Dear Sir or Madame,
I think you realize our opposition to abortion has nothing to do with your lady bits, and everything to do with the limb by limb dissection of the child up above said goodies, but you don’t want us to think about that. I mean, who would? So instead you play this little game, where you scrawl catching slogans about your vajay across a sign, and pretend like the only reason we could possibly want to rid the world of abortion is because we are all sexually repressed and disgusted by vaginas or something. Hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but that could not be further from the truth. I love sex. I love awesome sex. I have awesome sex. Often. And I sure as hell respect and admire my goods far more than you do, namely because I’ve seen what ALL they are capable of when they work together. I know the power my body holds. I revere it. It can make people with it. No, no, wait, really let that sink in… I. can. make. people. Oh yeah, and I feel I should point out, not with my “VAGINA!!!!” I believe there’s a lower case spelling of that word, but never once have I seen it used by your camp, so I’ll stick with what you know. Don’t get me wrong, my V is a wonderful delicate flower in a beautiful garden and all that other lame stuff our moms told us when we were like ten, but it does not make babies, it’s merely the portal. A super rad portal. So again, “VAGINAS!!!” do. not. make. babies. They’re capable of so much other awesome stuff, I do not know why you keep putting that on them. Because honestly it makes you look kinda dumb. No one is trying to cut off your clitoris, or take away your mind-blowing orgasms. You better believe, it that was the case, I’d be out of the front lines with you, sista.
Likewise, your federal government and mean evil Republicans are not trying to get all up in your womb. We don’t care about your uterus, as shocking as that may be, because as a female pro-lifer I can proudly say I am ALL for women’s reproductive rights! You don’t want to reproduce? Sweet. Don’t, girl. It’s 2013, that’s totally your call. You want to have a litter of kids? Cool, here’s some Mederma. I have no, and I repeat, NO business in your family planning when it comes to how many human lives you will or will not reproduce. Where you’re evidently a little foggy though, is your right to create a life then call take backs. Once a life has been produced, a living human being with its own body, which is now growing and thriving inside yours, you must protect it. Bottom line. That’s your inherent duty for, at the very least, the next 9-months. You are to do everything in your power to guard that human being as it’s mother whether it's part of your 5-year-plan or not. When, however, you decide that person is expendable because they don’t work with what you’ve got going on right now, that is a blatant assault on their human rights, and hell yeah, people will feel compelled to get involved. Child abuse always seems to rile up the crowds, so you cannot act shocked when suddenly we care about what’s happening to the person inside your uterus. Did you catch that? The PERSON INSIDE YOUR UTERUS. Still, don’t really want anything to do with your uterus in a particular, I’m sure it's lovely and all, but that’s just really not my thing.
Let me see if I can explain it another way… If I saw you holding up a sign, oh let’s say in the mid-1800’s reading, “My Plantation, My Choice!” or “Keep The Government Out Of My Slave Trade Practices!” I would say, "Hey Paula Deen, uh-no." Because see, we’d be talking about another human being, I mean, at least in my opinion... which certainly would’ve been unpopular back then. It took society quite some time to fully evolve to the point where slaves were viewed as people just like you and I, and slavery viewed as barbaric because it‘s the ownership of another human being. And man, how much do I wish we would’ve learned from that huge embarrassment in American history that other human beings are not our property. What's that? Other human beings are not our property? Exactly. Yet, here you still are, fighting for the right to snuff out another person’s life just because you can… just because it's legal. Well, a lot of things used to be legal. That doesn’t mean they were right.
That said, you’re not scaring me off by screaming about your “VAGINA!!!” because hopefully as you can see by now, I’m far too comfortable with that word and its namesake. Vaginas are the best, wombs do some of the most amazing things I've ever seen, and your uterus ain’t nobodies business but your own, that is, until it’s used as a place to perpetrate injustice against the human race, then yeah, I’m gonna be up in your business, sorry. If you want us out of your womb, cool. Don’t make it the scene of a crime against humanity, and we’re gone. Trust, there's like a thousand other places I'd rather spend my summer vacay.
Peace,
D.
I have no idea how I came across this. I think a friend of a friend's nephew or something liked it and it showed up in my facebook newsfeed.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I gotta say, this had me laughing and nodding in agreement the whole time.
You go wid your bad self, sista! And know that you speak for the many pro-life woman out there.
Thanks for the moral check with a great dash of added humor!
Sharon
http://sharon-moms-madhouse.com/
That's right, woman! Rocking the pro-life feminism. BTW, I had a lengthy discussion with a male friend about this subject a few days back. He was expressing some anti-feminist sentiments because of the pro-abortion focus of so many who claim feminism and told me that "our" cause was being co-opted by those who were spouting anti-male/anti-life philosophy.
ReplyDeleteI reminded him that it is not "my" cause but a human cause to promote gender equality. And, I think I'll send him to your page so he can meet another pro-life feminist.
Keep writing!
Dang girl. Preach. This was thoroughly entertaining as it was convicting.
ReplyDeleteI LOVE you, D!
ReplyDeleteSo hypothetical scenario here i would like an honest answer to. You and I are in a room, My arms are outstretched in my right hand i hold an infant and in my left hand i hold a petri dish with a human embryo (ya know the ones the pro-lifers have on a sign with some catchy slogan like "This is a life!!" etc..) I inform you that I am going to drop both of these at the exact same time and you can only save one (mind you this is purely hypothetical,) which one do YOU choose. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you choose the infant, which is really an impossible choice if what you say is true because they are both human lives capable growing to adulthood and make little babies of their own.
ReplyDeleteGood thing it's hypothetical because hypothetically, your an asshole. Seriously though, your asking us to act upon instinct in an impossible scenario where the rules based on biased thinkers. Where we do not have time to think about our decision . So basically, you want us to think like animals? You just devolved the human race to nothing more than mere dogs. I'm pretty sure we have time to think about decisions. Is that too extreme? For someone who might be pro-choice, you don't really offer many choices at all. Instead you give the "person" in this situation an ultimatum. Let's see, in my scenario I am the person, but instead I have the power to move objects with my mind and I don't have to pick on or the other.(I'm just assuming that since you have the ability to make people only save one person in any given situation, then in my scenario, I should be able to have some sort of fictional ability too. Ok, back to the scenario.)You then drop both. I use my ability to save them both. Woohoo!!!!! I see what you were trying to say, but your argument has little or no substance. k bye
DeleteThat's one of the worst arguments I've ever seen from a pro-choicer, and I've seen some really stupid ones.
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DeleteMalent, the scenario you describe is a triage situation, where one's moral duty is to save the one who has the best chance of survival. Which in this case would be, as you correctly surmise, the older of the two infants.
ReplyDeleteLet's ignore for a moment your misuse of terminology - what you're describing is a foetus, not an embryo. You're describing a scenario in which a sociopath is is playing mind games by asking a bystander to choose who is to be the victim. I heard a story about a war correspondent who was with a sniper who pointed his gun at two innocent people in the street below, a man and a woman, and said, "You choose. Him or her." The war correspondent refused, and the sniper shot both, saying "You could have saved a life. His or hers." What would you have said?
But here's the interesting thing about the scenario you describe: if you kill either, you are legally guilty of murder. That's right. The foetus you describe is alive in a petri dish. It is not inside the womb. It is therefore legally a person. The law relating to personhood and human rights depends on WHERE it is, not WHAT it is. If a child is born alive at any stage, doctors have a legal responsibility to do all they can to save it. They very often do an excellent job, with premature babies born BEFORE the legal abortion limit sometimes surviving. For the abortion to be legal, the [insert your favourite term for the life-form in question] has to die in the womb.
This was a thought experiment and purely hypothetical as i stated. The point of this is to highlight the fact that one of the options is clearly more human than the other even in a mind that proclaims that they are equal. As far as the sniper situation goes i can't say that i would have chose either of them or maybe i would have i don't know i have never been in that situation before, but the difference is that this story actually happened, my hypothetical situation is exactly that, it isn't some personification of some deep seeded sociopathic tendencies, or hatred, or anything other than a word problem presented to bring about the fact that in that situation the infant is more "human" than the embryo and if it is true to a pro lifer in that scenario then that says something about what they truly believe. I don't label myself as anything i'm not really pro life nor am i exactly pro abortion, there are too many variables in too many situations for me to possibly form a concrete view on it. I can't help but notice that typically (not always) many so called "pro Lifers" tend to be conservative Christians and/or Republicans who largely have no problems supporting a death penalty, but that is really an entire different disscussion.
ReplyDeleteDo you save the old man on his death bed or the 5 year old kid? Most people would say the kid simply because the old man has already lived his life. As Alastair already pointed out, you're "experiment" is triage situation and does happen every day in hospitals. Who has the best chance of survival? It does NOT make one more human than the other.
DeleteAs for the death penalty discussion, the reason many are against killing a child in utero but for killing a murdering rapist is simple: the murdering rapist gave up his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness when he denied those rights to someone else. And, do you really want the chance of a murdering rapist ever getting out of prison? It's not about punishment or a deterrent to others - it's about public safety.
Hey, Mal, I think you're a little confused about the difference between emotion and science. Let me try to illustrate why your thought experiment does not actually say anything about whether a fetal human or an infant is 'more human'.
DeleteI'd like to direct your attention to the third paragraph of the original article. Once upon a time, the idea that a slave is just 'as human' as any other person was not a popular one. If you proposed the same question, with the two parties being a white businessman and a black slave, any pro-slavery person would see it as self-evident that the businessman should be a higher priority.
My point is that dehumanization is a powerful thing, especially when it's used to exploit a group of people, but it doesn't actually say anything about the nature of any human being. It's not the nineteenth century anymore, and we recognize that humans are humans, despite the fact that skin color visually sets us apart from another.
It's time for us to realize the same thing about a person's developmental stage.
"in that situation the infant is more "human" than the embryo and if it is true to a pro lifer in that scenario then that says something about what they truly believe"
DeleteThat doesn't follow. As others are pointing out, in triage situations you have to choose to prioritize one life over another based on the probability of survival. It has nothing to do with who is more "human." These situations are real. They occur when a disaster or horrible accident overwhelms the capabilities of hospitals. They happen on the battlefield. Even organ banks are a form of triage.
Imagine you have one heart and two people on your list who'll die if they don't get a heart transplant immediately. Now imagine that one is only in need of a heart, whereas the other also is in end stage kidney failure. He can survive for a while with dialysis if he gets the heart, but eventually he'll need a new kidney to survive. The embryo is like the person with kidney failure. If it's not implanted in a womb, it'll die even if you save it right now.
Another instance where we choose one life over another (although unlike triage, it's hypothetical) is a lifeboat scenario. You have a lifeboat with space for one additional person, but two people are in need of rescue. Suppose this is the result of a plane crash and one man is a convict on death row and the other is a federal marshall who was escorting him to testify at the trial of an associate of his. It doesn't matter if the guy is innocent or guilty. He's been sentenced to death and the odds of having his sentence overturned, commuted or being pardoned are low. You save the marshall.
The same is true for frozen embryos. The way IVF typically works is that a couple will donate gametes and the clinic will create many more embryos than they'll use. A few embryos thought to have the best characteristics are chosen for implantation and the rest are frozen. Occasionally the couple will use some frozen ones for a later pregnancy, but most embryos are never implanted. They remain frozen until they are no longer usable and then they're destroyed as medical waste. That's why as a prolifer I think regulating IVF to prevent the creation of surplus embryos (but NOT banning IVF) is more important than fighting about using surplus embryos for stem cell research.
Because of the way IVF is usually performed (some prolife couples actually do use all their embryos) the typical embryos in a lab is like someone on death row waiting for a temporary reprieve - Even if it is chosen for implantation, the odds of it's surviving to birth are very poor.
That's another reason to save the baby in your hypothetical that has nothing to do with whether it's 'less human'.
PS: " many so called "pro Lifers" tend to be conservative Christians and/or Republicans who largely have no problems supporting a death penalty, but that is really an entire different disscussion"
DeleteI'm neither and I don't support the death penalty. You're right that it's a different issue. One is about whether the right to life (a fundamental human right) applies to prenatal human life. The other is about whether one can forfeit the right to life by committing a crime the same way that you can permanently forfeit your other rights when you're sentenced too life in prison. Very different issues
PPS: " many so called "pro Lifers" tend to.. [support the] death penalty,"
DeleteAbout "so called" - I hope you use that for so called "pro choicers" who oppose giving people a choice in circumstances unrelated to abortion since you're using it for prolifers if they're not arguing against taking life in circumstances (like capital punishment or not being pacifists) which are unrelated to abortion. Many so called "pro choicers" are liberals and/or democrats who oppose school choice because they prioritize ensuring government funding only for the public school system over giving students and parents their choice of school. In my experience most so called "pro choicers" don't take a libertarian position on legalization of prostitution or cocaine. That's another way they're anti-choice. There are many many more instances of so called "pro choicers" not supporting choice than there are of so called "pro lifers" not arguing against taking life.
If you like, you're welcome to call me a 'prenatal human rights advocate.'
Amazing! Thanks for writing this. I'm with you but I don't have your ability with the written word. I'm sharing this on Facebook now!
ReplyDeletePreach it, sista!
ReplyDeleteLOL! Pure awesome. Couldn't have said it better myself.
ReplyDeleteI loved this!!! Thank you for writing this!
ReplyDelete