Using this picture, because it really epitomizes everything fucked-up about anti-choicers, starting with the sense that life itself oppresses them. It’s Blog For Choice Day, so join in on your own blogs, or in comments.
I get really angry when I see headlines like the one in this article in GQ about Scott Roeder murdering Dr. George Tiller: “Savior vs. Savior”, with the blurb equating Dr. Tiller and Roeder as men who “believed they were doing right” and as having “convictions”. No one would dare say such a thing about a non-Christian terrorist, that they somehow have a conviction worth respecting. But when the argument is between the conviction that women are people vs. the conviction that women are subhuman incubators, then all of a sudden this false equivalence enters into the situation.
But despite that, the author Devin Freidman—-while still committing some inexcusable equivocation to make it more interesting by pretending there’s ambiguity where there really isn’t—-mostly creates an interesting contrast between Dr. Tiller and his clinic staff vs. Roeder and his anti-choice buddies. Dr. Tiller comes across as a pragmatic, down-to-earth (almost to a fault), brave man who had a full life with a happy marriage, happy children, and meaningful work. Roeder comes off as a broken man with no connections to others, whose convictions are mostly regarding imaginary things, such as the dangers of fluoride in the drinking water and the threat of the Illuminati. Dr. Tiller and his staff went out every day and helped real people with real problems fix those problems. Roeder and the anti-choice crew not only have no interest in real people, but seem actively hostile to them—-their anger and denial when confronted with evidence that women who have abortions have minds and feelings of their own is palpable. It’s too real, I suppose, and they prefer to live in a world of fantasy. Dr. Tiller was a man in the world—-involved in politics, able to relate to his patients in a compassionate way, always obsessing over details and reorganizing for efficiency. Roeder and his pals are, to quote Freidman, “surrounded by the latticework of society but not of it.” They’re obsessed with imaginary threats to purity—-see contamination in everything from food to water to abortion, which is of course their stand-in for their fears of sexual contamination.
In this contrast, you really begin to see the perversity of calling the anti-choice movement “pro-life”—-it’s an oxymoron. They’re motivated, on a base level, by a hatred of life. Or, life as most of us define it, when we use phrases like “what I want to do with my life”, “living my life”, “life is good”, and pretty much every other use of “life” outside of anti-choice propaganda. Life, for most people, is about being in this world. It’s about enjoying food, enjoying sex, having goals, making plans, creating relationships, loving each other, developing beliefs, thinking thoughts, learning, enjoying a good night’s rest, listening to music, enjoying drama, enjoying quiet, kicking your feet up and petting the cat, diving into your work, making a difference, helping others, selfishly hiding away and doing for yourself, falling in love, grieving a loss, the thrill of winning, the sorrow of losing, the ambiguities of the human spirit, the bright light of reason, the joy of discovery, the curiosity inspired by mystery, a walk in the park, a Christmas with family, a loud concert, a good book.
But when anti-choicers speak reverently of “life”, they don’t mean this. They imagine things that are technically alive, but have no relationship to this word—-Terri Schiavo laying in bed with no brain to speak of, a mindless fetus, a fertilized egg, a stem cell. They relate to these beings, who are not really living, and scrounge up nothing but anger and hatred at those of us who are perceived as actually living in the impure, disgusting, life-having world with connections to family and friends, brainy intellectual engagement with reality and of course, dirty, filthy, despicable sex. The impure wetness of real life disturbs them. They dwell endlessly on the medically disgusting aspects of abortion—-aspects that exist in all medical procedures—-because their minds are enraptured by hatred of the perceived filthiness of human bodies and life. The world with all its squirming, actually living life—-it’s bothersome. Better to dwell on the imagined peace of the fetus, the immoveable quiet of a person in a vegetative state. Someone who is recognizably human but not really living—-the purest, simplest, least disgusting way of being. Purity is always under threat, from fluoride to uncontrolled sexuality.
Which really points up to why I’m pro-choice, and it’s because I think life is for living. And living is complicated, and thank god, because the highly constrained, ritualistically pure worldview anti-choicers want to impose on the rest of us seems like the most boring way of being, hardly living at all. I’m baffled by the knee jerk hatred of actual living that is underlying the anti-choice viewpoint. For instance, the comments on the Hyde Amendment video I linked last week (and was featured in) are reliably anti-choice: