I don’t buy that

As I was following rabbit trails through a blog I read (hat tip to Jean), to other blogs she reads, I came across a sadly fascinating one on the state of women in India.  Post after post detailed gropings, cursings, beatings, even murders… in broad daylight, with onlookers usually doing little or nothing.  The site says it is mostly dedicated to female foeticide, although it discusses broader women’s issues, including infanticide, property rights, women murdered for refusing sexual advances, and bride burnings (appallingly common in India, where the new bride is “accidentally” burned to death (often by the mother-in-law) with her cooking oil and open flame stove because her dowry wasn’t good enough).  The blog is grim reading.  (Anyone seen much on this in our allegedly pro-woman, feminist friendly press?  Me neither.)

After reading for a while, I came across a post talking about banning sex-selection abortions.  At the end, the writer quoted something from catholic.org which outlined how banning sex-selection abortions in the U.S. could be used to shine light on the other poor reasons used to justify abortion.  The author ended with a comment about how awful it was that the “anti-choice” people were abusing the issue to ban “choice” altogether.  The first commenter dutifully came in with cries of “misogynists!”  The “pro-life” commenter replied that, hey, we aren’t all misogynists like those people you quoted.

The paragraph in question said nothing about demeaning women.  In fact, if anything, I would say it went the other way, since one of the concerns was the fact that abortion clinics, screaming about discrimination or something, have managed to avoid the usual medical oversight required of ambulatory surgery centers.  Isn’t it pro-woman to argue that, at the very least, abortion clinics should be held to normal standards of medical safety and practice?

I understand that, as women in India, the various writers on this blog feel heavily the consequences of the pervasive denigration of women.  Female foeticide has skewed the gender balance in India, China, and other areas of southeast Asia.  This results in a lack of women to marry (one post commented on the author’s discussion with her mother who was lamenting a cousin’s inability to find a “suitable girl” to marry.  The author asked, gee, why do you think that is?  Most people, she said, don’t really connect female foeticide and infanticide with the lack of “suitable girls” to marry.).  It also results in a devaluation of women.  Another author talked about her parents’ pain over their lack of sons, and how that carried on to her mother’s attitude towards her granddaughter.

Sex-selection abortion is mostly a symptom of this devaluing of women, but also a contributing factor.

Now, in the FAQ’s, the main site administrator said that the movement was neither pro-abortion nor pro-life; she wanted to bring attention to sex-selection practices all the way from infanticide back to selection of only male-DNA sperm.  The problem, she insists, is not abortion per se, but the discrimination against women.  The SA stated clearly that she thinks discrimination on any of the usual lists of reasons is wrong.

But discrimination on the basis of being too young (i.e. still in the womb) is ok?  Or at least not really an issue?

Then on what grounds can you justify being against sex-selection abortions?

The SA addresses these concerns, but then dismisses them, explaining that a free choice not to raise a girl would be fine, but women’s choices in India are too dictated by the traditions and laws that discriminate against girls.  Therefore, it wasn’t really a choice to abort the girl fetus, but a forced decision.

So, the problem, she says, is the lack of freedom in the choice.  That it was forced by culture or those more powerful.

But when our culture says, “The unborn don’t deserve protection,” and those more powerful (mother, father, doctor) get to choose to kill the baby… the baby gets no free choice, and that’s ok?

And abortion is normally just a free choice?  No forced decisions?  And in countries without a strong tradition of son-preference, sex-selection abortions would be ok?

I don’t buy that.

I haven’t yet seen a happy woman walk into an abortion clinic.  I’ve seen them sob.  I’ve seen them sit in the car for ten minutes, trying to get up the nerve to go in.  They look at the ground, they look away; they are ashamed.  They look even worse when they come out.  Post-abortive women tell stories about waking up from the anesthesia screaming; later comes the nightmares, the self-destructive behavior, the guilt, the medical complications.

The local “volunteer” communications coordinator for Planned Parenthood (her husband is the director of the regional PP organization, so I don’t really consider his wife just some concerned volunteer) claims that economics drives most abortion decisions.  Well, if the problem is economics, then it isn’t a free, empowered choice, is it?  Which would make the crisis pregnancy centers the ones who really offer choice by providing the means and assistance to help the mother carry that baby to term, whether she chooses to parent or to make an adoption plan.

The only choice an abortion clinic offers is death.

Yes, society has failed these women when it drives them to abortion, when they feel they have no other choice.  But legalizing abortion so that society can ignore its problems is not the answer.  It is not pro-woman to say, “It’s all your problem; you take on the pain, the loss.  You deal with the consequences of what society has taught you and the economy has forced you into.  We won’t help you with the problems.  We’ll only help shred the evidence.”  Of course, the abortion clinics try to say they’re being helpful by shredding the evidence (the baby), and many women buy the lie, including many feminists who embrace abortion as the answer to all their problems.

And it is not misogynistic to say, “Abortion is not the answer.  It will not take away your problems.  It will not undo the rape or fix your marriage or relationship.  It will not free you.  It doesn’t make you not a mother, it makes you the mother of a dead child.  Please, let us help.”  When pro-lifers convince a woman not to get the abortion, there is a network of churches, charities, and crisis pregnancy centers behind them, ready to expend time and money to help the woman and her baby.

 

Getting back to the initial argument, though, that female foeticide is not about abortion… Yes, discrimination against daughters is more than abortion; it also comes in IVF and later discrimination against women.  But we have to understand that abortion is based on the same lies that female foeticide is: some people don’t deserve rights or protection.  Because they’re too weak, too dumb, too useless, too unwanted, too young, too old, too sick, too poor, her dowry was too small, he’s from the “wrong” tribe, they’re the “wrong” religion.  It is the same lie underneath that drives slavery and bride burnings and genocide and human trafficking, as well as lesser forms of discrimination.

If that group of people, those over there, those not us, don’t deserve rights, then what protects “us” from being declared not human and not worth protecting, either?

 

“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.”

(attributed to Pastor Martin Niemoller)

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