Soapbox

"I'm very proud of my pro-life position."

    Have you ever noticed? That's always how they begin their explanation of the chains they want to put on their daughters and ours- by declaring how proud they are of their tyranny. They use phrases like "pro-family" and "sanctity of life" without reference to a single position, belief or bill that actually helps any  families or people  who are different from them.
    "Why are you proud?" I want to ask them "and what do you actually do to promote life?"

    After all, nobody is "Pro-abortion". Nobody wants it to be anything other than a last resort,  yet today in the enlightened country of America we find ourselves in the mind-boggling position of discussing- yes, we actually need to debate!- whether or not a woman who has been impregnated by violence should be allowed to decide for herself if she will bear that child.
    Does she, who was already robbed of the right to say "No" in the most brutally personal way possible, have the right at last, in this tragic moment,  to make her own decision, to say 'yes' or 'no'?
    Apparently,  the all-male  jury is still out on that.

    And what of these (mostly) men who want to assault her again: want to hold her down, rip away her will and her future and force their opinions and their beliefs inside her, forcing her to bear the fruit of their twisted values for the rest of her life? 
    They always begin explaining why they are going to violate her freedom and independence by saying how  proud, how fucking proud they are of  their God-given right to turn women into brood mares, obligated to sacrifice their very bodies as incubation pods for the almighty male seed. Just as rape is not about sex,  forcing a woman to bear a child she did nothing to conceive is not about life- it's about power, and that power is what they're most proud of.

    And of course most of them don't want women to be able to prevent pregnancies in the first place, because their  2000 year old fundamentalist theology clearly  knows more about contraception than mere doctors. So since birth control pills and emergency contraception for rape victims  "seem like murder" to the pastor of their church,  then women mustn't have them.  (And  really, a woman shouldn't be allowed to choose whether or not to let a man's magic seed grow anyway: that's just too emasculating.)

    And they're usually the first  to advocate balancing the budget by cutting prenatal care clinics for poor women, infant nutrition  and Head Start. After all- we don't want to encourage women to be dependent on the government by giving them the idea that the children we forced them to bear are entitled to eat! 
    They don't support rights and protections for gay families and can't wait to take away the guarantee that our children won't be denied medical care because of a pre-existing condition.  They vote against domestic violence laws, equal pay, clean air and water, and are actually willing to consider getting rid of child labor laws.

     Nothing about any of their policies speaks to life. It is a bleak, blasted wasteland of fundamentalist entitlement  filled with the brimstone stench of "God only loves people who think like me" theology.

    But look, rape victims aren't pregnant because they were slutty enough to have sex with their husbands or boyfriends, so surely we all agree that they, at least should be allowed to decide for themselves, right? And women whose lives are endangered by their pregnancy- how is it pro-life to insist that both the baby and the mother die??

    Well, it may not sound life-affirming to stand by and let a woman die when you could prevent it, but God's will is mysterious. They are quite sure that birth control is a sin and obviously it was God's plan for you to be attacked and raped or you wouldn't be pregnant, right? So your beliefs about all that… they just don't matter. 
    That's called "freedom of religion", see? Freedom to force their beliefs onto your body, to rape you with their family values, to murder you in the name of pro-life.

    So  we find ourselves in a place where, in the 21st century, these men look carefully into the camera and inform the women and girls of America that if they were raped and got pregnant: beaten and attacked,  drugged and abused or preyed upon by their father while in middle school- that's a bummer, but  hey, make some lemonade, ladies!  Relax and enjoy it! It was God's plan!
    Some girls rape easy, they say, and anyway, they're pretty sure that a woman can't get pregnant unless she secretly wants it- and isn't that convenient!  Girls, if you open your legs to do that nasty thing, you deserve the baby, as punishment… I mean a gift! A gift from God! The truth is, not all rape is rape-y enough to turn women from heartless, death-eyed sluts into unfortunate victims in their mind, and rather than run the risk of a few women lying about rape in order to get an abortion, we should just close that door altogether, don't you think?

   These dead-eyed men will never know the joy or the terror of a life growing inside them, never know the anguish of watching their future slip away as they stare at a pregnancy test, never know the horror of learning that their beloved unborn child has a fatal disease, or is killing them, and that this beautiful dream just wasn't meant to be. Maybe that's why they say that if cows and pigs can carry dead fetuses to term, women should have to as well.

    Gentlemen, life is a mystery, and a miracle, and if you cared about actual, breathing, cooing babies as much as you care about clumps of undifferentiated cells you would be out there handing out free birth control on the streets and funding medical clinics to make sure all babies are born healthy and wanted.
     You would not be braging about how eager you are to put already abused women in chains fashioned of your morality.

     So go ahead. Preen your feathers and crow like the rooster on the top of the hen house. Say you are proud. But you are not pro-life.  You are subjugators, overseers, the keepers of chains. And that's nothing to be proud of.