Misconceptions 2: “Life”
I should begin by saying that I once witnessed an abortion. It was performed, from start to finish, in a German film, Occasional Work of a Female Slave, directed by Alexander Kluge, and the titular protagonist was an assistant at the operation. I only kept watching it to prove something to myself: It was a horrific visual experience, no doubt about it. But then, I could never watch the medical shows on TV, such as Chicago Hope; it’s just too awful to watch people being cut up, whether it’s real or fake. Even Eakin’s great painting, The Anatomy Lesson, upsets me. That’s life.
I’ve titled the politicized version of “Life” , as in “I’m Pro-Life”a misconception, as though its current usage were a linguistic error. That was me being polite: now that I’m started I’m going to switch to its proper name: Pro-Life is a scam. It’s like one of those e-mails you get from your “grandson,”who’s in some deep dark prison in Spain for an offense of which he’s entirely innocent , and if you could just send 50 K to his bank account in Bilbao, he could pay off the bail debt and come home. Home! Yes be my guest.
As for “Life,” In my time I’ve known one person who, along with his immediate family, was literally pro-life. It was Jimmy Cooney, who had a subsistence farm in Western Mass., and with his wife Blanche’s help founded a little magazine, The Phoenix, that published, for the first time in the U.S., authors such as Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Kay Boyle, and Jean Giono, as well as D.H. Lawrence’s poetry.
Jimmy was a pacifist, and that meant he would kill nothing. Going to the farm for a visit?–Better bring your mosquito repellent, and love those horse flies. Their son, Gabe, was once visiting us, and our infant son was being terrorized by an errant wasp. I rolled up a newspaper, ready to do the heroic thing, but young Gabe motioned me away, walked up to the wasp as it was wandering on a window screen, picked it up in some way that left it unable to sting him, walked over to our front door and threw it outside, where it speedily buzzed away.
That’s Life. The rest is politics. Or rather, bullshit. Were Jimmy and Blanche anti-abortion? If so, they certainly kept it a secret from the rest of the Left community in the Pioneer Valley. A wasp is alive: a fetus, not. But the political principle they lived by was the principle of non-violence. I’ve known many people who lived according to that principle, sometimes putting their freedom on the line to make their statements; I don’t know of a one who would accept the criminalizing of abortion: which is just another form of violence against women (and doctors). As is the harassment, the attacks on clinics, even firebombing.
Why aren’t these warriors of the Life Right escorting women into clinics through threatening mobs? Where are their rallies against capital punishment, storming the prison gates in Oklahoma; where were they during the invasion of Iraq; where are their petitions against the NRA, accomplice in mass murders? Where are they? Gone to Nowhere, every one.
But, some will say, “the fetus.” Is there not a difference of sincere beliefs about this type of “mass murder”? No, there isn’t. You can’t have a “belief” about a question of definition, sincere or otherwise; it’s not something you can observe, or categorize with other beliefs about human biology.
In our civilization It’s a dogma, a religious dogma adopted in the 19th Century by the Catholic Church–not the people but the Pope and Cardinals, then sold to the masses as a fundamental requirement for being a “good Catholic.” It’s part of the Church’s patriarchal and often misogynistic version of familialism that in the guise of Maryolatry, , relegates women, so to speak, to the second division. [NOTE Occasionally the anti-choice ideology adopts a guise of concern about a falling population. It’s worth pondering the fact that three nations of Western Europe–France, Spain, and Italy — have all fallen below the reproduction level of slightly over two children per family. What they have in common is that they were all once in thrall to the Church; perhaps young people are making a statement.]
Worse yet, to the sanctification of religious dogmas has been added the theocratic ambitions of evangelical protestants, who as a whole had no fixed opinion about abortion until they perceived unity with the Church as the road to political power. And at the expense of women’s rights, which they have now thrown to the winds.
The New York Times, however, for reasons I can’t fathom other than as a misbegotten bothsidesism, has jumped on the post-Dobbs bandwagon. Why do I say that? First, they’ve given a regular column to one Tish Harrison Warren, who specializes in what I’ll call good-feeling Protestantism, with none of the prescriptive venom you get from evangelicals. Then they followed up one of those with a long and adulatory article about one Father Mike, who is the host of what is apparently the most listened-to religious radio talk show in the nation. He too just loves everybody, and wants everybody to treat everybody else well.
Except that in the case of both of them, the universal good feeling disappears when it comes to pregnant women trying to get an abortion.
Why? Because they are “pro-life,” and that means that fetuses must get “equal” treatment with their would-be mothers. Excuse me, but the fetus is inside the mother, a part of her. This kind of “Equal” treatment means invasion of the mother’s body, and her life–which I’ll get to shortly.
Still, if you were to ask one of these thoughtful people how it is that they’re willing to destroy the lives of women, they reply, “Oh no, we’re deeply concerned.” And then they start telling you abut “crisis pregnancy centers,” and help for mothers and infants, and oh yes, adoptions. As for the last, it’s ugly; its implication is vile. And as for the former, the deception could not be greater.
The only crisis the volunteers at those centers are there to encounter is the “crisis” of having to dissuade women from wanting abortions. Real life help might begin, say, promising a client a scholarship to community college night school; and university; and graduate school, but that’s not in the cards. As for the actual crises that women who are lured by the false advertising might have hoped to be advised about–such as the dangers of childbirth itself, which are much greater than those of a legal abortion, and about which the United States has the worst record in the advanced capitalist world–they will hear not a word. Not to mention child poverty which, as one reader points out, is deep and rampant — and gets no response from these quarters.
Have fears about cervical cancer? Planned Parenthood will arrange a free examination for you, and help you deal with a positive test result if that should show up: not a word. How to deal with a miscarriage, or ectopic pregnancy: will they recommend an ob-gyn who has the appropriate experience; and what might that be? If any such are willing to take the chance. I suppose prayer might help–Tish Warren has written a book about it.
Above all, there is often a the genuine life crisis on the horizon : an absent, hostile, or criminal father; the aborting of equal opportunity, , of what may well be a thwarted commitment, as it once was, to real…life.
For these real crises, the “centers” that offer only fraud and deception.
Women, in fact, give other women counsel or advice about abortion, or about life, all the time–usually without coercion or moral pressure. No one (except perhaps on very rare occasions) can force a woman to get an abortion; and Planned Parenthood will tell her everything she needs to know about the nature of the medical procedure (including in instances where parents are hostile). And at the end of the day, as the saying goes, if you’re against abortion you don’t have to get one–freedom of choice. Despite what priests may think, women–that is, those whose “counsel” does not consist of pressing their religious proscriptions–are perfectly capable of both moral and practical reasoning.
The meretricious “reverence for life,” finally, does not extend to the lived lives of women. What then? “Life” offers no ethical grounding at all for social relationships–everybody dies.
There is an old joke one of those Priest-Minister-Rabbi jokes, in which the three of them are asked “when does life begin?”At conception, replies the Priest. At birth, says the Minister, glaring at the priest. The rabbi shrugs his shoulders and says wistfully, “Oy vey, it begins when the kids go away to college.”
Only the rabbi gets the real point. Birth is just a beginning; “life” isn’t a thing, it’s a process. The longer the life goes on, the fuller it may be–or maybe not. But the process is everything; we can give no account of a human’s life that stops at birth–let alone conception. The Church’s view of “life” is anti-life; the enforced celibacy of the priesthood is the most vivid instance of how cramped is that view. Jimmy Cooney’s contribution was making great literature available to Americans: not saving the lives of mosquitos.
However, what can I offer in place of life?
The question deserves an answer, and mine is simple. At the personal level, it is kindness; I can’t imagine another. But most of the time we are talking about the more complex question of relationships at the level of large-scale institutions, that for Kant demanded the categorical imperative; and that Hegel thought were resolved only at the level of the State.
And here my answer is straightforward. At this level, of the state, of universality, of societies, the ethical ground I try to live by–and of course I am far from alone in this- is the demand for justice. In the Constitution of the United States, where most of the people reading this post reside, that demand is stated in the 14th Amendment:
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immuniities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The majority of the Supreme Court of the United have decreed the rule of injustice: of denial, of unequal enforcement, of deprivation. They deserve our contempt. Only stripping them of their self-conceived autocratic power, by extending the membership of the Court, can we possibly rectify this deep injustice: and more, I fear, to come..
