My Thoughts on the War Against Women

            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.

Random thoughts on the death of Cecil the lion

So much has been written about the slaughter of Cecil, Zimbabwe’s most famous lion, that I am hesitant to add to the mixture of fact and fiction. But the incident troubles me so much I rehashed it too many times in one of those three-o’clock and I can’t sleep times last night.

The dentist’s apology and protests of innocence ring hollow. He has already been penalized for poaching a bear and, today, revelations hint he may also be a sexual predator (you never know about what you read on Facebook). But this I do know: a man who hunts for sport and trophy heads and his own pleasure, has no soul. I shudder to think of his house, every wall sporting a mounted trophy head. Hunting for food is one thing; hunting for sport totally another.

Please tell me it’s not true (but I suspect it is) that Cecil was lured out of the wildlife refuge by an animal carcass strapped to a vehicle.

Hunting for sport with bow and arrow is beyond cruel. This was not a clean kill, and the wounded lion lived forty hours after first being shot. The hunters had to search for him and finish him off with a rifle.

Selfishly, I hope to see no more pictures of Cecil on the net. He was a magnificent animal, and my heart breaks every time I see him.

It’s time to move beyond outrage to concrete action to stop poaching and curb legal hunting worldwide. I’m glad to see that steps are being taken in that direction. Want to help? Here’s an address: http://www.wildcru.org. It’s for the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit. There’s also a petition going around to put lions on the endangered species list (they may already be—not sure about that). We can do something concrete to help the world by speaking out. My mom used to say that some good comes of everything—making a difference for wildlife may be the good that comes out of this tragedy.

Karma is effective: I suspect the dentist’s life will never again be filled with hunts and trophies and, as one writer said, searches for his manhood. His practice is effectively ruined—who would take their teeth to him? I wouldn’t be surprised if his wife left him, if he has a wife. And he’s cowering in a corner somewhere. Not sure about this, but I read that if the use of a lure to get Cecil on public property is proven, the dentist can be extradited and prosecuted. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is investigating the case, and the White House has accepted a petition to look into it. One of the hunters who was with him has been charged in Zimbabwe with failure to prevent an unlawful kill.