Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good Executive Director Alexia Kelley issued the following statement today in response to yesterday's Supreme Court decision upholding a nationwide ban on "partial-birth" abortions: "Catholic Social Teaching calls us to promote and protect human life and dignity. In this spirit, we welcome the Supreme Court's decision to ban this practice. In order to build a culture that fully values human life and human dignity we must commit to addressing the underlying causes of abortion. As a nation, and as a Church, we need to do everything we can to support women and families facing unexpected or emergency pregnancies, and to provide robust alternatives that help them choose life."
How special. I imagine that this woman's doctor might approve:
... One woman ended up having an abortion in her third trimester because a doctor purposefully withheld information from her about her fetus's terminal medical condition. As reported in the Washington Post, a woman discovered only a few weeks before her due date that her fetus had developed without a brain, and would never take one breath. Dr. LeRoy Carhart, who worked with Tiller, said "Her doctor knew the problem all along but just never told her." ...
Abortion opponents think you can protect human life by simply denying women and their families choices, so that they have to carry babies that can't survive outside the womb to term. Or that, as per another example in the Washington Post article, protecting human dignity might be best accomplished by doing nothing about the pregnancy of a rape victim who's tried to kill herself three times already because she felt continually violated by that pregnancy.
The Missing Women
Though no matter how many tragic stories you tell them, people who think that abortion is never acceptable learn nothing and don't listen.
It's because they don't care about women who want abortions.
That sounds harsh and it is. It must sound especially harsh if your primary goal in having political conversations is to keep everybody smiling. But not only do abortion opponents either no longer remember, or care, how incredibly bad things were when abortion was illegal, plenty of people who think they support women's rights have forgotten, too.
These quasi-allies also forget who they're dealing with.
As others have picked up and as Sarah Posner has reported, Kelley wrote in a 2008 book that, "Each abortion constitutes a direct attack on human life, and so we have a special moral obligation to end or reduce the practice of abortion to the greatest extent possible."
Now, while I'm sure that Kelley would never support any violent action, and while I've been assured that she's quite the humanitarian on poverty issues, read that statement again. These are the words of a moderate, sane, well-balanced, fully functional and competent human being who just so happens to believe that all abortion is categorically an attack on human life.
Where's the woman in that equation? Nowhere.
This is the mild stuff, believed by people who are otherwise perfectly harmless.
Though suggesting, as Kelley's organization has, that simply fixing women's financial problems would fix all need for abortions is simply off the mark. It rings so loudly of bribing women to give birth, that you could almost forget that during the era when abortion was illegal, rich people just left the country to have a safe version of what others risked bleeding out in an alley to get.
Go ahead and fix that with a bottle of pre-natal vitamins and some WIC coupons. I dare you.
I support, as does everyone else I know who's pro-choice, helping women who want children be able to afford to make that choice and be supported as parents. I want their children to have a chance at a decent life, which is only fitting, because they're my fellow citizens and they're going to be paying my Social Security bill someday. Get those kids some healthcare and education, by gum, and assign them their cubicle directly!
But I also support letting women decide when it's a good idea to become a parent. Sometimes you're a 22 year old with an alcoholic boyfriend and no money, other times, you and your husband might already have a special needs child and worry about whether you can handle one with serious heart defects. Or, maybe someone's problem is that they're young and the family they depend on is deeply, irredeemably dysfunctional.
These are the arguments you run into when you're thinking about women. Or, as some might have it, the incubators who turn sperm into babies.
They. Don't. Care.
And I return again to my previous, harsh assessment, that people who believe that abortion is wrong in every case don't care about women who need abortions.
I feel like I can say that, considering that I used to be a fundamentalist whackjob, and I didn't care about them. They were murderers anyway. Child murderers who killed their own flesh and blood. Andrea Yates without the bathtub.
The arguments I heard at church, the ones I devoutly believed until my late teens, never had anything to do with women's well being. Except spiritual, in exactly the way that many priests of the Inquisition must genuinely have believed that it was spiritually better for someone to be burned to death than to live in sin.
The woman's health, happiness, etc., were completely irrelevant to one overriding belief: abortion is a dire sin.
It's a sin, therefore you are contravening the will of God and condemning yourself. It's the will of God if your baby is sick, or you're sick, or if your life is a living Hell. That isn't our business or our responsibility. Our job as human beings was to suck it up and try to be blameless so that God would make it up to us in the afterlife. Abortion was considered an absolute wrong, a premeditated murder, for which there can be no excuse.
That's how I thought, that's how the people I knew thought, that's how the people who wrote our literature and visiting preachers seemed to think, and that was that.
We didn't care about women dying or incurring terrible consequences from a pregnancy or abortion, not enough to stop any of them, and would only ever say otherwise because of how bad it sounds to non-believers.
Though you will never hear of a clinic bomber or a doctor killer coming from the sect I grew up in. It's committed to non-violence to the point that members were jailed for refusing the drafts in WWII and Vietnam. Members must not own guns, unless (and I suspect this is extremely rare now, though it was true of my family as a very young child) they live in a rural area where hunting is part of feeding their families. They condemn the death penalty, even for the most horrible of crimes.
But they don't really care, as a priority of any kind, about the plight of pregnant women who find themselves in what most people would consider the need to have an abortion. They don't even believe in exceptions for the life of the mother.
Harsh? Well, they don't think so. And they won't be shooting any doctors, either. They wouldn't even join a clinic protest. And if you met them, they'll probably be just as friendly as anything, especially if you'd like to sit down and talk about the Bible.
Beliefs: Not Just For Press Releases
If you tell someone from my childhood church that a woman's life is at risk if she doesn't have an abortion, they'd be sad, but they'd say let her die. God will reward her later.
Because they're absolutist like that. They don't believe in organ transplants anymore than abortion. My own father chose to die in his 30s rather than get a kidney transplant, leaving a widow, a teenager and two toddlers behind. They don't believe in blood transfusions, either. My family was fully prepared to let me die as a child (In the 1980s. In Los Angeles.) when they were told I needed a transfusion, so I'm grateful they found a doctor who'd operate without one within a week of my having been diagnosed with acute peritonitis - a severe, abcessed infection of the abdominal lining and intestinal cavity caused by appendicitis.
Is that harsh?
Does that make my family horrible in some way?
Does it matter?
This is what I think about in this debate: Would I appoint any member in good standing of that church (doctrinal dissent leads to expulsion) to the job Alexia Kelley has been offered, on any day, but particularly within a week of the assassination of an abortion provider?
Oh, hell no. Nor would I trust them within a mile of my medical decisions ever again for so long as I live.
They're nice you know, and they would never want to hurt anyone, but they believe things that are hazardous to people's health. They believe stupid things that get people killed. And they really do believe them, to the point where they'd die for them, or let their children die for them.
My family lives here in America, right now, right next door to families like yours, chatting away on their cell phones. They even, I think, deserve the same freedom of belief that anyone else has. They're nice too, like I said, like Alexia Kelley seems. And she also seems like a woman that I wouldn't want to accuse of being insincere. Because lying is also a sin.
This Ain't No Fooling Around
So when Kelley says things like this, (via Sarah Posner, via a thoughtful essay on compromise and common ground at Pandagon,) I'm inclined to believe her:
... Kelley and CACG have made clear they are committed to Catholic doctrine on abortion and birth control. CACG has supported the Pregnant Women's Support Act, aimed at stigmatizing abortion and making it less accessible. In discussing legislation on reducing the need for abortion, Kelley has written that various pieces of legislation concerned with women's health "are not all perfect; some include contraception-which the Church opposes." ...
It's because I believe her that I'm inclined to think that she shouldn't be allowed within a mile of deciding other people's medical care options, particularly relating to HIV prevention and family planning for low-income families.
If she really believes what she's said, well, I know other people who believe like that.
It's been suggested, in public and private, that this is all about some inter-NGO squabble. That the people from Catholics for Choice are just jealous that someone they'd favored didn't get this job.
But look, I don't know any of these people from Adam, and I don't care. Not even if it's true. It may become easy to forget when you live in a petty little fishbowl where the political is more personal than principled, but out in the rest of the country, I think people understand that beliefs matter. Beliefs have consequences.
You could ask my father about that, except he's f*ing dead. Because someone had him convinced that it was better to die than sin.
Just like someone convinced Alexia Kelley that it was a good idea to spread the belief, in a world where teenagers are still reckless and HIV is still a problem, that contraception and abortion are unacceptable in the eyes of God. Just like someone convinced the rest of my family, in a world where people like Scott Roeder exist, that there aren't any consequences to spreading the belief that abortion is murder, a direct attack on human life, as some would say.
It's all in God's hands, don't you know.
F* that. No god deserves the blame for the @sshattery we come up with of our own accord to put each other through. Unless there's a part in the Bible I missed where He said, 'Go forth and be cruel, hypercontrolling, tyrannical dumb@sses who act without regard for the consequences to others as they go through their only chance at a mortal life on Earth,' because I don't remember that commandment. |
