As regular readers will know, we here at The Adventures usually stay very, very far away from politics and controversial societal issues, preferring instead to expend our blogging energies on baseball, bitching, and breasts. And on those rare occasions that we break with our usual editorial policies, we usually live to regret it. However, when our own thought processes turn in a certain direction and then, completely independently, we run across someone somewhere else discussing a germane point (that no one usually says out loud), we take it as permission from the universe to Discuss.
So, here's the thing. When we were discussing the beauteous Ms Cates a couple weeks ago, it brought to mind Fast Times. I saw that movie in the theater when I was 19, enjoyed it immensely, and felt it was a fairly true depiction of high school circa 1980, neither sensationalizing nor whitewashing what it was like to be a teenager in my generation. Then I never saw it again until a couple/few years ago when I rented it, mainly because I wanted D to see it. While I had fond memories of it, entire plot points were lost to me. I totally had forgotten that one of the main characters in the movie has an abortion. Watching it, I was like, whoa, they could never make this movie today, simply because of how that was handled. The only angsting about it is in the fact that the asshole who knocks her up abandons her to deal with the mess herself. There's no "OMG, OMG, what shall I do? I'm killing my baby!" Today, of course, we have to have friggin' Juno (which I liked, btw) wherein a likable young woman can consider getting an abortion but must ultimately reject the idea.
Well. In the late 70s, early-mid 80s (in other words, my high school/college years) I knew--I won't say "a lot" but--several women who had abortions (which of course means I actually knew more, acquaintances or friends of friends whom I wasn't close enough to to know about their medical procedures and personal problems) and lemme say, Fast Times was realistic about that too. While an accidental pregnancy is always stressful and scary, and semi-unpleasant medical procedures are never fun, none of these women had any guilt or angst over aborting and their feelings afterwards were pretty much, "oh thank god that's settled." And lemme also say, not *all* these women were teenagers either; one of my college friends' long-married mom, who must have been the age I am now, if not a bit younger, got unexpectedly pregnant and, seeing that her youngest child was already middle-school-aged and she herself was a bit anxious and depressed (perimenopause without the benefit of acupuncture, I'm betting!), said basically, "Nope, can't do it, can't start all over again." And we all (including her husband apparently) thought, yup, that certainly sounds about right, don't have that baby.
So, thinking about that recently, jogged by our discussion of our Phoebs, I thought to myself, that just proves it, the "pro-lifers" have won, whether abortion is still legal or not, because the stigma and shame, the whole attitude, around it has totally done a 180 in the past twenty-five years. I wonder how many of those women I knew would, in today's climate, choose to continue the pregnancy, whether or not they were mentally and emotionally prepared to raise a baby without fucking the poor kid up for life.
Then yesterday, I happened to read a very excellent point someone made about how, even if you are "pro-choice", you must these days qualify it with "of course abortion is a tragedy" or people look at you in horror. And how that, like I said, means that really, the "pro-lifers" have won. Well, I personally am still stuck in my 1980 mindset, I guess, because I will come out here and say that I don't, myself, feel it's usually a terrible tragedy, that I don't think any of the people I know who terminated pregnancies should have continued them, and that you will never convince me that a non sentient first or early second trimester fetus that cannot survive outside the womb is a human person. Also? The fact that my impulse is to qualify that by saying, "But you know how much I love kids! You know I heart babies!" is also proof the pro-lifers have won.
xoxo
4 comments:
I feel no regret that society values conceived human life in a way that has evolved since the seventies and eighties. (Of course, I have no womb over which this battle is being fought, only progeny, so take all this with a grain of salt). I'd reserve the word "tragedy" for things deserving of it, (more on this at the end), but I am not ashamed to say it's regretful whenever abortions are needed to be chosen. Why would we want to be so blithe about something so potentially wondrous???
I think that the Supreme Court had it right when they ruled it a PRIVACY issue, and left the moralizing to the rest of us. It's a good thing that we know of just a subset of what goes on behind closed alleyway doors, and it's not a bad thing that our impulses are to value the conception of life, so win/win.
I don't see it as the "pro-lifers" winning anything at all. In fact, in a way, the reasonable majority having regained the right to talk in terms of tragedy is a major victory for all of us. The "pro-lifers" can thus be properly identified with the "pro-clinic-bombers" with whom they are aligned, and the word "tragedy" can thus be properly re-applied to real murder.
Ah, as you know, my womb is basically useless at this point and having no daughters, and a son whom I doubt will ever procreate. (Developing a serious neuropsychiatric disease just as you reach adulthood, permanently affecting your ability to ever lead the normal, happy kind of life you were meant to have, for reasons that are unknown to medical science, and which can't be cured but only palliated--now that's a fucking tragedy in my view. But I'm a selfish bitch that way.)
On a personal level, I've got no stake in any of this. It's not going to affect me or mine when you can't get a legal abortion in this country anymore. So I suppose I shouldn't care. But I do.
"you will never convince me that a non sentient first or early second trimester fetus that cannot survive outside the womb is a human person."
But that's because at a certain point past the joys of grandmotherhood you apply science to the business, rather than blind sentiment and the exploitive hypocrisy of superstition-mongerers...ooh did I say that out loud?
And then, you haven't heard my daughter on the subject...snarkiness honed to a fine edge by life amongst some of Cali's finest wingnuts, whom she loves to bait. Ah, fruit never falls far from the tree, does it?
The more you talk about your daughter, the more I'm sure I would really *really* like her.
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