For Those Naïve Women

I have met many women who firmly believe that abortion is murder. Absolutely nothing I say to them about how Mother Nature aborts 3-10% of all zygotes and fetuses because there is something wrong with them, or about how much more humane it is to abort an unwanted child than to have her or him suffer from lack of love or nurturance, ever convinces them otherwise.

They’ve seen the videos the anti-abortionists show, but never question how they got those videos, or if they are even real.

The anti-abortionists are clever folks because they have learned how to manipulate the uninformed emotionally through videos, billboards, and arguments about murder.

Never, however, do they admit that the people who want to maintain women’s rights to choose whether or not to be pregnant also believe that abortion is the last resort choice for any woman. But it is, and always has been, a choice.

Making abortion illegal will never change whether or not women choose to have abortions.

What it will change is who can afford to get one, which means, in the very easy to verify mathematical scheme of things, that poorer women will continue to have children they don’t want or can’t afford to have, either physically, spiritually, emotionally, or financially. Or that these poorer women will, once again, be the ones who become sterile or even die from backstreet abortions.

In effect, the single minded goal to make abortion illegal by anyone is either a miscalculation on their part about what will happen afterwards, or a deliberate calculation—keep women poor and pregnant.

This frightening possibility—that these religious fanatics who want to impose their point of view about abortion on the rest of us—is becoming all too real, even without making abortion illegal.

One of my nieces, who is the daughter of a zealot sister of mine, chose to keep the baby conceived in a one night stand. The conception happened because she did not know the medicine the doctor put her on for a muscle injury would compromise her birth control pill. The doctor should have known better, but never bothered to inform my niece, or she simply chose to ignore the warning. She admitted that she finally decided not to have an abortion (see, she still made a CHOICE) because she knew her mother would be unreasonably angry with her if she did, and because, once she found out it was going to be a boy, she wanted to give her father the son he always wanted.

Personally, I find her reasoning appalling, not because she chose to have the baby, but because she chose to have it for other people’s reasons, not her own.

The pressure anti-abortionists have put on young women to feel even more guilt than they normally would have (and they would have felt a tremendous amount of guilt having an abortion) has created a whole new American culture—a culture based increasingly on single mothers.

These women are raising their children in the most selfish society in the world. While anti-abortionists rail against abortions, most do nothing to help the young women who become trapped in this nearly endless cycle of poverty. Instead, these same conservatives have limited the number of years these single parents can get any kind of social welfare, so that they can’t even afford to get a college education anymore, further preventing them from “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps,” as I’ve heard so many conservatives say.

I’m continually shocked (which shows my determined naiveté) when my students—18-29 years old typically—voice conservative prejudices against people who need welfare or who can’t afford to go to college. They always assume, like their parents probably do, that anyone who wants a good paying job can get one. They always assume that merely wanting something and putting some hard work into obtaining it always means they’ll get it. They assume success is just a matter of CHOICE!

Unfortunately, these young people are from the same generation that has produced the boom in unwed mothers. The fathers, it seems, CHOOSE not to be fathers. And the mothers, it seems, feel they have no CHOICE but to become mothers.

Why didn’t they use better birth control, some ask? Most of the same kids who grow up in conservative households choose not to ask for birth control because of fear of how their parents will react, so they are often the ones who end up getting pregnant. The intense desire to have sex, especially in the quest to become close to someone emotionally, usually comes with no specific planning on either gender’s part. Even if the males use condoms, the chance that someone has compromised the integrity of the latex (see my other posts) is great, which increases the already problematic unreliability of condoms.

Why aren’t they taking that “other option” anti-abortionists seem to think is an easy solution for these young women? Why aren’t they adopting out their unwanted babies? For the same reason they choose to have them to begin with—they sincerely want to do the “right” thing, and they have been told, by these same religious fanatics, that the “right” thing is the responsible thing. To them, being responsible, means raising the child themselves.

Who suffers from all this programmed choosing?

The unplanned children probably suffer most of all, but the mothers suffer, and, typically, her parents bear a large part of the financial burden, which often causes resentment from the child’s grandparents.

Or, as in my niece’s case, they resent their parents’ attempts to help them raise the child, so they completely remove themselves from their parents’ influence, until they need them. The resulting strain in familial relations will be felt for some time to come.

My niece, like so many unwed mothers, was not ready to be a mother. She definitely tries her best, but she still holds the conservative values of her parents and spanks her son when he misbehaves. His resultant anger—both from the spankings and her threats to remove valued objects from his use, as well as from his resentment at having to be shuttled twice a year across the U.S. to see his father, and also possibly because his mother, too, harbors deep resentments at having her singlehood compromised against her wishes—has made him a rather volatile young man.

The Vatican has, on several occasions, published edicts that predict what will happen to the world if women are given equal rights and if abortion is made legal. Their wildest claims were that 1. people would stop marrying, 2. women would all become lesbians (as priests, they apparently don’t understand women’s sexual needs at all), and 3. the world would plunge into chaos caused by the ensuing economic upset.

While their first prediction seems to be coming true, it isn’t. In reality, both men and women are making choices. The women realize they can survive without men, as much as they don’t want to. But they have also realized that they don’t have to put up with men who only have selfish desires. Government statistics show that fewer people are marrying, but that those fewer marriages are actually lasting longer.

More women have come “out of the closet” since many of the Vatican edicts were written, but lesbianism isn’t on the rise. It’s just out of the closet.

The economy, still largely dictated by men around the world, is still making the wealthiest wealthier and the poorest poorer. The main difference is that, now, among all those poor are millions of American children, born to mothers who “did the right thing.”