if I were a rhetorical question, I would look like this

[the_siobhan]

Is it possible for somebody who is pro-life and somebody who is pro-choice to be friends?

Is it simply a matter of difference of opinion? Or is it more than that? Is there an underlying difference in values that makes it impossible to be friends?

What do you think?


What I'm listening to right this second: Stromkern

Comments

[panic-girl.livejournal.com]

Pro-life, ideally, means that while you dislike abortion and wish that it were not necessary, you recognize and respect a woman's right to choose. It means you fight for education and access to sexual education and birth control.
What happens, though, when those things fail? Because they do fail. Because two people make a child, making it even more difficult for things to be "perfect." I do find that "Abortion shouldn't ever happen so here's other stuff to do" a bit naive, and a bit dangerous. Unwanted pregnancy has always, and will always happen. When it does, are we going to say "Well tough, your birth control failed, stupid you, here's your kid!" We can't do that, and we have to, have to, leave the options for safe and legal abortion open.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind that there is also the other side of the coin.

Women do have abortions they don't want because is there aren't enough resources available for them to keep their child in anything but the most minimal conditions. The choice is often an abortion or a life of poverty, and that's not exactly a "choice" either.

[panic-girl.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. Women have abortions for a million reasons, and none of them are wrong. I wish we had a hell of a lot more options for women who have children, for any reason.
That's why I don't trust a lot of anti-choice rhetoric either, because it's all about the fetus, but ignores the actual child, and the mother.

Thing is, anti-choice people take that argument and run with it. When I got pregnant, I was the perfect candidate to keep that child, by that reasoning. I has some university education, I had a job, I had parents who would have supported me and that child, I live in a country that has comparatively good social programs. I chose abortion because I did not want a child, pure and simple. For a lot of people, that's a "selfish" and "wrong" choice. I'll agree that it was selfish, I won't agree that it was wrong. It was my choice, and I made it, for no other reason that I didn't want a child.

[medakse.livejournal.com]

Unwanted pregnancy has always, and will always happen.

And here the English instructor becomes a bit English instructory.

I usually start my intro to lit course with "Hills Like White Elephants" by Hemingway which is, in my reading, about abortion. And when I tell my students that unwanted pregnancies have *always* been a fact of life, and aborting an unwanted pregnancy has *always* been a fact of life, they freak out.
They just can't believe women in the Victorian era would wear their corsets too tight in hope of aborting a pregnancy.
They just can't believe that women in the middle ages took herbs and such in hope of aborting a pregnancy.
There was never really a backlash against this until the 20th century, when laws went into effect. Then the proverbial shit hit the fan.

I don't consider myself a "pro-choice but" person, but (and there it is) I do wish we lived in a world in which every person was able to exist in a comfortable, humane manner (education, food, shelter, clothes, etc.). But we don't live in that world, and who the hell am I to tell a 15 year old girl, or a 40 year old woman, what she can and can't do to make life better for her, or for her existing children, or for her invalid parents, or for the thousands of reasons women get abortions?

My best friend has a solution: every rabid pro-lifer (and I'm talking the gun-toting, license-plate-copying ones) who wants to stop abortion should have to support a child that would have otherwise been aborted. For the rest of her life. Not raise them; just support them.

And I still haven't seen Citizen Ruth. Just sayin'.

[panic-girl.livejournal.com]

My best friend has a solution: every rabid pro-lifer (and I'm talking the gun-toting, license-plate-copying ones) who wants to stop abortion should have to support a child that would have otherwise been aborted. For the rest of her life. Not raise them; just support them.
I've always thought that too. ;)

There was never really a backlash against this until the 20th century, when laws went into effect. Then the proverbial shit hit the fan.
Yup. BTW, the stuff I was going to look up for, I haven't because I've been responding to people all day. HA! Anyway, if you haven't already, read Backlash by Susan Faludi. That's where that info is, but the whole book is so unbelievably worthwhile.

[kest]

hello, oedipus? mr. failed post-birth abortion that comes back to bite his whole family in the ass?

[medakse.livejournal.com]

ha! exactly!

*scribbles that down*
Of course, the last time I talked Oedipus in my class (in conjunction with Muriel Rukeyser's "Myth"), I kept pronouncing it "O-dip-pee-us". As in, I smushed together Oedipus and Odysseus. When I finally realized what I was doing, I sent them all home early.
It was that kind of day :)