The
internet chronicles so much anger and indignation over what’s going on in
legislatures in Georgia and Ohio, Mississippi and Alabama—and throw in Texas
where one faction wants to rescind the rape exemption for abortion. It seems
redundant of me to want to chime in, but I am so outraged that I cannot keep quiet.
I come at this
topic from the perspective of an infertile woman who thinks the ability to bear
a child is one of the greatest gifts God can give anyone. My feelings about
that are only overcome by my unshakeable belief that every woman should have
control over her own body, and what another woman decides is none of my damn business.
I am grateful that none of the four girls in my family ever put that attitude
to a test.
If you study this
issue online—and I would urge you to—you know the arguments behind women’s outrage.
Man are acting as gynecologists and assuming an expertise they don’t have; they’re
obsessed with punishing women for tempting them (a bit puritanical and
certainly misogynistic—though they never admit it); they accuse woman of
heinous acts without knowing the emotional trauma that accompanies a miscarriage,
a late-pregnancy fetal death, a stillbirth; and there’s the classic argument
that once the baby is born the state abandons both it and the mother. Look for
instance at the statistics about children in Georgia. Finally, there are so
many contradictions and such illogic about the presence of a heartbeat, the way
men would have us treat a fetus with a heartbeat as opposed to laws governing
the treatment of a brain-dead individual with a heartbeat.
Sunday, for Mother’s
Day, our senior minister preached on the strong women of the Bible and the
value of women. I applauded his message, but it made me sad when so much is
being done in our nation to undermine women’s roles. When I said the war on
woman contradicts the love that Christ preached, someone said to me, “I don’t
know. Abortion is not a loving act.” That in-the-box, traditional, conservative
thinking drives me wild.
Very few if any
women use abortion as a form of birth control. Nor do they wake up one day in
their fifth month and decide willy-nilly they don’t want to be pregnant after
all. Abortion is not a whim like going to get your hair cut. When I was a
teenager, abortion was too often illegal, dangerous, and fatal to the mother—and
it was done for reasons of “saving face.” Today that reason no longer exists—having
a child out of wedlock is not a scandal to most people. Today, abortion is
often an act of desperation—to save a mother’s life, to terminate a nonviable
pregnancy, to spare a badly damaged fetus a life of pain and suffering. I don’t
know statistics, but I am convinced that for most women miscarriage or abortion
are emotional traumas that they carry with them for life. You never completely recover.
And instead of showing Christian love and compassion, men want to punish.
For what? For
being human? For being a woman? That they dare to couple their draconian
measures with Christianity is, for me, the ultimate outrage.
I don’t personally
believe in hell, but I do believe in karma. My concern is for the women who
will suffer today and tomorrow while we wait for what goes ‘round to come ‘round.
I think the least any of us can do is vote to retire old white men who have
been in power too long and elect men and women of compassion and common sense.
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