Why I'm Pro-Choice

Until I visited Lulu's blog, I didn't know today was the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and I'd never heard of Blog for Choice Day. I guess I'm a bad feminist.

Abortion is one of those topics I generally don't see much point in discussing. Most people have pretty strong feelings on the issue, and either people agree with you -- which doesn't make for particularly interesting conversation -- or they REALLY don't --which doesn't make for particularly productive conversation. But since the good folks at NARAL invited us all to do so, I figured I'd share my thoughts on why women's access to abortion should not be restricted. (I am not, however, going to get into any ridiculous abortion-related pissing matches in the comments section. See "doesn't make for particularly productive conversation" above.)

I don't know when life begins (and neither do you). I've watched enough In the Womb to know that something magical happens when sperm meets egg, and if I WANTED to have a baby I'd be pretty stoked on that little ball of cells slowly transforming into a little human inside me (although now that I put it that way, ewwww). Of course, I DON'T want to have a baby -- at least not right now -- so up to a certain mysterious point it's difficult to think of that little ball of cells as anything more than a little ball of cells.

Fortunately, I've never had to pursue this dilemma beyond the abstract. From the time I knew enough about sex to have it, I knew about and had affordable access to contraception.*

When politicians and religious fanatics are ready for the government to actively promote contraception and provide access to birth control, when they're willing to ensure that poor girls receive the same education and access (at the same price) as not-so-poor girls, when abstinence-only programs are scrapped for sex-ed programs that actually make sense, when teenaged girls aren't encouraged to pledge their virginity to their daddies, THEN I might buy into the anti-abortion argument about the sanctity of human life.

Because it's not that complicated. As I said a year ago when nobody but my brother and my friend Steve read my blog, if we did a kick-ass job of promoting and providing access to birth control, there would be far less abortion because there would be far fewer unwanted pregnancies. But you can't have it both ways: you can't deny women the opportunity to prevent conception and also deny them the right to terminate a pregnancy. Unless, of course, you hate women.

Which brings me to why I'm actually pro-choice.

I don't think the anti-abortion argument is really about the sanctity of human life at all, the deeply-held religious convictions of many pro-lifers (both male and female) notwithstanding. I think opposition to abortion is perpetuated by the male leadership of patriarchal religious organizations whose goal is to ensure women's inferior status. I know that sounds a bit conspiracy-theory-ish, but if we really wanted to eliminate abortion we wouldn't allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control.

I think Roe v. Wade rests on pretty shaky ground, constitutionally speaking (the 9th amendment, which essentially says there may be some rights the Founding Fathers didn't initially think of -- combined with the 14th amendment's guarantee of due process -- implies a right to privacy, and for a woman that privacy includes the right to terminate a pregnancy) but until all women enjoy complete and equal reproductive freedom, I remain pro-choice.

*Also I've been lucky. Which is not to say that I'm a tramp. I'm totally not.

Rarely Is The Question Asked: Is Our Children Learning?*

I try, I really do, but some days it's damn near impossible. Take today, for example. My students were watching the film Osama as part of our study of religious fundamentalism. Osama is not -- as you might think -- about bin Laden, but about a young girl living in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Because she has no male relatives and is therefore not allowed to leave her house, her widowed mother disguises her as a boy and sends her out to get a job so the two of them don't starve to death.

It's not the world's most exciting movie -- I mean, there aren't any explosions -- but I thought it gave a pretty good feel for what it might have been like to live under the Taliban: how far-reaching and oppressive their rule was. And I've been at this teaching thing for a while -- I know teenagers generally can't get themselves too terribly worked up over irrelevant things like oppression. (I'm not being sarcastic here. It annoys the hell out of me, but I get it.) But we're talking SERIOUS injustice here, and the film is pretty powerful, so I thought my kids might actually give a shit.

Wrong.

Late in the film there's a scene where a woman is accused of advocating profanity and, after what I guess is supposed to pass for a trial -- an observer at the so-called trial even notes the absence of a witness, sentenced to death by stoning. In the next scene you see a hole being dug, and then you see the woman in the hole with only her head and shoulders visible.

"What's going on?" asked my kids. Which. . . okay. . .fine, we're Americans, we're not all that familiar with stoning procedures. "They're getting ready to stone her," I explained, deliberately being blunt. "They bury you up to your shoulders and then throw rocks at your head until you die."

"Big rocks?" wondered a kid.

And I get that they're teenagers, I get that developmentally they don't have the whole empathy thing down yet, I get that having never experienced anything particularly awful themselves the horror of being stoned to death is probably tough to fully grasp, but COME ON. Does it really fucking matter how big the fucking rocks are?! Can we please focus on the fact that a woman -- who, oh, by the way, can't show her TOES let alone her face in public -- was just charged with a completely made up crime, was neither allowed to defend herself against the charge nor confront even a single witness against her, was sentenced in a matters of seconds, and now people -- like for FUN -- are gonna throw ROCKS, whatever their size, at her head until she DIES?

Oh, but my day gets worse.

The stoning scene ends with people swarming around the woman in her hole, all -- I presume -- eager to throw rocks at her for her horrible transgression of advocating profanity. As the next scene began, one of my kids said, "Wait. We don't even get to SEE her get stoned?" "You want to watch a woman get stoned to death?" I asked angrily. "Well, not in real life," he answered nodding, "but yeah."

What is this, like, Jackass: The Class?

Toward the very end of the film, we see an old mullah locking his newly acquired (against her will, of course) young bride in a room with his other wives. She weeps as the other wives tell her how cruel he is, while he makes preparations for their wedding night. In one of the very last scenes, the mullah holds an array of padlocks out to his new wife, as if he's giving her a gift, and encourages her to choose one. "What's he doing?" asked a kid. "He's letting her choose the lock for her door," explained another kid. "Awwww, that's really sweet," said a girl. "She's gonna spend the rest of her life locked in that room unless he says she can come out," I ranted, "what's SWEET about that?" "Well, if she has to be locked up, at least he's letting her choose the lock she likes," answered my student.

Seriously. What do you even DO with that as a teacher?

*thanks to my pal Jay for reminding me of this lil' gem of a Bushism

There's Nothing Cute About Oppression

Last week one of my colleagues lent me a very cool (from an educational perspective) artifact to use in class: a burqa. My students and I had learned about religous fundamentalism in general -- and its effect on women in particular -- earlier in the year, so the burqa thing was not news to them. As a teacher, I was pretty excited about the burqa, but as a woman it totally creeped me out, and if I thought about it for more than a few seconds that burqa made me angry. Even after seven years of teaching, I still forget that your average high school student is not nearly as nerdy or indignant as I am, so I mistakenly expected my students to feel pretty much the same way upon seeing the burqa.

"You look silly," one kid said. "Is it hot under there?," a bunch of kids asked. "Oooh, take a picture," another kid urged. "You should go knock on Mr. E's door and see what he does," suggested one of my favorite girls, as if it were Halloween. The closest they came to righteous indignation was arriving at this consensus: "Wow, that must suck."

Um, yeah, I think living under a regime that thought so little of you that it attempted to render you invisible by forcing you to cover yourself from head to fingertip to toe, made it illegal for you to receive an education, forbade you from leaving your home unless escorted by a close male relative, stoned you if it thought you'd had sex outside of marriage, and outlawed laughter would be pretty fucking "sucky."

South Dakota

Let's all take a moment to thank god we don't live in South Dakota, which just took it upon its backward-ass self to challenge Roe v. Wade by making it a crime for doctors to perform an abortion unless the mother's life is in danger. This is, of course, in direct violation of the US Supreme Court's 1973 ruling that all citizens have a constitutional right to privacy and that for women this right to privacy includes the right to terminate a pregnancy, but I think we've already established that religious fanatics don't let pesky little things like fundamental rights stand in their way.

WWJD

What Would Jefferson Do?

It’s nearly February -- high season for Virginia legislating -- and the General Assembly is up to its usual crazy shit. One has to wonder what Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and champion of individual rights, would make of our more conservative legislators. (Sidebar: remember when the term conservative was used to describe people who wanted the government to stay OUT of our lives? Or is that just when it comes to paying our taxes? I get confused.) Among the bills proposed in this year’s legislative session are HJ 41: the usual constitutional amendment defining marriage as something that may exist only between a man and a woman, HB 187: a bill forbidding medical professionals to artificially inseminate women who are not married, HB 164: a bill requiring the promotion of abstinence in all Family Life Education (AKA “sex-ed”) classes, and HB 1308: a bill that allows public facilities to deny access to groups that encourage pre-marital sex.

Clearly Virginia’s legislators are concerned about sex. And clearly they have either not heard of -- or just don’t give a fuck about -- the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the law. They also seem to be operating under the delusion that their religious beliefs should play a role in making laws for the rest of us to live by. The common theme among these four bills is so-called Christian values. (Not Christian as in “love thy neighbor” and “judge not lest ye be judged,” but Christian as in “every time I open a Bible I somehow manage to grossly misinterpret was Jesus was saying about love, acceptance, and salvation.” But that’s not today’s topic.)

Marriage

The same-sex marriage debate is not a brand-new one, nor is Virginia the only state to propose an amendment to its constitution that would ban it. From a legal standpoint, I just don’t see what the fuss is about. The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution states unambiguously that laws must apply to all citizens equally, which basically means that laws cannot be discriminatory. I’m not a Supreme Court justice (though I often wish I was), but I can safely say that a law allowing straight people to marry each other but forbidding gay people to marry each other is discriminatory. An amendment to the FEDERAL Constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman would allow states to circumvent the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, but some of you may have noticed that Dubya dropped that campaign promise the second the Christian Right re-elected him. Until such an amendment is ratified, states have to abide by both the letter and spirit of the existing Constitution.

The only debate you can have about same-sex marriage is a values debate. And that particular values debate probably doesn’t sound so very different from the debate Virginians had a mere 40 years ago about inter-racial marriage. Up until a 1967 Supreme Court decision, Virginia law forbade miscegenation, or “the interbreeding of races.” I hardly see the difference between prejudice against black people and prejudice against gay people, but maybe my “values” are fucked up.

Child-Rearing & Procreation

Fortunately the bill forbidding artificial insemination of unmarried women died in committee. That doesn’t change the fact that some dude (and rest assured it WAS a dude) actually proposed it. The bill was most likely designed to prevent lesbian couples from having children, but it’s patently offensive to single women everywhere. Wait, I can’t have a baby AND I can’t have an abortion? Make up your mind, Republicans!

Of course, if you ask Republicans, I shouldn’t (hypothetically) be having sex in the first place. Sex is for procreation, and the only people who should be procreating are those who have entered into the sacred covenant of marriage. Hence the promotion of abstinence in schools and the denial of facilities use to the plethora of groups that “encourage or promote sexual activity by unmarried minor students.” Seriously, where ARE these groups? Can anyone name one? I’ve been in numerous schools, as both a student and a teacher, and I have yet to encounter a club or organization that promotes any kind of sexual activity. Hell, why in the world would kids sit around after school and DISCUSS sex when they could just go home and HAVE it? Politicians: drop by a school sometime, talk to the kids for twelve seconds or so. It might save you the trouble of writing such silly bills. And PS: I hate to be a stickler, but this one’s unconstitutional too. If a school allows one club or group to use its facilities, it has to provide equal access to all other clubs or groups.

Abstinence

The bill in question was proposed by Del. Scott Lingamfelter (from Woodbridge -- my sister probably voted for him) and “requires that any family life education course including a discussion of sexual intercourse emphasize that abstinence is the accepted norm and the only guarantee against unwanted pregnancy.” I can get behind this guy (repeat: guy) on abstinence being the only guarantee against unwanted pregnancy, but the accepted norm? Are you fucking kidding me?! Perhaps Del. Lingamfelter discovered some sort of wormhole and traveled back in time to. . .um. . .a time that doesn’t exist? Or maybe in a parallel universe (Einstein indicated such a thing was possible) abstinence is the accepted norm. But it’s certainly not the norm in this universe.

Here’s the thing about teenagers: they are going to have sex whether we like it or not, and they can either do that safely or not so safely. (For the record, I don’t think kids should be having sex. But that’s based on what I know about sex as an adult, and you couldn’t have convinced me of that as a kid. Okay, maybe you could have convinced ME, but you couldn't have convinced most of the kids I knew.) If all we tell kids about sex is not to have it, they are not going to know how to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease when they do have it. This is bad from a social perspective and bad from a public health perspective.

And here’s the other thing, Republicans: you can’t have it both ways. You can’t exclusively promote abstinence and then bitch about women using abortion as a form of birth control. Abstinence-based education just does not work. If we did a kick-ass job of promoting and providing access to birth control, there would be far less abortion because there would be far fewer unwanted pregnancies.

Jeffersonian Governance

Unfortunately, for the most part we are not dealing with rational people but with religious fundamentalists, who argue that their way is A) the only right way and B) the historical American way. Which brings us back to Thomas Jefferson, an unwavering advocate of civil liberties who was devoted to the concept of separation of church and state (in fact, it's Jefferson who coined that phrase). In 1779, Jefferson crafted Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom, which reminded citizens that "our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions." In 1803, Jefferson wrote, "I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance." And in 1807, long before the advent of the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection or any related Supreme Court decisions, Jefferson asserted that "an equal application of law to every condition of man is fundamental." Do you think HE would support any of these bills?