Abortion
I backed into an abortion discussion over on the other site, in the process of discussing Judge Alito. I suppose it was inevitable; I try to stay away from that topic, because just about every possible position on it is fraught with harm of one sort or another. Any thinking person's position on it will involve uncomfortable, perhaps indefensible, compromises.
What does get under my skin is people who write about abortion as though it was a clear-cut case (and of course they know which positions are correct, and the rest are vicious or stupid).
Every life experience as a man in a relationship, as a lover of certain excellent women, as a father, has changed and colored how I feel about the topic. It is impossible to separate those feelings, and those experiences -- every mess and miracle -- from the opinions I arrive at, so I don't even try. Yet I know those feelings are not a sound basis for legislation or advocacy, for telling other people how to live.
Yet having them does not disqualify you from voting or supporting. Ah, damn.
So I try not to try to grind out a coherent position. But as a result, it's only when I sit down to write about it that I discover leanings I hadn't realized. Here's part of what I ended up saying:
I arrived at whatever positions I hold on abortion without reference to political parties. Frankly, the notion that there can be a political position on abortion repulses me.
But as a newspaper reporter in the 1980s, in a county that had an abortion clinic during the height of the "Operation Rescue" days, I saw the war at close range. I took the abusive phone calls and saw hypocrisy and hatred rule the day. The anti-abortion zealots were the worst, in my experience. But they were losing the fight. Perhaps if the terms had been reversed the other side would have been as brutal. And there was something creepy about the way abortion's staunchest defenders drifted toward talking about it, not as a necessary evil, but as a positive good.
At the end of the day, the fanatics on both sides were indistinguishable. Their mouths were twisted into spitting hate; the only difference was the order in which the words came out. I have no desire to see legislation, or justice, dispensed out of such mouths.
What does get under my skin is people who write about abortion as though it was a clear-cut case (and of course they know which positions are correct, and the rest are vicious or stupid).
Every life experience as a man in a relationship, as a lover of certain excellent women, as a father, has changed and colored how I feel about the topic. It is impossible to separate those feelings, and those experiences -- every mess and miracle -- from the opinions I arrive at, so I don't even try. Yet I know those feelings are not a sound basis for legislation or advocacy, for telling other people how to live.
Yet having them does not disqualify you from voting or supporting. Ah, damn.
So I try not to try to grind out a coherent position. But as a result, it's only when I sit down to write about it that I discover leanings I hadn't realized. Here's part of what I ended up saying:
To me it looks bad to airily dismiss all rights of a father as “lipstick on a pig” in the name of some sort of effete male feminism.
I used to defer all abortion questions to women, using the same illogic you use (it’s their bodies …) when in fact it was an excuse to avoid the ethical gordian knot. My advice: Don’t go that route until you’ve had a few experiences. Some of them might include:
A miscarriage or three. Having to look at a couple after they devoted themselves to making a space in their lives for a child who came dead from the womb in the doctor’s hands. Try telling them it was nothing, it was a mistake, it was only a lump of fat.
A divorce with a child, where the woman dangles a father’s contact with his son as a bargaining chip and the law takes her side, always, because it operates on the presumption that all men are inherently deadbeat dads, abusive spouses, or both. Put your family in the hands of your local equivalent of Children & Youth Services, then tell me fathers have no natural rights except to see their paychecks dunned.
A woman you’re entangled with in an awful passionate mess of a relationship tell you in a furious argument one night she stopped taking the pill and now she’s pregnant and she’s going to get an abortion tomorrow because of the way you treat her. And maybe she’s telling the truth, but she’s beyond sane right now.
Just for starters, you know.
Solomon was a wise king. But the Solomon story everyone knows is the one of the dead and living baby. It teaches the limitations of the law. How did we forget that lesson? The law is a broad sword, not a surgical tool. Families, passions, marriages are messy, arcane, little universes. The doesn’t do messy. It makes a quick, clean, sharp distinction.
I arrived at whatever positions I hold on abortion without reference to political parties. Frankly, the notion that there can be a political position on abortion repulses me.
But as a newspaper reporter in the 1980s, in a county that had an abortion clinic during the height of the "Operation Rescue" days, I saw the war at close range. I took the abusive phone calls and saw hypocrisy and hatred rule the day. The anti-abortion zealots were the worst, in my experience. But they were losing the fight. Perhaps if the terms had been reversed the other side would have been as brutal. And there was something creepy about the way abortion's staunchest defenders drifted toward talking about it, not as a necessary evil, but as a positive good.
At the end of the day, the fanatics on both sides were indistinguishable. Their mouths were twisted into spitting hate; the only difference was the order in which the words came out. I have no desire to see legislation, or justice, dispensed out of such mouths.
