File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9801, message 551


Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 23:41:52 -0800 (PST)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: Historicize the Fetus (was Re: M-TH: Britain's abortion 


Isn't it odd that, given that the pro-choice position is so self-evidently
correct to me that I would customarily not even bother to debate it, my
distrust of the left is so great that I would feel compelled to stick my two
cents in nit-picking over the logic of someone's argument?  I do find this
odd, as I have never engaged in this sort of discussion before.  Which means
perhaps I need to reflect upon my experience of these matters.

At 07:38 PM 1/24/98 -0500, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>Except for the attribution mistake, you are right on! In America,
>fundamentalists are real forces that have caused all kinds of ideological
>mess and misery. America is no paradise of grrrl power. Ralph needs to get
>in touch with reality more often.

It's a large nation.  The fact is, I have confronted right-wing Christians
in public forums in the past.  I even mixed it up on the street with some of
the anti-abortion demonstrators that periodically congregate in Washington.
But I do need to ransack my memory more thoroughly to determine what direct
experience I have of their influence in my everyday milieu.  I have
confronted a lot of reactionary influences in my social environment over a
lifetime including the social compulsions that induce people to marry and
procreate.  But curiously enough, I can hardly remember any cases in which I
knew women who were scared away from abortion as an option due to these
social compulsions.  I guess my Rust Belt liberalism is showing.

I don't come from an enormously advanced social environment, but then again,
there are large sections of this country I have never visited.  Aside from
crossing over into the North Carolina border for an hour, and staying one
day in El Paso, Texas, I have never been in the deep south south of
Virginia.  I've been to conservative sections of the southwest and west for
brief periods of time; I have been bored into a coma in a few cities in the
midwest, but I am a Northeastern chauvinist to the bone.  So it is quite
likely that things are much worse in many places of this spacious nation
than even my pessimistic imagination can conceive.

There are an awful lot of Catholics where I come from, but in the first
three decades of my life, I only met one person who vocally opposed
abortion.  She was an unattractive, sad and lonely individual who wore very
thick glasses, and she said she opposed abortion because people like her
would have been aborted.  (I think she suffered from severe myopia, and she
died young, I don't know of what.)  I remember other people trying to spare
her feelings, but everyone else around her was unanimously in favor of the
pro-choice position and said so.  I've always known a lot of socially
unenlightened and regressive people who simply held to the pro-choice
position as a matter of common sense.  Where I come from, anti-abortionists
are considered to be freaks.

I've analyzed my own past to death, but somehow it never occurred to me to
subject the place of the abortion issue in my experience to analysis.  Aside
from the obvious negative impact of religion on people when they hold to the
letter of their religion, my hypothesis for why otherwise unenlightened and
conservative people assume the pro-choice position as a matter of course is
this: they tacitly assume that in the modern world people should have
control over their fate, and not resign themselves to hopeless misery
because they are afraid of playing "God".  There are people in this country
who reject modern medicine: Christian scientists.  If you are meant to die,
you shouldn't interfere, and let nature or God take its course.  There are
still Catholics, I suppose, who don't believe in divorce: better to be
miserable and resign yourself to your fate than take your fate into your own
hands.  However, this sort of resignation is alien to my cultural experience.  

Furthermore, I was raised exclusively by women: there was no option for
women being weak and helpless and dependent and obedient.  My grandfather
suffered for a decade from Parkinson's disease, paralyzed and shaking in his
armchair all day while my grandmother went out to work.  My mother was
divorced and she had to work all day, in a time when single working women
were looked down on.  As a kid who grew up with a love for science and
modern secular humanist values, I made my earliest heroes famous scientists:
Albert Einstein and Marie Curie.  Years before feminism kicked in at the end
of the '60s, I had not once entertained any ideas that there was anything a
woman or any human being of any background could not or should not do.
People should be free to exercise all their capabilities: that is just
commonsense, at least for me.  

Now over the course of a lifetime I have had to militantly oppose all kinds
of ignorance, unconsciousness, and conservative thinking.  I lost a number
of friends because I boycotted their weddings, and I referred to others as
breeders.  This is because I didn't trust their decisions: I thought they
were blindly falling into traditional behavior patterns without thinking
them through as to whether this was the wisest course of action to take.
But now that I think of it, I can't remember being in the position to
observe abortion as an issue in someone's deliberations.  Maybe it was, but
I can't remember.  Isn't that amazing?

I didn't think I was out of touch with reality, but I'm sure things could
actually be much worse than I suspect them to be.  However, I intervened in
this discussion not to defend family values or paint a rosy picture of
social reality, but because of my suspicions--which have now been proven
valid--of some of the posturing going on by certain persons on this list.
At issue is the notion that women are so beaten down, so helpless, so
subject to social pressure, that it is out of the question even to entertain
the idea that even a woman not racked with anti-abortion guilt might
hesitate two seconds over whether to have an abortion over existential
considerations of whether this potential human life form should be allowed
to continue or not.  For Stalinists, individuals don't exist, so the
question of any iota of individual autonomy is a reactionary bourgeois
notion.  By Stalinist, I don't mean just avowed lovers of Stalin, or just
CP-ers; Trotskyists are just as bad, and a good number of feminist
intellectuals.  Stalinism is not just a doctrine; it is a way of being. Were
it not for my distrust of the left, I don't think I would have bothered to
get involved in this discussion.  I certainly have no sentimentality over
zygotes or any quarrels with abortion as an option whatever.



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