Blog for Choice Day
Friday, 22 January 2010 | 18:55
Photo: garrisonphoto.org/sxc
Whilst every day is a day for pro-choice activists to speak out, today has a special significance. Blog for Choice Day occurs on this anniversary of the historic Roe v. Wade case in the US – the moment that finally allowed women to legally have abortions.
This year, Blog for Choice Day is held in honour of Dr. George Tiller, a doctor who dared to provide legal abortions to women in the United States, and who was killed last year by an anti-choice fanatic. His murderer believed he was fulfilling God’s will; he killed Dr. Tiller whilst the latter was attending a church service.
Below, I’m excerpting an excellent article from Pandagon.net. It so clearly encapsulates not only my bafflement in the face of rabid anti-choicers, but also articulates better than I ever could my reasons for identifying with the pro-choice movement.
Perversely, I think that the anti-choice hatred of living is also based in a fear of death. Really living also provokes reminders of mortality. Roeder’s obsession with decay really shows how it works. Living means dying, getting closer to it every day. The expression we use to remind ourselves to really live our lives is “carpe diem”—”seize the day”. Unspoken, because you don’t have to speak it, is that you should seize today because tomorrow will not come. Not literally (for most of us), but the sense is that you cannot put off living your life until the future, because the future gets ever-briefer. Most of us are able to understand this, and we make our choices accordingly. We try to get our work done. We don’t stay in on Friday night. We figure we’ll take that chance on falling in love. There isn’t going to be an infinite amount of time to do these things, might as well start living now. Sometimes I think anti-choicers skip that step of understanding, and instead stave off fear of death by dwelling on the hope that not living will keep it away, that you can somehow purify yourself until death stops knocking. Not consciously, but subconsciously, it seems clear. Death is so scary, and so hopefully by denying living, death can be safely ignored.
The focal point of all this angst is abortion, and birth control in general. Women’s bodies have always been the focal point for the anger of those who fear corporeal realities, for those that are grossed out by life and easily provoked by fears of decay. Women are, for whatever reason, seen as more embodied, maybe because our bodies bleed once a month and because life—that fearful, uncontrollable, filthy thing—comes from our bodies. And so we should be controlled, and our sexuality especially needs to be stifled. Female virginity gets fetishized as “pure”, and abortion and birth control are hated and feared, because they’re reminders that people are out there having sex for pleasure, that they foolishly just live their lives and do things because their corporeal bodies reward them with pleasure.
Really, when you think about it, it’s hard not to pity anti-choice obsessives. Whatever makes you so bitter and fearful, what makes sexuality loom so large in your imagination as a threat, must be awful indeed. But fuck ‘em. If they took all that aimless energy they currently put into being bitter and angry and disgusted and freaked out, and put even a fraction of it towards reconciling themselves to their own lives and bodies, they’d be able to get the fuck over whatever crawled up their ass and died. Everyone is born into these dilemmas about life and death, about the body and disgust, about living your life in the shadow of your upcoming death. And most of us are able to get past that and realize that a life that’s lived on the margins isn’t a life worth living. We realize that you can live your life around the constant anguish about the biological messiness of life, or you can live your life to its fullest.
And we get over our fear of freedom. Freedom is obviously very scary to anti-choicers. If you’re allowed to fuck, then you have all these decisions to make! You have to know what you’re in to, what you’re not. You have to experiment. You have to be vulnerable—and that’s very scary! You fall in love, but that can mean that you fall out and your heart is broken. If we’re allowed to decide for ourselves, then people will make different decisions, and that’s very scary! Diversity reminds one of the messy complexities of living, and that’s anxiety-provoking. Better instead to have exactly one path to follow—don’t fuck, get married, have a couple of kids, stop fucking, and don’t look sideways or you might accidentally invite tumultuous passion into your life. It’s a life half-lived, for sure, but there’s no danger, diversity, or fear. You’ll still die at the end of it, but maybe if you’re lucky, you won’t know the difference.
Read full article here.
