The simple answer is, no one is--or at best, very few are.
My own views of the abortion horrors are created in large part by an incident in 2008, during the Presidential campaign of Barack Obama, when my grandson, a first-grader, climbed up into my lap as I was typing downstairs and announced, as if out of nowhere that Obama was a baby-killer.
I have an idea where he got that from, but I don't think it wasn't his parents. It almost certainly wasn't his teachers, so the line likely came from kids--you know, they're talking on the playground and one of them pipes up the line he carried into my basement office, the line he repeated, categorically, while sitting in my lap. It's really easy to say.
I don't blame him or anyone for telling him that. I haven't been harboring political hatred for all these years either. I can't forget that moment because what he told me that morning, in a pint-sized fit of self-righteousness, is that Presidential candidate Obama killed babies, rung their necks, threw them in a some foul pit, purposefully and without remorse ended the lives of little tiny babies. That had to be the way his five-year-old mind saw the problem.
He was being prophetic, carrying along the most sordid sense of what is and what has been one of the most singularly difficult moments of any woman's life--the realization that she has begun to carry life into the world that she hasn't chosen to bear.
"Obama is a baby killer" is a quick and simple answer to a problem that has none. It makes the pro-choicer evil, a murderer, a beast, and all who oppose him, thereby, lovely, God-fearing saints.
As a nation and a culture, we have to find a way to deal with the problem. If a fetus is a human being and abortion is murder, then, throughout history, many more young mothers should have been locked up in prison for murder. Even in today's bogey-man climate, the most ardent pro-lifers don't advocate putting mothers in jail. But why not? They are just as guilty, if not more, than any evil abortionist. Extremes are ever-present in a problem this complex.
Seems to me that in our bifurcated politics, both sides have to give. Progressives can't allow viable babies to be aborted, even though "a woman's right to choose," without limitations, seems sacred to some.
On the other hand, pro-lifers have to stop claiming that a three-minute-old fetus has all the rights and privileges of an American citizen, or that Obama, or any other pro-choicer (during his presidency, by the way, the rate of abortions in America actually dropped) is the baby-killer my grandson's first-grade understanding colored him to be.
How can that sort of compromise happen? I don't know, but I doubt any good will come from Alito's manifesto, hyperbolic writing that quotes a Puritan judge from Salem as a source, a man who sentenced women accused of witchcraft to the gallows.
If we're going to figure out a way to live with the rights of babies and the rights of women, cooler heads will need to prevail.
I don't look for that to happen soon. In places like Sioux County, Iowa, my grandson's answer to the dilemma will prevail, because calling people baby-killers is the easiest, the most efficient way to deal with a question that has no easy answers.
1 comment:
I have found that the turmoil from the states about the Roe vs Wade issue to be so disheartening to watch. The divisiveness between these two factions is just another illustration of how we have decided that it is okay to stubbornly dig our heels into our own perspective and not see that there is another way of looking at this issue.
It just seems that it would be so much wiser if the Pro-choice perspective and the Pro-life perspective could see that they are actually wanting the same thing and then expend energy working together to achieve a better end than the negative polarization that waving placards and screaming at each other creates.
Every person who considers an abortion has a story. Maybe that story is more important than whether the perspective is pro-choice or pro-life.
That story could be:
-male superiority and aggression and/or rape
- poverty or worry about financially being able to support another child
-worry about dealing with a child who has a congenital challenge
-worry about bringing another child into a world where global warming is evident
-naivety or uninformed about consensual sex
-fear of reprisal or lack of support from family or community or partner
Instead of being so antagonistically against each other couldn’t we all work together and
-advocate for educating men and boys that addresses toxic masculinity and teaches them other outlets for aggression than violence and power
- advocate for an economic structure that supports women and families in financial crisis
- support sex education that teaches consensual and safe sex
- advocate for a justice system that believes women in cases of rape and incest, and advocate for training for those at all levels of the justice system to recognize and penalize violence against women
- support creating free, easy-to-access birth control and daycare services, support campaigns and advertising that normalize and support single motherhood, encourage the use of pre- and post-natal healthcare
- advocate for free places of refuge and support systems for those who are being threatened
It would be far more productive if this joint advocacy group recognizes that when lives matter it is about building a relationship with someone who is struggling with the value of their life or their unborn child’s life or their elder’s life or the difficulties of living in fear or poverty or being overwhelmed by pressures due to race or climate worries or lack of support. It would be far more kind to work together towards understanding the story and then walking with that person through their worries, their fears, their feelings of being unsupported, advocating for them and then being there with them whatever their choices may be.
Working at relationship is much harder than waving placards and screaming at each other in attempts to be heard – but in the end it is so much more effective in getting closer to what we would really like to happen.
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