Allow me, just for a second, to speak broadly about the South. One of the things I still haven’t quite gotten the hang of is figuring out what the hell, in any given conversation, we’re actually talking about. Take, for instance, the current brouhaha in Nashville about our resegregating the school system. In the course of one of the lawsuits over this issue, it came out that the kids in one school in Nashville still don’t have some text books.
Now you would think that there would be outrage. And there is. But it’s been pretty firmly aimed at the mother who dared file the lawsuit, and then at the children who can’t be trusted with books, and then at the childless who find this unacceptable. Which makes no sense to me.
But I’m starting to wonder if it’s that people are embarrassed that they let their kids suffer without schoolbooks without raising holy hell about it and, to cover their embarrassment, they turn on the woman who did something.
I’ve been trying to figure out, when anti-abortion Southerners throw themselves into their cause, what it is that they’re really doing. I mean, like I said the other day, I wonder if some of it is in response to the abysmal infant mortality rates, a way to force women who might have babies that would live to “make up” for the women who don’t.
But I’ve also been thinking about it in terms of trying hard to justify your own existence.
Every single one of my Great-great Grandmothers lived almost a hundred years ago. I can tell you with full confidence that they had the children that they had (and all of them had at least four) because they had no choice. They may have wanted children very much, they may have not wanted them at all. Didn’t matter. You got married (unless you were very unlucky) and you had kids and that was just the way it is. I can think of my Great-great Grandma Hulda, for instance, and if I somehow learned tomorrow that she hated being a mother and hated having kids, I would feel compassion for her, but I wouldn’t feel indicted by it. Even if it were literally true that I was the result of her suffering, it would make me tremendously sad, but it wouldn’t make me feel guilty.
But take my nephew down in Georgia. His people on his mom’s side are anti-abortion. My nephew’s great-great grandmother is alive, as is his great-grandmother, as is his grandmother. In fact, I’m pretty sure that his great-great grandmother is younger than my grandma.
Wondering about whether his great-great grandmother felt coerced into having children isn’t an intellectual exercise, it’s about whether his right to exist trumps the right of the woman in the chair next to his to live free. (I consider being able to decide when and if you want to have children and how many a fundamental cornerstone of women’s freedom. Want zero? Have none. Want five? Have five.)
Now, in a best case scenario, personally knowing someone who suffers the brunt of an injustice would lead you to empathize and to try to, at the least, prevent others from suffering in the same way. But I think we all know that the more common response is to be defensive. And, in this case, to insist on codifying that it must be this way. Having no choice is the right thing and no-choice must be ensured in order to justify one’s own existence. All pregnancies must lead to babies or the anti-abortionist is forced to consider whether his life is the result of a grave wrong committed against women he loves.
I don’t know. It’s just a theory I’m working on. But I do wonder if we’re talking about a right to self-determination and they’re talking about a need to believe that they are justified in being here.
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But I do wonder if we’re talking about a right to self-determination and they’re talking about a need to believe that they are justified in being here.
Nail. Head. Sledgehammer. Boom. Yeah, Aunt B, you’re on to something there.
My mother got pregnant with me when, she said, “I slept with your father because I felt sorry for him.” I said, “You should’ve had the abortion and left me out of it.”
I’m analytical, rather than emotional, about this. People say, “If she’d gotten the abortion you would never have existed!” as if this should distress me. No, what distresses me is that people think I’d be floating around the ether going, “If only I were alive!”
God? Or rather being a nun. (I’m not from the south so this may be irrelevant to your theroies.) But I can look back at great great aunts and uncles and see ones who didn’t want children or didn’t want to be married and instead chose to go into the service of God. I know at least one of my grandfather’s sisters became a nun for just such a reason. And I expect that at least in my family it’s been somewhat of a tradition because it’s always been ok for women to not want kids as long as they did something good, church, teaching. (And I can say this because I got a part of a diary when my boyfriend dumped me because he changed his mind about not having children. My mom gave me a diary from my grandmother and it just glowed about her sister who didn’t want kids but became a nun. How she made the right choice and how good it was and all these lovely things.) I’m sure it’s not true in every family but does the marriage to god factor into this anywhere? Certainly it’s a big choice to make merely for the right to not have kids but it is or was (is it still?) and you don’t get to have relationships. But it does allow you to remain childless and yet revered.
I’m not so convinced that it’s as straight-forward as that. There’s a lot to be said for self-determination and its importance, but I’m inclined to believe that people who are “justifying their existence” are not doing only that, but also seeing the selfish side of self-determination. As we love to say…we walk a mighty thin line.
In this case, simplification of what “the other side” is really doing will appear as, well…over-simplification. On this issue especially, it’s essential to take into account everyone’s intellectual, emotional, and personal contributions to their opinions. Can we critically evaluate our own unique positions, and perhaps see some downfalls? I know there aren’t just two “sides” here.
Such a thin line…
Sara, that option only works if you’re Catholic.
Simon(e), I think the straight-forward truth is that there are a great many people who believe they have the right (for whatever reason) to determine for grown-up women what we should do with our bodies.
It’s not selfish to determine what happens to our own bodies. It’s freedom. There is no thin line. No acceptable justification for commandeering a woman’s body and forcing her to do what you would want.
If you haven’t come to terms with that, yet, I don’t even know what to tell you. The two sides aren’t equally valid. On one side is the right to be fully human and on other is to be at the mercy of whoever can establish a claim on your body the rest of society determines is legitimate.
True. And I suppose converting was worse than ending up unmarried. It would be interesting to compare (if we could go back in time and all that) Catholic women to women of other faiths and see if Catholic women felt like it was more of an actual choice.
Yeah, but let’s also not forget that it’s not just a matter of being open to kids v. not wanting kids. It’s being able to say “I want three kids and I want to space them three years apart.” Those women wouldn’t have found a solution in joining a religious order.
Nor would women who wanted relationships with anyone other than God. But it’s definitely a kind of precurser to choice. It’s something where I can look back and see that I’ve always known people who’ve made choices of what to do when it came to children. But there are people who don’t know anyone who’s ever had a choice. And I think it’s a bridge gapper. It is like an intermediate mutation. It might not be a full on opposable thumb but it might be a slightly off-kilter digit that extends and makes holding a little bit easier and it can eventually lead to a full on thumb. But if is there no off-kilter digit that mutation to thumb is much more difficult. I think the same thing follows with choice, if you never see the bad or mediocre choices because you never see any choices just one solid path, it’s going to be really hard to make that jump.
Amen, Aunt B, on that reply to Simon(e). You’ve said it all.
Aunt B- thanks for the clarification. I am at the beginning stages of learning about all aspects of this topic, and your response was very helpful. Keep writing.
“I’ve been trying to figure out, when anti-abortion Southerners throw themselves into their cause, what it is that they’re really doing. I mean, like I said the other day, I wonder if some of it is in response to the abysmal infant mortality rates, a way to force women who might have babies that would live to “make up” for the women who don’t.”
To add to this – I would like to bring up how a part of the reproductive justice dialogue by women of color that has often been left out by “pro-choice” activists is this country’s horrid history of forced/coerced (whether by lack of information, economic coercion, outright, etc) sterilization and long-acting birth control a la eugenics. I think there are people that are afraid to admit how intertwined Margaret Sanger was with the eugenics movement for fear of the righties saying hah I told you so. But I think more honesty in that yes that is part of the history, but not true anymore when we say choice, is needed. My point here was that I think this is part of your thesis in regards to “making up” for a lost past (and present) – especially as much of this was not long ago legally on the books (and I’m sure is still encouraged).
To me this is another place to make bridges with the community you are referencing, especially with how many in the mainstream “pro-life” debate are against helping single mothers, whereas I reckon more on the “pro-choice” side are for universal health care.
Hey now. Don’t forget the Orthodox faith. ;)
Aha, Sara! I see what you’re saying. Sorry, took me a few comments to see what you were getting at, but yes, I think you’re right. Those weird not-quite-choice-choices were important for suggesting that there were (or should be) more possibilities for women.
I’m thinking of my great-grandfather’s aunt who was courted by a guy who then went off and died in the Civil War. Before he left for war, it’s not that clear that she had any intention of marrying him or even found him anything other than annoying. But after he died? Oh, she had lost her beloved fiance and her love for him was so deep she could never marry. Instead, she had to travel around the country visiting various relatives.
Nice work if you could get it, in that era.
Caroline, you bring up an important point that bears repeating–for some of us “choice” means “nobody but us decides if we have children”; for others of us “choice” means “nobody but us decides if we don’t have children.”
It has been very common practice in the South (and throughout the country) for women of color and poor Appalachian white women to be sterilized against their will, sometimes without their knowledge.
This is such an amazingly gross violation of a woman’s sovereignty that it’s hard to wrap your head around it. And it’s also very difficult for these women to even talk about what happened to them because some of them may not know (though they may suspect) and the ones who do know have good reason for not wanting to have to talk about it.
But I think it’s easy to see how communities full of women who who may have had doctors decide for them they cannot have any (more) children would be very anxious about any possibility of a doctor deciding that a woman can’t have a baby (this may help explain the weird dissonance where some anti-abortion people think abortion is murder but can’t fathom why you’d charge the woman).
I agree with the gist of this post, but I gotta say that I don’t get why this is portrayed as a southern thing. Is the mind of an anti-abortionist really that different in Montana? Are downtown Los Angeles anti-abortionists somehow doing it in a trendier, hipper way? Maybe I’m taking it a little personally as a southerner who has to work to defy stereotypes, but it doesn’t really seem a regionalized mentality to me.
This is very interesting. I know a woman who was very very pro-life until she discovered- upon reading a *baby book* she was never supposed to see- that her mother tried unsuccessfully to self- abort. That her mother, though she had always put on a smiley face and gave the sweetest affection and attention that she did not want to do any of it, that she hated motherhood and regretted her daughter and her pregnancy. By the time she was finished she was riddled with conflicton that she WAS a punishment a long “agonizing” punishment that her mother tried hard to love but couldn’t fight resenting. She hid it well but wrote about it all.
The truth did hurt her but she was pro-choice from then on because she felt that no one should suffer the way her mother did, that no child should be a punishment, that no pregnancy should continue as an unwanted violation of a woman’s body. She had not realized before that she was just one of MANY MANY unwanted pregnancies that developed into unwanted babies and were raised as unwanted children who were perpetual punishments to mothers who would have changed their circumstances if only given the chance.
Abortion isn’t alwas about finances, education or not wanting to be pregnant. It can be about smply not wanting to reproduce period. There will always be a *need* for abortion because there will always be women-like my friend’s mother who regardless of wealth, health, familial support or education- they simply do not want to have children. They should alwas have the option of abortion, as should every woman. And of course no one is to be blamed for being born because you had no say in the matter whether you were a punishment or not.
In line with #15, please make more explicit the reason why this is couched as a Southern thing? I just don’t follow that part of the argument.
I’m sure it’s not a Southern thing. It’s possibly a dynamic that plays out all over, but I’m speaking about what I know and what I witness what I wonder about and those happen to be things in the South.
I love this post, but I want to quibble on one aspect. You’re arguing against other people and social structures determining how many children a woman has. I agree completely; thank you for saying this! But I don’t agree that “being able to decide when and if you want to have children and how many [should be] a fundamental cornerstone of women’s freedom.”
Having children is materially unpredictable. It is a physical event that cannot be abstracted from biology. Except for the very wealthy and the lucky, most women cannot determine whether they have 0, 2 or 5 children and when they have them. Many women are chronically or infertile or otherwise unable or unsuited to have children that they may want to have; adoption is expensive and difficult. Other women desperately want a child but choose not to have one without a committed partner or a career that allows for time with children or other family members that they care for.
I’m not sure how to define this, but I think it’s important to talk about removing social strictures without assuming that the result of moving social strictures is that women have complete control over their wombs or lives. When outspoken reactionaries say that older women shouldn’t be getting pregnant, they’re often speaking out of ignorance or disrespect. And they’re outright wrong when they say that women in their 30s and early 40s can’t or shouldn’t get pregnant. But as you get older (40s) it is harder to get pregnant and being an older parent is a reasonable choice– but not one that everyone should make. We don’t have control over what happens, you can’t have careless drunken sex and be sure you won’t get pregnant and you can’t try conscientiously try for 10 years and be sure you’ll have a child. It’s reasonable for a woman who wants a child to decide not to have one because she is making other life choices. And it is reasonable for a woman who doesn’t want a child at all to decide to have one if she gets pregnant or if her partner really wants a child.
So, what about this framing instead? Instead of arguing for a woman’s ability to determine what happens in her life, we should be clear that we’re fighting for a woman’s realistic knowledge of her options (and I mean ALL her options), for her independent decision making (with input from those who she wants input from but without social pressure) and for her opportunity to try for whatever she wants to try for (with support from her community regardless of her choice). After that? Que sera, sera.
knowlege without access is cruel.
[...] and then I realize that it’s me. But you can read about my theories on anti-abortion folks here and 287(g) here (I have mixed feelings about the [...]