Changing the debate on Abortion

I have a personal blog and I wrote this entry for it. It was originally intended to be an essay complaining about how we have feral cats in the back yard and we keep catching, spaying/neutering, and releasing them... and there are always yet more of them. It sort of got away from me though and I thought that it might be a good essay for here as well.

If the abortion policy of the country is to be changed, first the minds of the people have to be changed. The stuff that has been done in recent decades has not been working, I posit. The pro-life folks pretty much strike me as being oblivious to the power dynamics that exist in the minds of women when they hear abortion being debated and, once again, the social conservatives seem to have this "you people" undertone that really undercuts their message.

I don't really have a solution for that, really. But I do think that if you can get people to change their minds about abortion, it'll be a *LOT* easier to ban, for example, third trimester abortions. The point of this particular essay isn't to change minds as much as it was to complain somewhat about the dang cats in the back yard... but I suspect that it deals with the power dynamic that is very much there in a way that won't automatically result in the assumption that oppression and control is there. Then again, maybe it's just yet another navel-gazing catblog. (When I give an aside, know that this essay was originally written to my own personal friends... within the circle of whom I am the most Conservative. Yes, I know. I'm a Cosmotarian Libertine. I am still the most Conservative guy in my circle.)

In any case, the essay follows:

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A few months back, there was this Ron Paul guy. He was running for president. He was also pro-Life. He was an obstetrician and delivered a kabillion babies and ran for Congress on the "I did not have sexual relations with those newsletters" ticket. I wasn't really a Paul supporter, myself. I saw (and see) him as a Paleocon and while there is some overlap between Paleos and Cosmotarian Libertines such as myself, there isn't enough to get me to donate to a g-darn blimp instead of sitting on my butt, not doing anything, and call myself "Boston Tea".

I digress. Anyhow, I was arguing politics and the argument came up that Ron Paul must hate women or some such. This knitted my brow.

When I was a kid, there was a healthy debate on the whole abortion thing... on the right and on the left. Now, as an Evangelical Christian, I was pretty much only exposed to the debate on the Right (which amounted to whether there should be exceptions for rape/incest or if there shouldn't be) but, as I started digging into the debate, I found out that there was a healthy debate on, of all places, THE LEFT. It freaked me out. Instead of a debate that didn't really take the whole power dynamic of sex, pregnancy, whatnot, into account, there was a debate where such things were vital. And yet, there was still room for disagreement. The counter-arguments ranged from stuff like Jesse Jackson saying that he found the arguments about "keep your government out of my property" to remind him of the arguments given by slave owners (wow! He really said that!), arguments in The Progressive talking about the responsibility of the powerful to protect the most powerless, and Nat Hentoff.

Let me pull a moment out of The Princess Bride for a second. Allow me to reassure you and point out that I am pro-choice. Hell, I think that abortion should be legal up to and including the moment of crowning for reasons as trivial as sex-selection (not that prefering this gender over that one is trivial, of course). This is not an essay explaining that I'm pro-life or think that women are chattel or that my favorite book is A Handmaid's Tale or that sort of thing. Okay? Back to the essay.

Anyhow, I was arguing with someone about the election and they pointed out that Ron Paul must hate women. Well, I remembered a lot of the stuff I read about when I was still making up my mind and started arguing and pointing out that there were plenty of reasons to be opposed to abortion and not all of them involved denial of the power dynamics that are fundamentally there. I pointed out that, yeah, Ron Paul was an Obstetrician. You catch them kids popping like a cork outta the playdough fun factory of life long enough, I reckon it might give you opinions that you might not pick up otherwise. Well, this argument fell on deaf ears. It instead earned me a free psychoanalysis session. I was asked if I was a pro-lifer. I explained, no, I am not. Pro-choice. I hit the high notes of those italics up there. Well, the conversation turned into whether I thought that abortion was morally wrong. As it turns out, I do. I was called pro-life again. I disagreed and pointed out that I think that the wrong of abortion pales in comparison to the wrong of Prohibition of it... I went on to point out that, as a Cosmotarian Libertine, there are plenty of things that I think are wrong but don't think should be illegal. I was then asked if I thought that I was merely hedging my bets so I could tell God that, hey, at least I thought it was wrong come Judgment Day.

Sigh.

That's not what inspired this essay, however. That was yet another neo-Christian argument splitting hairs over not whether I acted in accordance with Accepted Dogma but whether I *BELIEVED*. (I should probably get used to that kind of argument, I am beginning to suspect.)

Anyway, all this was well behind me... until we started catching cats again. Today we took our 12th feral cat to the "Nut Extraction Factory" (as my beloved wife has so eloquently dubbed it). They have a form, of course, that they make you sign. I hereby authorize the clinic to spay/neuter this animal. I hereby authorize the clinic to notch the animal's ear. I hereby authorize the clinic to test for FLV/FAIDS. If the animal is pregnant, I hereby authorize the clinic to terminate the pregnancy.

That last one sort of stuck in my brain. It's a paraphrase but those words were used.

Terminate.

Pregnancy.

That sort of brought the whole argument back to mind for me. Not the whole "pro-choice" thing, they're cats. Yes, I love my kitties and I anthropomorphize them as much as any Sensitive New Age Guy has anthropomorphized any critter that has been called "kitty" unironically. It's not a choice thing, though. They're just cats.

It's more the sense that the world is a certain way... and the things that we are doing with the cats in the back yard is completely against the, for lack of a better word, Tao. More than that, it seems deeply nihilistic. Life is a positive good. This is covered in Genesis... look at the world. Wow... it *IS* Good. The light is Good. The land is Good. The seas are Good. Vegetation is Good. The sun, the moon, the stars... they are Good. The fish of the sea, the birds of the air... they are Good. The wild beasts and the domestic animals. They are Good too. Even Man. Even Woman. Look at all of it. It is Very Good.

And here we are, catching cats by the onesies in the back yard, taking them to the clinic, removing their reproductive organs, and placing them back there. With authorized notches in their ears.

And, of course, there is a chorus of people explaining to me that, no, we're doing the right thing. "Don't think about it that way", they tell me. "You're doing the right thing."

I've always felt that when people point out to you that "you're doing the right thing", there should be klaxons going off in your head.

 Anyway, I'm still pro-choice. Up to and including the moment of crowning. For reasons up to and including those as trivial as sex selection.

But I think I have put my finger on why it strikes me as wrong... this is not the way the world Ought to be. It goes against, for lack of a better word, the Tao.

(No, I am not a Taoist either. Not even close. I can't think of the right word/concept in English, however.)

And it's not something that we'll likely stop doing prematurely. It's something that needs to be done, after all.

Thankfully, there's no shortage of people telling me that we're doing the right thing.