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Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Why I didn't blog about choice yesterday
Posted by Jill | 9:26 AM
Well, there are two reasons. One of them is that I just plain didn't think about it. Now you could ask why I didn't think about it, and I have to admit that since I no longer have to think about unwanted pregnancy, it isn't at the forefront of my mind.

But there's another reason, and that is that I'm tired. I'm really, really tired of this battle. I'm not saying that we have to capitulate, but I've been fighting this battle since the early 1970's, only to see many young women either dismiss early feminists as an anachronism, or shrug their shoulders and say, "Oh, they'd NEVER make abortion illegal again." Well, sue me for thinking sometime that if that's how they feel, why are we busting our asses to preserve this right that the women most affected take for granted?

I'm not talking about the progressive blogosphere, where the young activists congregate. God knows they do yeoman work trying to drive home the realities behind the "Save the BAYBEEZZZZZ!!" rhetoric. I am talking about the larger society, where every single election we have to fight this battle over and over again, with fewer people taking it seriously as a right we have to continue to fight to retain.

By ceding any portion of their right to bodily self-integrity, young women who are not on the front lines of this battle have enabled one of the crazier pieces of legislation to attempt to seize state control of women's uteri: an amendment to the state constitution in the state of Georgia that reclassifies most of the common methods of contraception (i.e. all nonbarrier methods) as abortion, while defining a fertilized egg as a human being.

I've railed for years about the prospect of government inspection of used tampons, investigation of every menstrual period and prosecution for miscarriages, as a way of dramatizing the logical outgrowth of such legislation, which pops up every now and then like the unwanted mice that somehow find a crack in the foundation you hadn't patched yet. And yet where is the demand for staunch pro-choice candidates? The Democrats are supposed to stand for women's equality, but every time Chuck Schumer chooses a candidate like Bob Casey, or Hillary Clinton looks for "common ground" with fetophile absolutists, our rights over our own bodies are increasingly endangered. I know a woman whom I will not identify here who has a horror story of her own about how her health has been endangered by doctors' determination to salvage her uterus at all costs. I hope she will decide to tell her story soon.

While young people are wishing that we baby boomers would just die the fuck off already so they could get the share they feel they're due of an ever-shrinking pie, we boomers have been out there trying to apply the brakes to an organized drive by religious fanatics to once again make women prisoners of our own biology. Perhaps many of us let our guard down and didn't kick up enough of a ruckus when groups like NARAL decided to do things like endorse Joe Lieberman, who had the gall to say that if a hospital refuses to prescribe emergency contraception out of "religious principles" (sic), well, that dirty slut who got herself raped can damn well just drive to another hospital. But you know what? We get tired. Tired of fighting the same Goddamn battle for thirty, forty years. We need help now. And we need it from those women who are going to be most affected by the Handmaid's Tale society the Christofascist Zombie Brigade has in store for them.

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3 Comments:
Blogger Bob said...
America is already resembling pre Roe V. Wade, when women had to travel to New York or another large city. That's what it's like now in South Dakota, Missouri, Kansas, & probably a bunch of other states. The religious right realizes it's more effective rolling back rights on a state by state basis.
1/23/08, 11:04 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
At the risk of pointing out the obvious--and I'm sure this has already occurred to you--what you describe applies to all rights that are taken for granted. That was one of the things that horrified me after 9/11.

At the moment, basically any citizen of this country can be whisked away to Gitmo, without recourse to a trial or anything resembling due process, just because some moronic Texan-by-way-of-New-England decides to label them a terrorist.

But, of course, it'll never happen to me because I'm no terrorist, and I'm an American, and that whole due process thing is one of my rights, blah, blah, blah.

If there is one thing that folks should get from history, it is that no freedom should ever be taken for granted. There will always be some asshole who believes that they know better than you what freedoms you should have and what freedoms you shouldn't have.

Still, it is understandable, though not excusable. We all have our lives. We all have those daily chores that absorb most of our energy and time. It is easy to become complacent. To just let it slide. But at the end of the day, when we look around for those freedoms we thought we could take for granted and find them missing. . .well, most times, all we need to do to find the culprit, is check the mirror.
1/23/08, 12:03 PM  
Blogger Maya's Granny said...
I know how you feel. Sometimes fighting for those who don't recognize the danger they are in, either on abortion or any other rights, as Matthew13 mentioned, gets really tiring. For me, it helps to remember that one of the people I'm fighting for is only 11 years old and not able to fight for herself yet. If her rights are lost while she is still in middle school --
1/23/08, 3:36 PM  
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