a Blog for Choice from Liberal Street Fighter
People are often suprised how strongly I feel about Abortion being legal and freely available to women. I’m a white guy, middle class, raised in the “heartland” … I look like I could be a talk radio fan. My “extreme” liberal point of view often suprises people. “Why do you care?” questions alternate with a suspicion that I just want to make sure my options are open if an “accident” occurs.
Well, I do have a selfish reason, I guess, but not in the way people would think. My life, ALL of our lives, are enriched when people are free. I honestly and deeply believe this basic humanist principle. Who can say how many poets, writers, doctors, scientists, engineers, entrepeneurs, singers and so on NEVER CAME TO BE, all because we as a culture have insisted for most of our history in making half the human race slaves to biological imperative?
There’s an old story I read when I was a kid, The Lady or the Tiger.
When a subject was accused of a crime of sufficient importance to interest the king, public notice was given that on an appointed day the fate of the accused person would be decided in the king’s arena, a structure which well deserved its name, for, although its form and plan were borrowed from afar, its purpose emanated solely from the brain of this man, who, every barleycorn a king, knew no tradition to which he owed more allegiance than pleased his fancy, and who ingrafted on every adopted form of human thought and action the rich growth of his barbaric idealism.
A barbaric idealism demands that women either conform to some demand for “purity” preserved through abstinence OR be punished for having sex by being forced to carry it to term. Those two words: conform or punish … how can any modern person NOT look upon that simple-minded system of values as anything other than barbaric?
We are at our best, our most fully human, when we have options and opportunities in life. ALL of our options are limited when we limit those of our mothers, our sisters and our daughters. How can people not see this, or is that the problem? It is, after all, easier to follow a well-trodden trail than to strike out on our own, and perhaps those who take comfort in the deep trenches they walk upon feel a little tug of envy, of hatred, when they see people breaking off and blazing new trails. Is this where all the talk of feminists “disrespecting” women who choose to become mothers comes from? What a strange projection. What better way to make sure that this never happens than to MAKE women be mothers, whether they like it or not? What better way to inculcate to children that there are “proper” paths to follow than to have them be raised by women who themselves were denied choices. To control us all, what better place to start than to control women and the choices they would make?
It’s more than choice though. One can only choose if one is FREE. Autonomous, open and curious and well-informed … from THESE conditions come true “choice”. This man knows that his life is better because his three sisters are all very different and very strong women who made their own paths in life. This man knows that his life is better because he had a mother who asked questions herself, a woman who taught me early and often to read and explore and push boundaries, even when my pushing and questioning made life harder for her and my dad. I know that my life has been enriched, and my own options expanded, because the female teachers and coworkers and friends and lovers I’ve known have lived in an America that gave them the freedom to choose their own paths. How enriched my life has been to live in a time of flowering freedoms for women!
So my support for women is indeed selfish. Forcing women to choose between two doors in life, either motherhood or maidenhood, is to rob the world of thought and beauty and creativity. Such a world was a darker place, a darker place that is coming back with a frightening speed.
How can people not SEE this?
