“Owning Up to Abortion” from Barbara Ehrenreich’s THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND
http://www.hercircleezine.com/2012/02/02/owning-up-to-abortion-from-barbara-ehrenreichs-this-land-is-their-land/
THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND: REPORTS FROM A DIVIDED NATION by Barbara Ehrenreich (Holt, 2009).
Ehrenreich is well known for her writing and reporting on issues related to social justice. THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND is a series of satirical essays about issues related to the economic melt-down that began in 2008, and the divide between religious and secular America. Two essays stood out as especially pertinent to inContext readers. The first is entitled, “Owning Up to Abortion,” and the second, “A Uterus is Not a Substitute for a Conscience.” I’ll look at each essay individually, and address the first this week and the second next week.
“Owning Up to Abortion” is Ehrenreich’s call to women to acknowledge their own abortions and the need for access to abortion care. She points out that with all of the genetic testing available prenatally, there are increased reasons why a woman may choose to terminate her pregnancy. However, many women who abort for reasons related to the results of prenatal testing refuse to call these abortions just what they are. Ehrenreich reports that many women invent some kind of differentiation in their own minds between their “need” for an abortion and the women who might be sitting next to them at a clinic who merely do not want to be pregnant at that time.
I worked with a social researcher over ten years ago who was gathering data for a book about childbirth practices. Her demographic questions included asking whether the interviewee was pro-choice. One interviewee claimed she was against choice, yet went on to describe her support for her sister-in-law who “had to” terminate her pregnancy due to severe fetal abnormalities. The researcher and I were incredulous. If you are against allowing women control of their own bodies, then how could you think it acceptable for one woman to decide to undergo a second trimester abortion rather than continue her pregnancy through its natural outcome whereupon the baby would die either at some later date in the pregnancy or certainly at or just after birth? As Ehrenreich found, the difference to these women is that they claim they “wanted” their babies. Ehrenreich wryly points out that these women did not “want” the PARTICULARbaby, however. This “prejudice,” as the author calls it, was confirmed in a survey she found wherein 82% of survey participants supported abortion due to fetal abnormalities and only 40% supported a woman’s right to choose for another reason, such as an inability to financially support another child.
This subterfuge is exactly the same as when reporters give airtime to Republican voters who in the same breath tout their disdain for “big government” and yet want to vote for candidates who would outlaw abortion and birth control. I used to be unable to comprehend how small government equated with a government that meddled in my most private business. However, I now understand that when a Republican advocates for small government and the criminalization of abortion and birth control, what he or she really wants is government small enough that it can set up camp in my uterus.
At the end of the essay, Ehrenreich calls for honesty among women who seek abortion services for any reason, at any point in their lives. She also warns “the freedoms that we exercise but do not defend, or even acknowledge, are easily taken away.” Acknowledgement must come first. Women need to acknowledge the necessity of legal, quality medical care and access to abortion services. Rather than determine for individuals when abortion is acceptable, we must keep it legal and accessible to all women who may then individually decide when it is acceptable for them personally. In an election year here in the United States, it is even more crucial that women recognize pregnancy termination for any reason as abortion, and to protect access to legal abortion for all women.
THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND: REPORTS FROM A DIVIDED NATION by Barbara Ehrenreich (Holt, 2009).
Ehrenreich is well known for her writing and reporting on issues related to social justice. THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND is a series of satirical essays about issues related to the economic melt-down that began in 2008, and the divide between religious and secular America. Two essays stood out as especially pertinent to inContext readers. The first is entitled, “Owning Up to Abortion,” and the second, “A Uterus is Not a Substitute for a Conscience.” I’ll look at each essay individually, and address the first this week and the second next week.
“Owning Up to Abortion” is Ehrenreich’s call to women to acknowledge their own abortions and the need for access to abortion care. She points out that with all of the genetic testing available prenatally, there are increased reasons why a woman may choose to terminate her pregnancy. However, many women who abort for reasons related to the results of prenatal testing refuse to call these abortions just what they are. Ehrenreich reports that many women invent some kind of differentiation in their own minds between their “need” for an abortion and the women who might be sitting next to them at a clinic who merely do not want to be pregnant at that time.
I worked with a social researcher over ten years ago who was gathering data for a book about childbirth practices. Her demographic questions included asking whether the interviewee was pro-choice. One interviewee claimed she was against choice, yet went on to describe her support for her sister-in-law who “had to” terminate her pregnancy due to severe fetal abnormalities. The researcher and I were incredulous. If you are against allowing women control of their own bodies, then how could you think it acceptable for one woman to decide to undergo a second trimester abortion rather than continue her pregnancy through its natural outcome whereupon the baby would die either at some later date in the pregnancy or certainly at or just after birth? As Ehrenreich found, the difference to these women is that they claim they “wanted” their babies. Ehrenreich wryly points out that these women did not “want” the PARTICULARbaby, however. This “prejudice,” as the author calls it, was confirmed in a survey she found wherein 82% of survey participants supported abortion due to fetal abnormalities and only 40% supported a woman’s right to choose for another reason, such as an inability to financially support another child.
This subterfuge is exactly the same as when reporters give airtime to Republican voters who in the same breath tout their disdain for “big government” and yet want to vote for candidates who would outlaw abortion and birth control. I used to be unable to comprehend how small government equated with a government that meddled in my most private business. However, I now understand that when a Republican advocates for small government and the criminalization of abortion and birth control, what he or she really wants is government small enough that it can set up camp in my uterus.
At the end of the essay, Ehrenreich calls for honesty among women who seek abortion services for any reason, at any point in their lives. She also warns “the freedoms that we exercise but do not defend, or even acknowledge, are easily taken away.” Acknowledgement must come first. Women need to acknowledge the necessity of legal, quality medical care and access to abortion services. Rather than determine for individuals when abortion is acceptable, we must keep it legal and accessible to all women who may then individually decide when it is acceptable for them personally. In an election year here in the United States, it is even more crucial that women recognize pregnancy termination for any reason as abortion, and to protect access to legal abortion for all women.
THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND Part 2: “A Uterus is Not a Substitute for a Conscience”
http://www.hercircleezine.com/2012/02/09/this-land-is-their-land-part-2-a-uterus-is-not-a-substitute-for-a-conscience/
A common platitude among feminists (myself included) is that if women ruled the world, there would be no war or violence. Ehrenreich debunks the myth of the benevolent female in her essay, “A Uterus is Not a Substitute for a Conscience.” inContext examines this particular essay to continue the discussion from last week about Ehrenreich’s book THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND (Holt, 2009).
Ms. Ehrenreich admits her own surprise at viewing photographs from Abu Ghraib prison that depict female soldiers committing abuse of male prisoners. She, and many other feminists, were disturbed not only at the images in the photographs, but also their evidence that women could be trained in a way that undermined what is assumed to be the very essence of womanhood: a commitment to non-violence. As women’s roles in our military have increased, feminists hoped our armed services would be changed by the presence of females. A lot of feminist scholarship claims our culture of war creates our rape culture. Researchers believe that because war requires hyper-masculinity, which of necessity and by definition is the opposite of and denies validity to anything feminine, that this view pits women as less than men and thus “other.” Because war requires soldiers to see the enemy as “other,” this allows male soldiers to kill, maim and yes, rape.
The pictorial evidence from Abu Ghraib shows that women have assimilated to the U.S. military rather than bringing their own, assumed innate, feminine, anti-violent, pro-human rights agenda. I believe the women soldiers in the Abu Ghraib photographs are less a testament to the nature of women and more a testament to the effectiveness of our modern military training. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman wrote ON KILLING: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL COST OF LEARNING TO KILL IN WAR AND SOCIETY (Back Bay, 2009), which examines the ways in which we train our soldiers to fight and how this has an impact on them as individuals and on our society as a whole. His insider view as a former service member confirms scholarship about war by non-military researchers who posit this view of the enemy as “other” as the most effective way to train soldiers to kill. This same training is provided to female soldiers, and thus brings them into the mind-set of viewing fellow humans as something “other” and something “less” so that they might be prone to the same dehumanizing and abusive behaviors long-thought to be the purview of men alone, based, ironically enough, on their anatomy.
With the rise of military sexual trauma, which is committed upon both men and women in the military, there is a rising focus on training that counteracts the training strictly to increase a soldier’s willingness to kill. Scholars from both inside and outside the military ask that principles of duty, honor and respect that are part of military recruiting be integrated into training that would simultaneously allow for the ability to kill. (How this might be accomplished is too big a discussion to begin herein.) Ehrenreich and other feminists would agree.
As a society, we need to stop vilifying men as perpetrators or potential perpetrators of violence and realize that women are not necessarily the only peacemakers and peacekeepers. Grossman’s research points to men being just as opposed to violence as women, unless they are trained otherwise, of course. He posits that humans are against violence by their nature, in fact. Just as women do not want biology to be their destiny, we must recognize the same for men. We need to erase our own blind spots in feminist thought and scholarship and believe a higher moral ground is something to achieve—not a thing synonymous with our anatomy.
(THIS ARTICLE PURPOSEFULLY LACKS AN IMAGE OUT OF RESPECT FOR THE PRIVACY OF THOSE HOODED PRISONERS DEPICTED IN PHOTOGRAPHS THAT ARE THE IMAGES OF ABU GHRAIB.)
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