Becoming Pro-life

24 Nov 2011 5 Comments

by Barbara in Uncategorized

There are a lot of Catholic teachings that I struggled with in a real fist-pounding way.  The notion of male headship in households had me sending up more than a few toddler-style why’s in God (and very patient Catholics’) direction.   Similarly,  the idea of a male only priesthood bothered me such that I spent a lot of time on womynpriest websites and message boards.   The Catholic teaching on contraception was a smack in the face to my unexpectedly pregnant about to be married self already in a state of clutching terror about these two revolutionary changes taking place in my life.

Abortion on the other hand,   I got right away.

I was never overly fervent in my pro-choice views, views I absorbed through osmosis rather than conviction. I absorbed inhuman amounts of television in my adolescence, and the subtle messages disseminated through it communicated the “natural rightness” of that position.  I still remember an episode of Degrassi High when I was 16 where Erica, one of the twins, has an abortion and is mercilessly tormented by a pro-life student who finds out about it.  As a bullied student myself I automatically sided with Erica,  absorbing the pathos of her situation and hating the bully.

Becoming pro-life was the first time I really used critical thinking, looking at something objectively without pathos and examining those tropes I had accepted as  givens.  Beyond my religious conversion, yet not altogether separate from it, there was a process that I underwent, several steps which lead me to the conclusion that abortion is an injustice and must end.

1.  Meeting pro-lifers and hearing them describe themselves.

Up until I started examining Catholicism I had never encountered a pro-lifer in real life.  I was, and still am, an academic in a very left-wing university where the pro-choice position is the default, so much so that the issue of denying funding to pro-life clubs doesn’t phase people as a lack of fairness or censorship.   Pro-lifers were “hateful”, so what is the problem with preventing “hateful” people from speaking?.  Meeting people who were pro-lifers and listening to their ideas was something I had never done.  I had simply taken as facts the tropes that radical feminists attributed to them, assuming they were motivated by religious extremism or a desire to curb women’s sexual and reproductive freedom in order to produce more male children for the patriarchy.  It had never occurred to me, until I spoke to them and listened to them that They believed the unborn child was a human life worth protecting.  I began to ask myself hard questions about it.  Was it a human life?  Is it worth protecting?   Is this not a noble goal?  Is this not what the social justice principles I believed in were, the ones that made me a feminist in the first place…to protect the weak from the strong? the vulnerable from the powerful?

2.  Understanding opposition to abortion as an extension of social justice principles.

In my studies I read a lot of testimonies from torture victims in Chile and Argentina during the Dirty War of the 1970′s and 1980′s.  I also studied novels and poetry from that time period.  I struggled to understand how a person could wilfully commit the kind of violent acts I read about such as hooking genitals and sensitive bodies up to car batteries, driving rats into women’s vulva’s through heated pipes, cutting the stomachs of prisoners open and throwing them into the sea. In so many ways lives were violated, bodies immolated to produce enough pain so that the so-called subversive would give up “information.”  These acts were justified and motivated by twin engines:  first a political ideology with a strong dualistic tendency, viewing its opposition as evil  and threatening,     second a practice of dehumanizing the person on the table, making macabre jokes or referring to him or her in material terms.  When I turned my lens to the issue of abortion I started to see their similarities.  An ideology (radical feminism) with a strong dualistic tendency (opposing patriarchy/conservatism as threatening) which also dehumanizes the victim of its practice (the unborn child is referred to as “fetus” “clump of cells” “parasite” et. al.)  Macabre humor is used to avoid any type of feeling for the “thing”, or any recognition of its humanity.  

3.  Understanding that justice needs to be consistent.  

These first two realizations put a definite chink in my pro-choice views, I began to understand that abortion was actually a human rights violation, not a human right, and that a life was being taken.  At first I modulated my views to say that abortion should only be allowed for the “big 3″ hard-cases…when the life of the mother was in danger, in cases of rape, and in cases of incest.  To this I added one more, in cases where the woman was under the age of 15.  This seemed, at first, quite reasonable.  Here we can avoid unnecessary suffering for women and protect the lives of the majority of unborn children.  There was a niggling inconsistency in those views that started to bother me.  If I truly believed that abortion was a violation of human rights, that a human life was being taken unjustly, then why is it okay in cases of rape, incest and in young mothers?  We are a long way away from the time when we punished descendants for the crimes of their forbears.   The child in the hard-cases is as innocent as the child of the party-girl who has her third abortion in one year because she can’t figure out how a condom works.   Nothing done by the father or mother makes these children somehow stained or punishable.  If anything, the child of the rapist is as much a victim as the mother herself.  It’s as if a man were to kill his wife, take their newborn baby to  the house of another woman, rape her and then leave the baby on the doorstep.    The second rape victim would have to give the baby to social services or an adoption agency, or raise her herself, but to kill her who had no role in the crime other than that of bystander/victim?  This steers close to a kind of bloody retribution, not justice.  I realized that justice needs to be a consistent and objective standard.  It seems more compassionate to give the hard-cases a pass, and yet to allow innocent lives to be taken in order to spare other’s pain is not justice.   I also realized that there are non-death alternatives in these hard-cases, adoption being one of the best ones.  There is an opportunity in choosing life, in leaning towards love and away from death, to heal the past.

4.  Witnessing…

I became unexpectedly pregnant, and I saw this:

Blanca Isabel sucking her thumb at 18 weeks gestation

In the first ultrasound, at 16 weeks, Blanca Isabel was a fully formed being.  She was in a state of bliss, alive, swimming, thriving, kicking her little hands and feet.   The technician laughed “she’s playing from the camera!” as he tracked her crazy circles with the wand.   At 18 weeks the doctor wanted a shot of her digestive system to see how she was developing, so I saw her again, this time bigger, her heart valves pumping at marathon-runner speed as she sucked her thumb for the “camera”.  I saw her mouth open and close to swallow fluid, and maybe its the oxytocin speaking, but I saw her wave both of her hands saying “hii”.  Blanca Isabel the same yesterday…

Today

And tomorrow

My cold, feminist heart, sealed in the mausoleum of its ideology, has been broken, gloriously broken, by this tiny astonishing body, as real in the womb as it is when I wash it and dress it in the morning. Those eyes, that hair, that ever expanding awareness.  And I fell through the cracks in my old thinking, to this place of feeling.  My heart is splayed open and aching for every baby washed out in a bloodbath, every one dismembered, I think it could have been Isabel, perhaps if I were younger, or even if I had never made this examination of belief before I got pregnant.  I would have coldly had her dispatched because I “wasn’t ready” and that flesh-flame of a life would have been extinguished by the coldness living inside of me.  For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on me and on the whole world.