Blog for Choice 2008
It’s a little late in the day but it’s not midnight yet and thus it is still officially Blog for Choice Day 2008. I had a better idea for this post, but somewhere in between the 180 pages I’ve had to read today, it got lost. So I will tell you instead about my campaign to get my sister, a 20-year-old devout evangelical Christian who comes home every weekend from college just to attend church, to become pro-choice.
My sister is one of those Christians who grew up attending such events like “youth group”, listening to a particular style of music known as Praise n’ Worship, and reading her Bible every day. When I was an undergraduate I returned to my parents’ house for some holiday or another and noticed that my sister, then probably about fourteen, was wearing a gold band with a small diamond in its center on her “wedding finger”. I jokingly asked who she was engaged to and she replied in all sincerity that she had just been to some kind of Christian youth conference at which she pledged to “remain pure”. My parents, moved by her public promise to stay a virgin until marriage (and probably also prodded by the rampant consumerism that usually accompanies such testaments of faith), had purchased her a faux wedding ring for Christmas which my sister explained “symbolized” her committment. The ring could only be removed by her future husband on their future wedding night.
“So…you’re essentially engaged to Jesus,” I offered, in what I’ll admit was a bit of a sniggering tone. She just stared at me wide-eyed.
But the thing is this: even though that was six years ago, she’s kept her promise, and kept up her prayers, and her involvement with her church. Although I’m an atheist with some embarrassing remnants of Catholic guilt, I have to admire her devotion and piety. I can’t even make it to the gym every day, but my sister has faithfully read her Bible, said her prayers, and attended that church whenever its doors were open all her life.
This is a strange point to illustrate my full-hearted conviction that reproductive justice, reproductive freedom, and gender equality should be central tenets in our society, and that nothing is more scary to me than the steady erosion of not only abortion rights, but family planning services, sex education, and access to birth control for countless women in this so-called democracy. But here’s some facts about Christian youth culture and anti-choice:
1. Girls like my sister who have grown up in religious families–or even families that only attend church on Easter and Christmas–DO NOT KNOW ANY BETTER. If the anti-choicers, anti-feminists, anti-women’s health trolls have done anything well, it’s been to scream so loudly about bloody fetuses and partial-birth abortion and mothers burning in hell and teenage pregnancy and how the feminists and homosexuals kill and eat children that young people are truly terrified for their future. Until I was 18–and I attended public school!–I truly believed that abortion had something to do with crushing the skull of a fully developed fetus with a pair of forceps and then tossing the scraps into an incinerator. Sound horrifying? Well, it’s effective propaganda, and that’s what the anti-choicers are spreading.
2. Girls like my sister don’t realize that voting against abortion also means you’re voting against birth control, family planning and women’s health services, emergency contraception, and the basic RIGHTS of women in general: human rights, human worth, human dignity–human choice. If men could give birth, do you think we’d be having these discussions? No. Cristina Page’s book How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America lays out in eye-popping detail how the “pro-life” movement isn’t just about curbing abortion–’cause if they were, wouldn’t they want to make sure women had access to free or cheap birth control and education?–they’re also about curbing birth control, rape kits, emergency contraception, and basic, no-frills, high school sex ed. Why? Dunno–don’t they realize that the number of abortions go UP when women don’t or can’t use condoms, the Pill, the Patch, EC? It’s obvious that the anti-choicers are hypocrites and we should call them out on it already. Not only do they essentially want women to just keep it in their pants–unless married, and unless for procreating–but for all their sanctimonious claims of “pro-life”, they sure aren’t pro-CHILD and they definitely aren’t pro-woman. So “pro-life” what? Pro-fetus? Pro-embryo? I’ve heard the term “forced pregnancy movement” also.
It’s especially important to let girls like my sister in on this dirty little secret of the anti-choice movement, because even Christians–and yes, even Catholics–need birth control, gynecological care, and help available in case of an emergency.
3. Finally, girls like my sister GET ABORTIONS. They happen across all socioeconomic, racial, cultural, and, yes, religious strata, and the fact is that sooner or later, chastity ring or no, a church-going girl’s going to find herself in a predicament. (Notwithstanding the epidemic of rape and incest in our society, which currently places women at a 1 in 3.8 chance of being sexually attacked and the risk of pregnancy associated with that.) Two of the most devout Christians I’ve ever met got abortions: one as a result of incest, and the other as a result of a wild night with a high school boyfriend. Both were adamantly and staunchly pro-life. The fact is, Christian girls like my sister may pay lip service to the anti-choice cause; they may pledge their virginity to their dad or Jesus or their future husband; they may make fun of hairy-legged feminists; they may think, I have self-restraint and my faith; that would NEVER happen to me. But the fact is that many of these girls, someday, may find themselves with a bun in the oven and no wedding ring on their finger, and then they won’t hesitate to rush to the nearest Planned Parenthood (if they live in one of the 13% of counties that have an abortion provider, that is). So, for my sister’s sake, for the Christians’ sake–and, as much as it pains me to say it–for the sake of the pro-lifers, we need to keep this country PRO-CHOICE.
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February 14th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
hey girl where did you get your statistic pertaining to sexual assualt? “women at a 1 in 3.8 chance of being sexually attacked” seems difficult to believe.