showed signs of attachment disorder when she was first brought home and the thoughts of what had happened to her during this time plagued her. She could also never get over the idea that her biological mother gave her up to be adopted. This radically altered what I think if the idea that women should not have abortions because if they do not want children, or don't want children at this time, or don't want this child because of the circumstances, they can just give the child up for adoption. The reality is that adoption is not painless process. In fact, the scars that result from feeling rejected by your parents, particularly your mother, are the kinds of scars that may never heal.
Recently I picked up a book: The Girls Who Went Away: The hidden history of women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade. The book basically tells the stories of women who got pregnant and were forced into giving their children up for adoption by a variety of factors: society, family, lack of financial and emotional support for raising children. This book made me realize that the idea that adoption might somehow be easier for women emotionally and psychologically is a total myth. I will concede that for some women, abortion is difficult and they feel guilt, the thing is, I don't think it is any more difficult than living with the decision to give your child up for adoption. In fact it seems like it could be a lot easier to live aborting a fetus than to live with allowing a baby to grow from a few random cells into an actual baby, giving birth, and then giving the child away. Unlike a woman who knows what age her child would have been but for an abortion, a woman who gives a child up for adoption, knows its birthday. She knows that somewhere out there this kid is growing older. Allowing her child to be raised by people who are at a place in their lives where s/he/they are ready for a child, does not change knowing that a child born from you is in this world. It will not somehow make it easy to deal with the question from that child, should you ever meet, why didn't you love me enough to keep me? Which may not be the overt question asked, but it is the question behind the question: "Why did you give me up for adoption?" No matter what the reason and no matter how much better the child's live may have been in their adoptive home, for a birth mother, the pain of being asked that question has to be at least as harmful as the worst stories of women who have regretted their abortion (of which there are a some, but far more do not). My point is not to say adoption or abortion is bad. Or that one is better than the other. Just that so often in this debate, giving a child up for adoption is provided as an option that contains none of the emotional pain that may be involved for some people in an abortion. That is simply not true.
The other alternative, keeping a child, is also often thwarted most by those who claim to be "Pro-Life." That's the idea of providing government support for women who are raising children. From fair start breakfast and free-lunch programs, to food stamps, to other welfare programs, pro-lifers tend to be the people who most resist these "government handouts." The term welfare mother conjures up all sorts of negativity. Including sometimes radical responses, like advocating forced sterilization of women on welfare.
Of course, the best alternative, increasing awareness of and access to contraception and other safer sex tools, is also vehemently resisted. When you put all these things together, what is left is an understanding that much of this rhetoric seems to be much more about controlling the lives of women than caring about children.
Many of the women in the book I'm reading had no knowledge of how to use safer sex methods that could greatly reduce the likelihood of pregnancy, and if they had, it wan't legal either - remember, married women where only allowed access to contraception in 1965 with the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut ruling identifying the right to contraception as being part of the private sphere of life the government couldn't infringe upon. It wasn't until 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird that this right was extended to unmarried women. Then a year later abortion was found to be a constitutional right. This is a rapid sea change in the sexual freedom of heterosexual couples, and particularly women.
This anti-sex education stance seems all bound up in this idea that if you teach it kids will have sex sooner (or they'll have sex outside marriage). In all honesty, I think having sex before you're at least 18 is probably not the healthiest decision. I think the endorphins and artificial intimacy that sex creates complicates relationships and that it is better to wait until you're older so that things don't confused until after you have a better sense of self. But believing it is psychologically better for people to wait, doesn't mean (1) people will wait, (2) people won't eventually be engaging in sexual behavior and school is the best place to try to teach best practices, and (3) that my opinions should matter in someone else's decision about what to do with their bodies.
Who knows, maybe this means every time anti-abortion questions come up in political debates, that it is the responsibility of all of us who believe in women's full equality and in every person's ability what to do with their bodies, especially in the privacy of their own bedroom, to make sure that we always tie abortion to sex-education. That we constantly point out that the most effective deterrent to abortion is not laws - laws have not and will not ever stop women from having abortions. What will have the greatest influence is if everyone is trained that unless you're trying to have children, you should always have sex with a condom. Maybe you can use other birth control options if you're in a monogamous heterosexual relationship (like the pill or a diaphragm) and you've both been tested for STIs. I'm not saying that condoms are a 100% guarantee against pregnancy, but used correctly, they are probably the closest thing there is. And their lack of a 100% guarantee is no reason to allow ignorance to prevail and not advocate their use, because not using a condom has a much lower rate of walking away without an STI or a pregnancy.
No comments:
Post a Comment