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Pro-Life, But Not Proud of It
I’m 100 percent pro-life: No exceptions for rape or incest, and opposed to all the research and fertility treatments that involve creating zygotes to be left in freezers or destroyed for testing. But I have to admit, I am ashamed to call myself pro-life.
Part of that shame stems from why I am pro-life. I grew up in a family that was both pro-life and adamantly devoted to the bourgeoise American Dream. Children were a gift from God, to be sure, but they were also a gift that should only be accepted when the circumstances were right; i.e., after one had a college degree, a remunerative career, and was married to productive man after buying a nice house in the suburbs. Having children before that point was to throw away one’s life, and a woman staying at home to raise children was a waste of her education. The night we announced our engagement, I overheard my mother flatly say, “Maybe after she pops out a couple kids she’ll realize college is more important.” Having unplanned children was, I understood, a mark of failure to control passions and failure to control fertility.
Moreover, I grew up on a hobby farm. We may not have raised animals for meat, but we lost enough of them that I understood why euthanasia is considered humane: better a quick death by injection than for a cat to suffer through internal bleeding from a car collision, or see the ducks and chickens attacked by coyotes, or a thirty-year-old horse die of dehydration because she couldn’t get up on her arthitic legs. I learned the hard way that sometimes the kindest thing one can do is to let death come quickly and cleanly, as Mother Nature doesn’t let animals die peacefully in their sleep.
With these kind of premises, the pro-life stance I grew up with seemed unfair. If children really did forestall any further education or career potential, maybe it was better to abort a child now so as to build a better life for future children. And maybe it was better to let a fetus die cleanly than to be trapped for nine months with the kind of terrible, thoughtless woman who managed to get unwantedly pregnant in the first place. An abortion was a horrible thing, to be sure, but maybe it was the least bad option.
Things changed. First, my bourgeoise expectations crumbled around me. My husband lost his job as a computer programmer and couldn’t find better paying work than washing dishes. I graduated from law school into a major restructuring of the legal industry and ended up selling shoes to try to make ends meet. Unfortunately, the ends didn’t meet in the middle, and we lost our house in foreclosure. By our tenth anniversary, everything I thought my adult life would be was gone
I began looking enviously at the Facebook pages of high school friends. They’d married their high school sweethearts and stayed in our small town, but they’d had children. For years, I had privately looked down my nose at them, imagining the upper-middle-class life I’d soon have that they’d envy; less than a decade later, I was envious of their children and their husbands who made enough for them to stay home in their modest houses. Children had gone from a curse on the imprudent to a luxury beyond on our means to afford.
My husband and I started working toward being able to afford children, and life improved enough that we felt ready to start trying. So we tried, and tried, and tried. After two years of trying every friendly tip — yes, I even tried dramatically giving up to get pregnant ironically — we brought in the doctors. The verdict was we’d never have children naturally due to a birth defect.
The second change was that, as I was going through this, I changed denominations into a sect of Christianity that takes the pro-life message seriously and became aquainted with pro-lifers who took their call to defend the unborn more seriously than what I’d been used to. Through their influence, I began to learn what abortion really entailed. Far from the clean, humane, and sanitary process I had imagined, I learned how the fetus is ripped apart limb from limb or mashed to a pulp by a vacuum. This wasn’t a humane death: This was a gruesome, torturous execution. If someone killed a puppy in this way, the howls of the internet mob would never stop. Surely, a human fetus deserves at least as much concern.
The third fact came when I decided to look into adoption. I’d had second-hand experiences that didn’t give me good feelings about the system. An aunt and uncle were (and are) foster parents, and it took three years of legal wrangling to finalize my cousin’s adoption because the case worker would rather have seen an unwanted black child with her drug-addicted single mother than with married white social workers. Additionally, a couple we know had been fostering two girls for a year and lost them when the “father” gave one girl a well-earned spanking. It appeared that whatever money one saved by trying to adopt through the public system would be spent either on legal bills to keep a child one had come to think of as one’s own, or would be paid in heartbreak, as a foster parent is less a parent than a landlord for very picky tenants who can move out at a moment’s notice.
If anything, the private systems were more depressing. Domestic adoption fees range from $12,000 to $22,000, plus the ability to pay for any of the mother’s remaining medical bills. International adoption is expensive enough to constitute a status symbol. (Seriously, how many children would there be if every parent had to pay $40,000 to bring them home from the hospital?) For comparison, the average abortion costs $400.
I thought about how my child-free life had not brought me the material success and contentment it was supposed to bring. I thought about how unlikely it would ever be that I could afford to adopt. I thought about how adoption was so expensive, in part, because there were so many parents who wanted to adopt and so few children who were both unwanted and survived to term. I thought about how those children who could have been mine were brutally killed because other women — women lucky enough to conceive — decided they couldn’t be bothered. I envied them, and I hated them.
In the end, I’m ashamed that what convinced me to become adamantly pro-life was not a new-found respect for the worth of all life, or a utilitarian analysis that the potential for each person to help make the world a better place outweighed the significant inconvenience to parents, or even a humble submission to the teachings of the church I joined. No, what finally pushed me over the edge into a 100 percent, no-exceptions, pro-life stance was the deep visceral hatred I felt for the women who’d been given what I so deeply craved who would rather destroy that gift — kill that child — rather than be inconvenienced long enough to regift it to me and my sisters in barrenhood whose arms ache for a child.
Published in Culture
My friend Beth’s second baby smelled like buttered popcorn.
You know, I probably should read “Red Families, Blue Families” but I can’t get past the fact that one of the authors is my least favorite law school professor. “I want you to leave my class more confused than when you walked it” is a direct quote.
Thank you for chastising me only a bit, Liz. There is, though, a different factor that I didn’t mention that you might be aware of. In Judaism, we are encouraged to have children. With all the destruction of Jews and against Judaism, having children is one way to help ensure that Judaism survives. One doesn’t have to agree with that belief, and that certainly didn’t occur to me in my earlier years (since I wasn’t practicing then) but I see that belief differently now.
One of my grandsons has chosen not to have children and there is an ache in my heart, so I understand Susan. He claims to be an atheist and just doesn’t care.
“red sex, blue sex”
Is this Seussical?
Red Sex, Blue Sex
Old Sex, New Sex
This one has a tattooed star
This one has an expensive car
Say! What many ways to
Get Sex there are!
I would not, could not in a tree.
Not in a car! You let me be.
The most interesting part of this remark to me, Sabr, is that I know you’ve been critical in the past of how the labels “red” and “blue” are used. I agree there’s something sloppy about them (especially when applied to states as a whole, since entire states only roughly approximate regional differences). Nonetheless, it seems you’re saying there really is something to this whole “red tribe vs blue tribe” thing. Correct?
How much is “acting like a princess on their wedding days” an elite prerogative? Sure, a lot of Americans, including the wealthy, do have over-lavish weddings, but I think in the book “Unmarried Families with Children”, the researchers were surprised to find that poorer demographics value a (relatively) lavish wedding even more than richer demographics.
In my “elite” circles, at least, two relatively (and, it’s assumed, temporarily) poor graduate students getting married cheaply in a park, local church, or someone’s backyard, with a picnic lunch to follow, was pretty common. And one of the most elaborate weddings I’ve been invited to was, according to some other guests, one of the least elaborate they’d been invited to. Blowing too much on a lavish wedding was not considered a smart move, for some reason, and even considered rather low-class. But maybe my particular social bubble is just very weird in this respect? (Lordy knows it’s plenty weird in other respects!)
Kinsey espoused the theory that the two groups most likely to exhibit the most casual attitudes towards sex were the very, very poor and the very, very rich. They both use it as a form of recreation. The poor can’t afford the middle class distractions and the rich are bored with them.
I am conceding only that there exists a category of people who marry late and have children only within marriages, and that in order to do so, they use abortion as a secondary form of contraception.
And that there exists a second category of people who marry early, divorce at the drop of a hat, and have children willy nilly, but in their defense, while terrible parents they may be, they don’t murder their children.
If we wish to hang them with the epithets “red families” and “blue families” I’ll use the lingo in order to be understood. I do not believe that these categories describe the entirety of society, nor do I believe they map perfectly onto the “red tribe” and “blue tribe” even if I conceded the existence of the “red tribe” and “blue tribe” (and do not get me started on the self-conceit of the “gray tribe”). Nor do I believe that they represent the end points of some type of continuum.
I state only that I find both of them objectionable, and that I believe this is sustained because the elite of this country is attached at the hip to the idea of marriage as self-actualization, and if that self-actualization has to be built on a platform of infant skulls, well, that’s OK with them.
Understood, but there is also a strong urge among Prots to procreate as well to carry on family lineage. My brother and I are both IVs and my niece is a V. :)
Understood. I agree with you that the correspondence between mating habits and “red tribe” vs “blue tribe” isn’t perfect (in fact, the very religiously observant among the “red tribe” have habits quite different from the less observant – which is itself perhaps rather explanatory!); that “red tribe” and “blue tribe” are in themselves imperfect descriptors; and that they’re not endpoints on a continuum.
I use these labels only because they’re popular now and they do seem to capture something, and that those who use these labels as shorthand to point out a seeming contradiction between stated beliefs about sex and sexual behavior shouldn’t, I think, be completely ignored.
In my caseload of 120 girls, only one of them was promiscuous. The rest were all good girls. Most of them were conned by their boyfriends, “If you love me, prove it.” One was a 12 year old little girl whose mother let a 21 year old sailor take her out. Almost without exception their boyfriends vanished into the woodwork. Then to add insult to injury, their parents would throw them out for “sinning.”
One of my closest friends admitted her family forced her to give up a baby for adoption when she was 14 years old. Every year for nearly 60 years she cries on that child’s birthday.