Current mood:	awake
Current music:	Evanescence -- Before the Dawn
Entry tags:	abortion, childfree, philosophical, rants

How I Got An "A" In Religion Class
or
The Great Abortion Manifesto

in which Naamah gets a little preachy, because she is worried
warning: long

I'm not Catholic, but I went to Catholic school because in the buttpie town I live in, a Catholic school education far trumps the public school system. At least my Catholic school didn't have bars on the windows, and the worst the drug dogs ever found was pot.

Let me restate that in very clear terms. I was 16, already in an open relationship with the man I'm still married to, had been having sex for two years, was on birth control, and was a bisexual pro-choice pagan. And I was in Catholic school. Taking religion classes.

Yeah.

Ironically, they were my favorite classes. Nowhere else could I get a good grade for playing Devil's Advocate.

Can you imagine that in math?

Them: "Two plus two equals four."

Me: "What if it's six? Why is that worse than four?"

Them: ". . ."

Or Oklahoma history:

Them: "Oklahoma was largely settled in the land rush--"

Me: "By Martians. Red Martians."

Them: "-- in the land rush by--"

Me: "And I'M JOHN CARTER!"

Them: ". . ."

So I had a reputation. Everyone expected me to be contrary and difficult. I thought of it as "full of beans," but opinions varied.

Twice I stood up in religion class and denounced the idiot-speak I was hearing from students about "gays." The second time, it was to awed silence from teachers and other students alike as I called bullshit on a selfish, rich little prick who thought that providing compassionate hospice care for dying AIDS patients was flying in the face of God's will. God's will evidently being that evildoers suffer, and evil evidently meaning occasionally taking dick in the butt. I will note that when I asked him he said nothing about those evil lesbos who are also gay, or those wicked blood transfusions that can also spread HIV.

So the religion teachers knew they could call on me for a contrary viewpoint at any time, and I would deliver a sermon of my own, bristling with invective and frothing bile. I was always ready to lampoon their position and defend my own, and I usually gave better than I got. Considering I was outnumbered by twenty to one, and that the twenty were led by people who had been through seminary, I considered this no mean feat.

On the day that we were to discuss abortion, tensions ran high. Life begins at conception, their reasoning went. Two cells rub together, a chemical spark occurs . . . and there is human life. Furthermore, the soul inhabits the body at conception. Because, they debated, when else does it ring the doorbell and come in? Life begins when the heart first beats? When the brainwaves start? When the fetus is capable of motion? Capable of surviving outside the mother without assistance? With assistance? And what about babies who could survive but don't because they're fundamentally flawed, or because the hospital is a shitty one? Do they not have a soul? Do they get it at birth? Is that the moment of crowning, or when the cord is cut, or when the doctor bothers to scribble something down? How can we be sure life doesn't actually begin at 30?

Clearly, they explained, it is best to be on the safe side. Life and the soul are wedded from the first union of egg and sperm, before the little aggregation of cells even implants in the mother's uterine lining.

Life, and the life of the soul, begins at conception.

Murder is the taking of an ensouled human life and since life begins at conception, anyone who deliberately terminates a human pregnancy is guilty of murder.

The teacher, a Dominican brother, turned to me and said: "Amanda, is there anything you would like to say to that?"

A hushed silence descended on the class. What heresy would pass from my lips? What blasphemous tirade of barely-strangled invective were they to be subjected to today? What soap-opera orgy of godless beliefs and profane values would emerge from the mouth of the most notoriously intractable heathen in the entire school?

"Nope. Totally with you. Life begins at conception. The human soul is sacred. Abortion is murder."

The silence stretched on and on. "You . . . agree," the teacher said, obviously confused.

"Indeed."

"But how can you be pro-choice and still believe abortion is murder?" someone blurted, sounding as though they feared that some sort of matter/antimatter reaction was about to cause my head to erupt in a fountain of gore, a la Scanners.

"I am morally opposed to the taking of human life, but the concept of choice is a legal concept, not a moral one." I had to explain that I do not have to mix the Coke of morality with the devil rum of the law. I take each separately, neat, from different glasses. "I choose life for myself, because I am a gentle woman. I choose for no other woman because I am an American."

Okay, my words weren't quite that poetic, but that's the gist of what I explained over a couple of carefully-worded minutes.

It is precisely this separation of law and God, I pointed out, that allows their faith to thrive alongside the other Christian sects who despise them as much as Catholics despise fags. It is precisely this attitude that frees them to practice their faux-cannibalistic rites without interference. The American attitude of freedom of religion, and of separation of church and state, has ensured that their safety and their rights are not (ideally) dependent on the morality of the priviliged few, but rather on higher ideals of justice and freedom and equality. Ideals, I pointed out, that lie at the heart of Christ's own teachings. Also ideals which also underpin the arguments for choice.

I am pro-choice because it is the only truly moral choice to make when it comes to other people.

It was the first time I'd ever used the "Abortion is the American Way" argument, and it kept them very, very quiet while I underlined some key points.

A woman allowed to choose might decide to kill her unborn baby. If we take away her freedom to make that choice then the unborn life will be saved, but a great evil has been done to the woman, who is the ultimate custodian of her body and any life that resides within it, and it is quite possibly harmful to those adults and already-born children for whom she must also have concern. To Americans (the good ones, anyway), the abridgement of personal freedom is abhorrent because it debases and devalues human life, and implies that the many are less fit to govern their own destiny than the few. To Catholics, the abridgement of personal freedom is abhorrent (or should be) because to deny a person a choice in their morality is to deny them true spiritual growth and development. In short, without choice, there can be no morality at all.

Is it better to allow a woman her choice, knowing she may do an evil in some cases, or is it better to remove that choice, and therefore most assuredly commit an evil in every case? That is the true question, and one I begged everyone to consider.

Life must be protected. That is not in question. But it is my duty to protect the life of my unborn child, not the government's. The welfare of a developing embryo is, like the embryo's own tissues, too caught up in my own welfare, my own existence, to be considered separately. The distinction between mother and child occurs gradually. And in the beginning when there is no distinction, it is for the mother and the mother only to decide how to protect that child. And when there is no clear distinction, sometimes the mother can, should, and will choose to protect herself first. The mother's life, both physical and spiritual, deserve at least as much consideration as that of an undifferentiated embryo. Some say it deserves more.

Besides. The pro-life argument is not one of legal precedent or physical technicalities, it is spiritual. It is not only life with which they are concerned. It is, really, the integrity of the human soul. But to have any integrity at all, we must be allowed to eat the fruit of knowledge so that we might choose our path, whether to struggle nobly back into God's grace or simply grub in the heathen dirt of the land beyond Eden. To remove a person's right to choose is tantamount to gainsaying the Catholic doctrine of "free will."

We may think we are stopping them from committing a terrible crime, but all we are doing is harming everyone.

It is fine to be pro-life. If you can change someone's mind with love and compassionate words, so much the better (though these are tactics that the pro-life movement seems to eschew as ineffective). But it is not all right to force someone to act as you believe is right when only they truly know what lies in their best interests.

I let them think about it. I didn't change many minds, if any, but I let them understand that to those of us who favor choice the argument is not about whether we believe we are killing babies or not. It is about the freedom of the human spirit, and it is about being allowed to choose our destinies. It is about being allowed to have regard for our own productive lives before considering the life of a being who is, essentially, a cipher, and it is about feeling no shame when we protect ourselves by doing what we must.

And, yes, sometimes abortion is a necessity. I would ask no woman to give up her life (either physically or emotionally) because of a pregnancy that she did not want. I would not ask a woman to shoulder a burden she does not feel she can bear with good grace. And I would not ever presume to make life-altering decisions for someone not myself.

Inevitably someone asks me, as they did that day, whether I would have an abortion if I turned up pregnant. My pro-choice argument is based not on personal morality, but on the idea that you cannot and should not legislate morality for all. I believe that emotional, financial, and physical safety for all women trumps concern over the welfare of the unborn. But that is not personal. My personal belief was that abortion is, indeed, the ending of a tiny human life. Therefore, my own personal choice was called into question: what would I do, put in that position?

At the time, I told them honestly that I would not have an abortion. This seemed to reassure them.

I'd like to be able to tell you that I still occupy the comfortable and validating TV docudrama middle ground of a woman who believes in choice for other women but in life for her own child, but I can't. How I feel is more complicated than that. Life is more complicated than that, and death is more complicated, still.

If I got pregnant now, I would have an abortion. Part of that is practical – I'd be unlikely to carry a child to term anyway, due to various medical conditions. An induced abortion would be a far safer way to terminate a pregnancy doomed from the outset. But I felt this way even before I knew that I am likely unable to carry to term, and I have come damn close to having to test it.

I had a pregnancy scare when I was 22. I was poverty-stricken, my panic disorder was giving me nightly panic attacks (if you think panic attacks are nothing much to deal with, I beg you to think again, and if you think only weak-willed, neurotic twits suffer from them, I beg you to leave quietly and never speak to me again). In the midst of what is still the darkest part of my life, my period decided to skip town for parts unknown and take my sanity with it. After a bout of what felt frighteningly like morning-sickness, I became convinced that I was somehow pregnant.

I couldn't get to a pregnancy test until the next day, and so I agonized in helpless fear for all of a day and a night. And in trying to decide what to do, I ran square up against my beliefs. Yes, I believed it was murder, and yes, I was going to do it anyway.

I still remember staring up at the wooden moulding on the ceiling, at my dusty light fixture, at the cracked and yellowing plaster, and thinking, "If I have to, I will kill this baby. I will go alone if I have to. I will never tell anyone. I will pay for it myself, if I must. But I will not become a mother. It would destroy my life, the baby's, and my husband's. It is not worth it."

When I went to the clinic for a free pregnancy test, I burst into tears when the nurse told me I was not pregnant. Startled, she covered my young hand with her warm old one. I don't remember her face, but her hand was soft, with wide veins like roots under the papery skin.

"Did you want children?" she asked delicately, because it would have been literally impossible to distinguish my tears of relief from tears of despair.

"No," I sobbed. "No. Not ever." I was crying with relief to know that I would not have to test whether I am capable of ending a human life, even a barely-there one. In that moment I'd been reprieved – I would not have to take a human life, not even a tiny one.

This, more than anything, has convinced me of the rightness of my beliefs. If I agonized over my choice so greatly and still decided that I would have an abortion, I cannot bring myself to call it wrong. No choice that is so difficult is ever completely right or wrong.

I do still believe that abortion is the taking of a human life, but I cannot call it "murder." That would make every woman who has had one a murderer. Many people would say that is exactly what they are, and if it were not for the evil connotations of the word and the vindictive glee with which it is applied, I would agree. I see no stigma in it, if by "murderer" we mean a woman who has aborted to preserve the physical, mental, and emotional quality of her life. But because it carries with it such negative implications, I will not use that word.

I will not use it to my friends, or my relatives, or any of the other estimated twenty percent of women who have had abortions. That is to put the woman with her private pain (or her secret gratitude) on the same boat with women who deliberately drown their children, or smash their heads in with rocks. It would be putting the teenage girl with her impossible choice in the same boat with the ignorant fool who leaves her child to starve while she does drugs in the next room. It is not the same, my friends. It is not the same at all.

The reality of abortion is not black and white, good and evil. It is a human struggle, fraught with pain, blood, fear, recrimination, and humiliation. Things nobody likes to talk about. But it's got another, darker face, one nobody wants to speak of, or even admit the existence of. This face is that of relief. Freedom. Strength. Safety for self and family, considered action and control that dignifies the value of human life by ensuring quality not just for children but for self and other affected adults, instead of denigrating it by considering only one part of the equation. Like any act of great human consequence, there are times when abortion is a positive thing, many of them, just as there are times when it is undoubtedly negative.

If I would not tell my friend what to do, or my own kinswoman, who am I to speak for a woman I do not even know, whose story and life are foreign to me? Who am I to second-guess her choice, a choice that, no matter how the fanatical pro-life contingent clucks, is not ever as simple or as easy as it seems?

If I would not allow the doctor with whom I trust my health and my life to tell me to kill my child, or keep it, if I would not allow my own husband to choose for me, if I would not allow my blood kin to say one word about the fate of the life I carry within me, and thus, my own life, why would I allow someone I do not know, to whom my story is meaningless and my life and mental health of no consequence, to choose for me?

I choose for myself, and I will let no one choose for me. And to other women everywhere, I give the freedom of that choice, one of the most basic choices there is. I give it without reservation, without doubt, and without prejudice.

Your stories are your own, and nobody else's. Your lives are your own. Claim them. And allow me to claim mine, as I claimed mine in class that day by declaring that I could agree with them morally, even embrace the gentle beauty of their reasoning fully, and still not support their stance legally, because it denies me my humanity.

If you have read this far, you probably either think I should be boiled alive as an inhuman heretic, or you actually do understand why I got an A in that religion class. And if you have read this far you will understand why the turn that current events have taken lately, with the zealotry of the current administration bringing abortion rights under fire from all angles, has frightened me deeply.

Because in my worldview, there is room for those who disagree with me. There is space for them to act as they choose. But in theirs, there is no room for me, or for the millions of other women who would be affected by an abridgement – any abridgement – of abortion rights.

I don't want to look back twenty years from now and see the years between Roe vs. Wade and the present as golden years for women's – no, human -- rights, where we were briefly allowed control of our bodies. I don't want my serendipitous sterility to be all that stands between me and an uncaring, monolithic government that exists only to forbid, and not to allow.

And I'm here to tell you that I, and thousands like me, will not let it go without a fight.

Abortion facts.