Abortion: You Be Her Judge

I liked this. I also really despair of some men, sometimes. I'm not going to go into it too much, as the article smacks down the pillocks quite thoroughly, and I have other things on my wandering mind.

I read all the comments on that piece, which I tend not to do on blogs (I don't enjoy trollfights, as a rule), and I continue to be fascinated by some of the arguments that anti-abortionists come out with, as well as those put forward by "centrists" or "moderates". I mean, this one-per-customer idea - what good is that going to do anyone? Once is alright, but twice is murder? Obviously I know why they suggest it, because they tell me. It's about responsibility. We must be responsible for our own decisions. Translation: I feel that I have the right to control your body if I don't like what you're doing with it. It astonishes me that anyone feels they have the right to tell women when and how often to have sex, and then when and how often they can have a medical procedure. The arrogance of it is astonishing. They think they get to decide who is allowed medical treatment. I mean, I don't like smoking - I think it's stupid, a filthy habit, and can only do you damage, but I cannot imagine saying to a smoker, "Lung cancer? That's your own fault. Fuck off and die in the street."

I also find it difficult to take seriously the position of those who believe abortion should be illegal except in case of rape or incest, et cetera. Why? If you believe it's child murder, then why is the "child" who is the product of rape any less of a child and more worthy of murdering? If we take the favourite crappy trope of the forced-birth crowd: Well, You Wouldn't Murder A Three-Year-Old, would it be more acceptable to murder a three-year-old child who was the product of rape? Obviously not. I firmly believe that the majority of anti-abortionists don't give a shit about children. They make the rape/incest exception because those women can still be redeemed; they can still be Good. Those who had sex on purpose are Bad and must be Punished. It's about control of our sexual habits. It's about transporting us back to this idyllic 1950s state that nobody I know remembers actually existing. Since I first became aware of abortion, I've heard people say: well, it shouldn't be used as a form of birth control. And yeah, that would be a bit dumb. We have much better forms of birth control readily available to us (I know this is less true for Americans, who have to pay for the Pill, but we Englishwomen get ours for free). And if "not as a form of birth control" was meant to mean "don't be bloody stupid about it and learn about contraception", fine. But it doesn't, does it? At its most harmless, it means "I judge sluts." At the other end of the scale, it means "I hate sluts and think I should get to deny them medical treatment." We know it's not about abortion being murder, because otherwise they'd object to all abortion, substitute birth control or not.

You don't often come across people (from a British perspective) who will happily announce that all abortion is murder and nobody should ever be allowed to have one. We mostly get "Well, I could never have one" (which is fine), that strange breed of wishy-washy sort-of-Conservative who firmly believes that we will one day be able to pinpoint exactly the moment during gestation when a foetus becomes a child, or those who sort of vaguely think it's a bit icky but don't support either side of the debate. Of course, we do have an occasional whackjob. No, I promise I won't link to Nadine Dorries again, but she is getting her own tag.

So our abortion debates, such as they are, are often led by the second group. Where and when does life begin? We must find it. David Cameron apparently thinks life begins at twenty weeks in the womb. Why? We don't know. He pulled the figure out of his ass. Should we ask him - which I promise you I will, given the slightest opportunity - he would probably make some noises about scientific advances (one of the arguments I hate most because it implies that one day we will have the technology to outlaw abortion), but I bet you his true feelings lie with the third group: he vaguely thinks it's a bit icky. I use David Cameron as an example partly because I still can't stand him and haven't had a go at him for a while, and partly because he's such a good symbol of England in regard to the abortion debate. We think a fertilised egg is clearly not alive and a thirty-nine-week-old foetus is clearly a baby, so somewhere in between is the point where a magical transformation occurs and what is clearly a ball of cells turns into what is clearly a human being. We don't think of it in those terms, of course, because it just sounds daft. We like to make noises about "viability", but what does that even mean? Foetuses can be "viable" at twenty-four weeks because we have some impressive technology these days. And as I said, at some point, we may well have the technology to make all foetuses "viable". Does this mean abortion should be outlawed when we have made such advances? We would still say no, I think. I think we might also say that removing a six-week-old foetus and incubating it for eight months is a little creepy.

Abortion is a hugely contested subject, but most of us have no idea what we think about it. We might know that we're pro-choice or pro-life (hate, hate, hate that term), but for almost all of us there are questions that would make us go "...huh. I don't really know." I don't know what the time limit should ideally be. I know I don't think it should be any lower, but why couldn't it be higher? I don't know. I just sort of defer to the consensus of the medical profession and gloss over it. If I were in America, I wouldn't do that. I don't believe there should be a limit on how many abortions a woman can get, but if I were to hear that a woman had had twelve abortions, I would want to know why. How stupid is that? Why, even in my own head, am I asking this hypothetical woman to justify herself to me? What if she'd had all twelve because she was careless and didn't use contraception? Well, what if? Why on earth should that make any difference to me whatsoever? Why should she have to set out her precise reasons for me so that I may judge her a slut or an idiot? (I hate the whole concept of "slut" so I'd never do that, but I absolutely see myself judging her as an idiot. And maybe she is an idiot, but what has that got to do with me?)

It shocked me a little when I started thinking about this - I throw huge stroppy fits about anti-abortionists judging women for their choices, so why is it alright when I do it? I don't believe that every choice a woman makes is necessarily feminist, or that it must be the right choice because a woman made it, but I clearly think abortion is alright. If one abortion is a personal, private medical decision to be kept between a woman and her doctor (plus partner and/or family if she so chooses), why aren't twelve abortions just twelve personal, private medical decisions to be kept between a woman and her doctor? Why, instead, do twelve abortions carry some heavy statement about the woman's life? The reason she had one abortion wouldn't matter to me, so why would I demand her reasons for having twelve? Is it because most of us pick up a little of this vague "abortions are icky" from society and have to consciously fight against it? Or maybe because we all feel that we have the right, to some greater or lesser extent, to judge a woman for her sexual behaviour? It's probably both. Unless we work to get over it, we look at the gestation of a pregnancy and pick a point between "clearly just cells" and "clearly a baby" as the point where life begins, just we look a woman's sexuality and pick a point between "clearly a prude" and "clearly a slut" as the point where we as a gender should ideally sit. The whole thing is subjective and ultimately pointless, but most of us have 'em, and they slide up and down as we change, as we think we've learned more and therefore it's alright for us to judge these women now because I've learned.

Have you?

My Uterus Is Not On The Free Market

OK, last one today, I promise.

I'm confused by this. Not the article itself, which makes points that need to be made about an issue that makes me very cross. I'm confused by the comments. Why are so many people saying "Oh, but of course we must respect the free market"? The free market protects your right to open up yet another coffee shop, but this isn't bad coffee, this is medical health. You're not a shill, you're providing the medicine that your customers' doctors have decreed necessary for their health. You are not part of that equation and you do not have the right to tell someone that they cannot have the medication they need. I don't understand why anyone, much less a woman, much less a feminist woman, would defend the right to open up a pharmacy that will not give you your medication. This is not about people being able to choose which supermarket they go to or whether they give their money to Starbucks or Costa, this is HEALTHCARE.

Note this:

"We try to practice pharmacy in a way that we feel is best to help our community and promote healthy lifestyles," said Lloyd Duplantis, who owns Lloyd's Remedies in Gray, La., and is a deacon in his Catholic church. "After researching the science behind steroidal contraceptives, I decided they could hurt the woman and possibly hurt her unborn child. I decided to opt out."

He decided. So what if a doctor prescribed it? This guy looked it up on the internet and he decided not to allow women access to their meds! He thinks you can "opt out" of contraception. No, mate, you're a pharmacist. You don't get to do that.

When feminists, of all people, are arguing for this guy's right to "decide" whether or not women get their medication, for his right to throw misleading information around a field in which he is supposed to be expert and trustworthy, his right to try and conform any woman who walks in to his warped idea of morality, we've got trouble, my friends. Right here in River City. I don't think this kind of thing would fly here (the sheer arrogance of "I decided" is enough to put most of us off supporting him), but Americans are having trouble holding on to their legal abortions as it is. Bush has been eroding the abortion laws, McCain will surely do the same and I do not believe for a minute that Obama will be a pro-choice stalwart (I think he's wishy-washy, light on policy and could just as easily be a Republican if he thought that would work better for him - sorry), so I can't see that this erosion will do anything but continue. And with feminists who make noises about the "free market" when it comes to their own health - if a woman needs contraceptives for ovarian cancer, as is one Feministing commenter's experience, and a scary fake pharmacy steals her prescription and sends her away, the fake pharmacy is not just screwing with this woman's health, it's risking her life. A few people on the thread pointed out how rare pharmacies are in some parts of the US, and for some people "I'll just go to another one" is not feasible. And even if the Pill's only use was pregnancy prevention, so what? We're feminists. We should be defending our reproductive rights with every damn ounce of strength we have, not making stupid weak noises about the "free market". NO. STOP IT.

I think we reach a point where we have to stop saying "but I can see both sides of the argument" or "technically under the law it might be possible for them to argue this, and we should respect that". Anti-choicers are rabid. They will make no concessions to our side. They will just yell that we're bad, we're evil, we're baby-killers, we're corrupting society, we're causing all these wars and deaths and tornadoes and things. So why are we trying to see their side? Of course we want to debate more intelligently than they do, but why can we not tell them they're wrong, they're liars, they're hypocrites, they're doing enormous damage with their deliberate use of misinformation? Why do we have to "see their point" and bend over backwards to make cases of gross malpractice like this fit inside the law? Are we that desperate to be seen as reasonable?

I tell you what, I am so sick of this whole "reasonable" thing. The word is a stick with which to beat women. Call us "shrill" or "hysterical" when we disagree and you've won, because then everything we say is born out of irrational feminine emotion and is hence not relevant. We've internalised that we won't be taken seriously if we are seen to get angry at all over any issue, no matter how worthy of the anger that issue may be, and we try as hard as we can to seem reasonable. Mum and I had the TV on while doing the crossword this evening, and we caught part of a show called Mary Queen of Shops, based on the standard TV premise of sending an expert into a failing business and making it work again. The clothes shop under scrutiny was run by a husband and wife team (mainly the husband, with the beaten-down wife on grunt-work duty), and was doing terrifically badly because the man had no idea about clothes. He also wouldn't listen to a damn word anyone else said, and rejected all the expert's plans out of hand. Repeatedly. She, of course, got frustrated. So he, in the voice of a true git, said, "Now, just calm down. Calm down, relax. I'm trying to explain." Any female blogger knows those words. They're "shut up, you silly little woman, and let the big man explain it to you" words. I've seen most episodes of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and even though he goes ballistic in most episodes, nobody has ever told him to calm down, or relax. Certainly nobody would dare to invite Ramsay into a failing business and say, in impossibly patronising tones, "I'm explaining it to you, so you'll understand." I've seen people who think they know how to run their own business better than Ramsay would, but I've never seen anyone who thinks they can teach Ramsay a thing or two about cooking. Eventually the git gave in, the expert did her thing and of course made it eight million times better, but I got the sense that the git would have almost preferred to go bankrupt, just so as not to be bested by a woman.

This is what we're up against. We can't be "reasonable" because we are not in a world full of allies. We are in a world full of men who would happily throw our rights away, and powerful but stupid women who would happily help because they don't seem to understand that no exception would be written in for them (I don't get these women. Help would be appreciated). We have to fight loud and hard, and it's not even for progress. It's for the privilege of staying where we are. We're not making hard-won advancements, we're struggling with hard-won stagnation. In the interests of managing, if not reducing, sexism, feminists have to come out in defence of women they despise. I have found myself defending both Ann Widdecombe and Ruth Kelly, both of whose views conflict on almost every level with mine (Ann Widdecombe bothers me on a personal level as well, whereas Ruth Kelly's track record on issues of equality and reproductive rights just make me nervous), and several American feminists talk about the sad necessity of defending someone called Ann Coulter, who is by all accounts rather mad and one of the powerful but stupid women I mentioned earlier. We not only have to defend these women, we have to watch out for opportunities to defend them, because we know how pervasive and insidious sexism is. We also know that we can't be weak about it. We have to make people listen to us, we have to stand up for our cause at every opportunity, we have to fight like hell. We all know this. So why are we so concerned with seeming "reasonable" to the point of defending medical malpractice that runs totally contrary to our belief system? Why are we allowing some man to "decide" which healthcare we are and are not permitted to have, with no medical training at all? Why are we amused by them, calling them "stupid and wrong" in the same dismissive way that we talk about people who used to bully us at school, instead of using more serious words like "dangerous" and "malpractice"? I learnt a harsh lesson when the leaders of the Catholic and Anglican churches over here noticed the power that their counterparts in the US had and started digging in their heels for a little piece of that here (letters to the Times from various reverends state that all this talk by the bishops of Christian-hating and marginalising from the government and the public is rubbish and they haven't noticed anything of the sort). If it happens anywhere in the Western world, it can happen everywhere in the Western world. And when it's happening in your own damn country, you cannot afford to sit back and say "free market". My uterus is not to be negotiated by the church, the government, my family or even my partner, and it sure as hell is not on the free market. Read that guy's speech again. He's denying women their medication because he decided to. The decision isn't his to make, but we're letting him make it anyway. He decided, and we let him.

Please, Think Of The Children

Yay!

Yay!

Gordon Brown has earned himself two points. He voted for the 24-week abortion limit, and he voted to get rid of the heterosexist guff about a child's "need for a father". Well done, Gordon, you impressed me. The Tories, not so much.

First and foremost, I do not understand how, in this day and age, a man like Sir Patrick Cormack can have anything to do with the running of our country. He said: "A child that is deliberately brought into the world with no desire that there should be a man or a woman who is the parent is brought in with a disadvantage." This makes no sense whatsoever, and I sort of hope the BBC did that on purpose because they hate him, but translated into English, it means, "Lesbians shouldn't be parents."

I sincerely hope that David Cameron, a man whom I royally despise but who claims to be leading the charge to modernise his party, will realise that such sentiments are not endearing the Conservatives to the young generation. I seem to be his target voter; a young, white, middle-class woman. Young, white, middle-class women have no truck whatsoever with this sort of insidious gay-bashing. If Cameron ever wishes to win my respect, he must acknowledge that this ridiculous "need for a father" motion tabled by Iain Duncan Smith (the most useless Tory leader ever, and that ought to tell you something) comes out of an out-of-date view of Britain and is representative of his party's subconscious - or, indeed, conscious, in the case of Sir Patrick - bigotries. "Need for supportive parenting" is exactly the correct way to phrase it. When Duncan Smith and his ilk tell us that children who grow up without a father are more likely to go off the rails, they're ignoring a big chunk of the story. I know a lot of people who grew up without fathers, and they're fine. The ones that aren't fine are the ones whose fathers were present and neglectful, or present one day a month. They're the ones who grew up with abuse, casual insulting remarks tossed out to get them to shut up, and not so much as a card or phone call on their birthdays. These are the kids who feel deprived, who feel they've done something wrong to drive Daddy away and end up with no sense of self-worth, or who just can't get Daddy to acknowledge them and end up in deeper and deeper trouble. This is still a generalisation, but it's far more accurate than "single-parent families fuck kids up."

We will keep our 24-week abortion limit, no thanks to Mr Cameron, who voted to lower it by two weeks. Why two weeks? Lord knows. The BBC is careful to point out that all the Catholic Labour ministers voted to lower it to 12. Yeah, fucking 12. Nice one, Ruth Kelly. Someone called Edward Leigh is yacking on about sanctity as though he's a right-wing American pundit, and frankly he is so insignificant that I have nothing else to say about him. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor turned up in the Times supporting everything I argue against and vice versa, using the phrase "incremental change". Remember this, ye who value your freedom: this two-week-at-a-time knockdown is part of the plan to erode your rights completely. If, God forbid, he should ever get his two-week knockdown, he'll be out there again arguing for another two weeks. And another, and another. Before you know it, we're in Ireland. You could have stayed there, y'know, Murph.

There are numerous things I could say about these votes, but I'll stick, for now, to this one: in general, the people voting to restrict IVF were the people voting to slash the abortion limit. This strikes me as a wee bit illogical. These people insist that it's absolutely vital that a baby has a mother and a father, but if a woman accidentally gets pregnant, the man pisses off and the woman doesn't want it, well, tough. Why isn't it better for a loving same-sex couple, or a single woman who wants a child enough to go to these expensive and invasive lengths, to have their baby than for a frightened, abandoned teenager to be unable to choose not to? I am feeling charitable, and so I'll assume the best. I'll assume that these men (as the vast majority are in the Commons) are loving and devoted parents who cannot imagine their babies being unwanted, who cannot imagine abandoning a woman pregnant with their child, who help to change the nappies and get up in the night and play football and read stories and consider there to be no greater joy than the laughter of their sons and daughters. Excellent. But guys, not all men are you. Some men cannot think of anything worse than having a baby. Some men will panic. Some men aren't ready, and have the luxury that women don't of just fucking off. Some men are just assholes. I know men who, variously, forget their children's birthdays, dump them with someone else on their visitation days, run the other way if they see mother and baby in the street, deny the child's existence to their friends, yell at the child, hit the child, hate the child. I know men who conceived children in wedlock - the Conservative lucky charm - and after divorcing the mother, try as hard as they can never to see the kids again. I'll assume, also, that your wives were delighted to be pregnant, wanted children, were ecstatic over the prospect of giving birth to your little one. Do you, any of you, have any idea what it's like to be pregnant and alone? To take an equal part in an 'accident' for which you alone are now reponsible? Do you have any idea what it's like to have something growing in you and hate it with a vicious passion, while sanctimonious arses like you are going on about the sanctity of life, and how abortions are 'social' and calling that horrible little ball of cells your 'baby'? It's not a fucking baby.

I wish people would stop going on about 'tradition' and lamenting the loss of 'traditional family'. I don't want the kind of tradition that forces women to have babies they don't want, and forces couples to shackle themselves together for eternity because one night has unexpected consequences. Duncan Smith complains that by removing the "need for a father" clause, we undermine the traditional family; well, duh. Some people aren't wired that way, mate. We're not all born traditional. Some people would love to be parents. They would love to devote themselves to raising a child. And if they happen to be a pair of women or a pair of men, so fucking what? When Catholic adoption agencies were trying to get themselves excepted from the "no homophobia" law - to ask for Government-sanctioned bigotry takes some nerve, I must admit - numerous commentators pointed out that Catholic adoption agencies took on the most difficult, unplaceable kids, and the people most likely to adopt one of these kids were gay couples. Instead of taking a lesson from this, the agencies threatened to shut down. To paraphrase Dara O Briain, essentially their stance was: "If you won't let us do what we want, we shall release the children into the wild."

Memo to Britain: The Conservative party is still nursing its bigotries. Please do not forget this next time Cameron starts going on about recycling in modern Britain.

Memo to Conservatives: For the love of God, move on. It's 2008. We can't still be proposing laws that basically say "Gays are weird".

Memo to Murphy-O'Connor: I still hate you, and everything you stand for.

Won't somebody please think of the children?