[Editor's Note: This is political. I understand if you don't want to read it. My politics have always been very clear here -- someone once tried to get me fired from my job because of them. But I have to write this, because to say nothing might be interpreted as disinterest or agreement.]
The little angel appeared before my side of the bed. I didn't look at the clock.
"Mommy, I'm trying to stop a bad dream from forming," she said.
This has happened several times in the past few weeks.
I climbed into her bed with her and put my arm around her. We both fell asleep.
I woke up this morning thinking about my girl and how much I wish to protect her from everything scary in the world. I just read Margaret Atwoods' The Handmaid's Tale this past weekend. The daughter Offred loses would be eight. The little angel is eight.
"What's the matter? he said.
I don't know, I said.
We still have ... he said. But he didn't go on to say what we still had. It occurred to me that he shouldn't be saying we, since nothing that I knew of had been taken away from him." - p. 182
I'm not pro-abortion. I've never had one. I never wanted to have to make that choice. I understand the pro-life stance, maybe not some of the methods used to drill the message, but the message. In a perfect world, no one would ever need to have an abortion. Being pro-choice doesn't mean thinking all pregnancies should be aborted willy-nilly for whatever reason. Being pro-choice means wanting safe, affordable options for pregnant women who were made that way against their will or who will not be able to provide adequate care for a child or for whom a pregnancy is a health risk. Being pro-choice means wanting pregnancy to be avoided in the first place via safe, affordable birth control and sex education. Being pro-choice, to me, means wanting to ensure girls and women can avoid that, the most horrible choice there can ever be, from ever arising in the first place.
We're humans. The women have the babies. If it were any other way, if instead of genders we had blue and green and sometimes blues had the babies and sometimes greens had the babies, I don't think there would be this issue. The way it stands, the women ALWAYS have the babies; it's just the way our anatomy works. And because of that, it makes individual rights very, very tricky. There really is no comparison for the other gender, and I don't blame men for that -- it's not their fault they don't have the babies any more than it is women's fault that we do, or we can. That we are capable of doing so.
But we are not vessels.
There is no way an egg can get inside a man to be fertilized with the sperm, leaving its existence or nonexistence up to the man or to a government that wants to have a say in that fertilized egg's existance.
If a man is raped -- because that totally happens, too -- the government has no say in how he deals with the fallout. A man can get a disease from rape -- all sorts of horrible things can happen to a man -- but the government can't pass an amendment to the Constitution to force him to keep a pregnancy resulting from abuse against his will. I'm not even talking about a child -- I'm talking about a pregnancy. At a certain point one becomes the other, and we can agree to disagree on when that is, but the government is not trying to make amendments about born babies, so to me, it's a moot point.
I realize completely there is really no point in arguing about whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, because such stances are deeply personal and all we can do is disagree civilly and vote to support politicians who we believe will treat us with respect.
It is the respect part I keep getting stuck on this week, any week, when it comes to this issue. My uterus is in early retirement. I don't plan on using it again, have taken steps to insure against accidents. I'm not worried about the government legislating my uterus, because I benched it.
The Handmaid's Tale is a book about a society in which women are valued only for their fertility due to depopulation and a government takeover by a highly religious society. Atwood, in her ending "A Note to a Reader," wrote this, in 1986:
"The roots of the book go back to my study of the American Puritans. The society they founded in America was not a democracy as we know it, but a theocracy. In addition, I found myself increasingly alarmed by statements made frequently by religious leaders in the United States; and then a variety of events from around the world could not be ignored, particularly the rising fanaticism of the Iranian monotheocracy. The thing to remember is that there is nothing new about the society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale except in time and place ... It is an imagined account of what happens when not uncommon pronouncements about women are taken to their logical conclusions. History proves that what we have been in the past we could be again."
I am a spiritual person. I have my relationship with my God. But God isn't writing human laws, people are -- people who are interpreting God. We don't know. We won't know until later. People are fallible, can take things too far, can take their beliefs to unwanted logical conclusions.
I sat in bed for a while this morning, thinking about everything I've seen and read in the past 48 hours regarding abortion and women's health and women being denied services and "legitimate rape," and I, too, wanted to stop the bad dream from forming.
I have a vote, and I have a blog, and this is all I can do. As Atwood also wrote in an interview in the back of my library book:
"After all, this is the United States and it is North America and it is a pluralistic society and we have many people with differing points of view. A number of people would not take this lying down."
We have to keep talking about it. It's important. My daughter is only eight, and she has a whole life of experiences -- good and bad -- ahead of her. I want her to have her rights intact to move forward through life as she sees fit. She is the best thing I've ever produced, but I am more than just her mother. She is more than her someday fertility.
Women are more than that. We are more than one-half of the population. We just happen to be the half that has the babies.
