Personhood

Two of fifty states have now codified government-mandated sexual assault. Texas and Oklahoma, I'm looking at you while my skin crawls and my internal organs quiver in fear. Virginia is on its way to becoming the third member of this misogynistic, utterly abhorrent club.

Because it is incredibly unhealthy to be a rageball all the time, I am working assiduously at setting aside my anger at the very idea that the government is mandating vaginal penetration with a foreign object for women seeking a legal medical procedure. But let me just say that one more time, so that it sinks in for all of you following along at home:

The government is mandating vaginal penetration with a foreign object for women seeking a legal medical procedure.

Why is this ok? I'm seriously asking. I want to know why this is ok.

I find some of the quotes from people defending these laws to be instructive as to the kind of mindset that makes things like this ok. For example, "They already chose to be vaginally penetrated." Again, setting aside the initial rush of rage, I can start to unpack that statement. Choosing to have sexual intercourse once makes anything that happens afterwards consensual. It's something like a chaste/virgin doctrine: once intercourse occurs (once the hymen is broken?) there is no protection for your ladybits. By breaking the seal (so to speak), you lose claim to any protections. Consent to sex is something that can only happen once, and it can never be revoked. Once you've lost virginity, you are ever-after "open for business" to anyone, including the government! It's the fallen-woman doctrine, gussied up for modern times.

Another came after a Virginia legislator was asked about exceptions for rape and incest. His response? "Sometimes incest is voluntary. The woman becomes a sin-bearer of the crime, because the right of a child predominates over the embarrassment of the woman."

First of all, I am not kidding.

Second, can someone please find me a breakdown of "voluntary" incestual relationships versus molestation and rape by a family member? I would like to know more about this voluntary incest.

Really, I don't think this guy defines "voluntary" in the way that you and I do. Voluntary sex is any sex that happens because you don't kill yourself rather than be defiled. And sex, itself, is always a defiling act. Sex is dirty.

And that's really what all this is about, isn't it? The deeply-seated belief of many people that there is something inherently, irrevocably wrong with sex. The body is dirty, because it is corporeal and not spiritual, and acts of pleasure for the body are naught but devilish distractions from the work of cleansing the soul.

It's a sad, tragic outlook. My well of compassion is almost emptied, thinking about all these people that think the pleasures of touch and give are evil. Women are by necessity nothing but uteruses, because to acknowledge the entirety of a woman would be to acknowledge desire.

Sex is not shameful. Corporeal joys are not lesser than spiritual ones.

And the government has absolutely no right to be enforcing such arcane and deeply personal beliefs. You may wish to hold onto your notion of sex as something that is capital-W WRONG, but you do not get to codify your beliefs. Mandating sexual assault and making birth control inaccessible are inexcusable abuses of power. Women are more then uteruses, and our uteruses are not yours to make decisions about. I get to decide who and what enters my vagina, not a legislature. I get to decide whether I have sex, and whether I want the possibility of progeny to come from that sex, not a legislature. Those are my decisions to make because I am a complete person, with the ability to reason and choose.

You want to talk about personhood? Let's start with the personhood of women.

I am tired of constantly having to defend the existence of my brain, my character, and my capacity for moral decision-making. Women are complete beings. Accept it. And stop treating us as if we are not.

Morality Cannot Be Defined By Any One Thing: Planned Parenthood vs. Karen Handel

Can we just talk about Karen Handel for a second? Ok, maybe a couple of seconds. She doesn't merit much more than that, but as a case-study in a particular way of thinking that I cannot for the life of me make heads or tails of, she's interesting.

And then we'll talk about how she's batshit insane.

But first, the earnest and wide-eyed questioning ingenue portion of today's blog.

Handel ran for governor of Georgia some years back, and her campaign website has been archived on the internet, because the internet never forgets anything, and so we can look at her statement about Planned Parenthood while she was running for governor. The salient portion of the statement reads as follows:

First, let me be clear, since I am pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood. During my time as Chairman of Fulton County, there were federal and state pass-through grants that were awarded to Planned Parenthood for breast and cervical cancer screening, as well as a “Healthy Babies Initiative.” The grant was authorized, regulated, administered and distributed through the State of Georgia. Because of the criteria, regulations and parameters of the grant, Planned Parenthood was the only eligible vendor approved to meet the state criteria. Additionally, none of the services in any way involved abortions or abortion-related services. In fact, state and federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer funds for abortions or abortion related services and I strongly support those laws. Since grants like these are from the state I’ll eliminate them as your next Governor.

The sentence that smacked me upside the head and made me want to cry for the state of humanity is the last one: "Since grants like these are from the state I'll eliminate them as your next Governor."

What the what? Not, "Since grants like this are from the state, I'll amend the criteria so Planned Parenthood is not the only eligible vendor as your next Governor." Or even, "Since grants like this are from the state, I'll take the grant money and let the state itself administer cancer screenings and baby check-ups."

No. None of that reasonableness. As the next Governor, she would have eliminated the grants.

She's so pro-life that she's going to eliminate state spending on diagnosing life-threatening disease early! She's so pro-life she's going to make sure that poor babies don't see a doctor!

Look, Planned Parenthood is fun for a lot of people to use as a punching bag because they stubbornly refuse to stop providing comprehensive reproductive care services for women, usually women that have no other, or very limited other, access to healthcare. In plain English, Planned Parenthood refuses to remove abortion from the plethora of services it provides. Because of this, "pro-lifers" are quick to pile on, screeching at the top of their lungs that Planned Parenthood ought to be defunded by everyone and hounded out of business.

So, you don't like abortion. That's fair. I know some very lovely people who are staunchly against the practice, would never have one, would be horrified to know their daughter had one. I also know some not-so-lovely people who are staunchly against the practice.

The thing that, in my mind, separates lovely anti-abortion people from horrifyingly misogynistic control-freaks is something I call the Planned Parenthood barometer. It goes like this: I understand and respect your belief that life begins at conception and that you would never abort a fetus; do you understand and respect my belief (backed up by ACTUAL FACTS) that Planned Parenthood does way, way more than performing abortions, and can you recognize the good that they do and be happy that they do it and that they save lives? If the anti-abortion person I am speaking to can, in fact, recognize the good that Planned Parenthood does every day, then I term them a lovely anti-abortion person. Maybe they still have some discomfort, morally, with that, but you know what? Nothing is black-and-white. No moral decision will ever be simple. Being a good, moral person is to be uncomfortable for most of your life, because choices are hard, whether you're talking about an unintended pregnancy or killing a man that breaks into your house with the intent of harming you. If someone cannot understand that moral choices are fraught with gray and cannot recognize and acknowledge all the good (and I do mean, straight-up good) things that Planned Parenthood does, I mentally write them off as a horrifyingly misogynistic control freak and remind myself to never, ever trust them. With anything.

I'm not exaggerating even a little bit.

If your sense of being "pro-life" is so centered on a fetus that you are blind to the lives saved and made easier and the comfort given by poor people having access to breast cancer screenings, cervical cancer screenings, STD testing, and a general environment of non-judgmental knowledge, you're not very pro-life. You don't have to like abortion. You don't have to have one. But if you'd like to simply cease funding programs that do, in fact, save lives simply because they are being administered by an organization that does perform the perfectly legal abortion procedure, you cannot call yourself pro-life.

PERIOD. FULL STOP. You cannot do it.

Apparently, Karen Handel is one of these people.

What I learned last week, as the Komen debacle unfolded, is that contrary to what I had begun to believe about American humanity, she's the minority. People who are so incapable of recognizing nuance and the gradations that are attendent in any moral decision-making process are a minority.

You may not like abortion. You may think it's a bad thing, and a bad choice to make, and you might choose not to have one should you ever find yourself in an unfortunate position. But you don't get to condemn millions upon millions of poor women to death by breast cancer, or cervical cancer, or to lives of pain and suffering because of constant pregnancy due to lack of contraceptive access or STDs, and call it the moral, good, pro-life choice. And I learned last week that far, far more people than I thought would be able to make that distinction, DO, in fact, make that distinction.

World, you did me proud. I love all of you right now.

Then I read Handel's resignation letter this morning. The woman is batshit insane. She thinks if she says the same untrue things often enough, people will start to believe her. She thinks this even after last week very demonstrably proved that her extreme and frightening ideology and narrow focus is not shared by the majority of the people that Komen tries to help, or is supported by. Isn't the definition of insanity "doing the same thing and expecting different results?"

I thought so. The woman is nuts.

Oh, you wily paternalistic commentators, you.

An unspecified length of time back (I'm terrible with time, honestly) I read a piece by Fox News' resident male-centrist Dr. Keith Ablow that set forth the premise that men should have veto power over an abortion.

He makes all kinds of qualifications to the kind of men that should be able to exercise this power right up front (reasonable expectation that they are the father, desire and ability to care for the child when it is born) which (as an acquaintance pointed out) is pretty much reason to stop reading right there.

Why?, one might ask.

Well, because the law is a blunt instrument and morality is as delicate as a butterflies wings. Bludgeoning with law is not the answer to any problem as nuanced as abortion. As soon as you start making those kinds of qualifications, the ability of the law to deal with the reality of any situation completely breaks down. "A reasonable expectation that that he is the father"? Really? Wasn't there a study done that says something like 25% of children in this country are being raised by men who think they are the fathers and aren't? Maybe it was only 20%. But it was a pretty high number. What if a man thinks he's the father absolutely during the first trimester and then finds out he's not? Is he still going to take responsibility for the child on delivery? Is he still as into the idea of caring for this thing that he hasn't actually been a part of creating?

(I've never fully understood paternal societies for precisely this reason: it's really difficult to be absolutely sure who the father of a child is. It is far, far easier to know for sure who the mother is.)

The law deals in absolutes. The law does not have the capacity to encompass the nuance that any moral question carries. The law does not have the delicacy to distinguish between a man for whom reasonable expectation is enough, and knowing absolutely is necessary. But both of these men could make a claim in Ablow's world.

And let's just get right down to it: people are shitty. Men are shitty, women are shitty. We all do terrible things to each other, with the express purpose of inflicting pain. When someone hurts us, we want to hurt them back. Sometimes, we just want to hurt someone for no particular reason. Pregnancy and children have been the means to control women by amoral men for, quite literally, centuries upon centuries. We have, as a society, been moving away from that circumstance for more than fifty years. You're really advocating once again codifying male dominion over women in law? Are you going to ask that women be required to vote as their husbands or fathers wish them to, next? Maybe they shouldn't leave their homes unless properly chaperoned by a male relative, just so they stay safe.

But I'm getting a little hyperbolic there. Forgive me. Hysterics won't help anyone. (And yes, "hysteria" is an incredibly mysogynistic notion. I'm one of those crazy bitches.)

People are shitty, and we hurt each other a lot. That's not ideal, but is fact. And there is no area of human life where we have the ability to hurt each other intimately and personally than in sexuality. And while I am incredibly glad that we no longer keep young women under lock and key or stone them for becoming pregnant without first getting married or punish sexual experimentation to the degree we used to, I must admit that I have become concerned that the penduluum's swung a bit too far the other way. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it. And black-out drinking and a different fuck every night is not something that anyone should be doing. You really should know someone before you sleep with them. At least know them well enough to know whether basic ideas match up and should something unexpected occur you'll be able to work it out between the two of you. And probably you'll both end up hurting some, but it's going to hurt when your life is thrown into chaos, and that's not necessarily anyone's fault. That's just the circumstance of being alive. What you have to do is not hurt each other any more than that.

Ablow notes (and I have no idea where he's getting this from) that "no one" asks fathers how they feel leading up to and following an abortion.

Uh, what? I'm pretty sure that's not the case. As I've written about previously, I have had two unexpected pregnancies, and currently have one child. And I'm pretty sure I (and a whole lot of other people) asked both those men how they were feeling. In at least one case (the case of the abortion), I'm pretty sure more people asked him what he wanted than asked me what I wanted, and subsequently asked him how he was doing than asked me how I was doing. For the record, I went against his wishes in that case. And it was still the best decision I've ever made, despite the psychological turmoil it caused me and continues to cause me.

Which brings me to the doozy in Ablow's commentary on this matter.

I understand that adopting social policy that gives fathers the right to veto abortions would lead to presently unknown psychological consequences for women forced to carry babies to term. But I don’t know that those consequences are greater than those suffered by men forced to end the lives of their unborn children.

First of all, we absolutely do know the psychological and also social consequences for women forced to carry babies they don't want. It's called: read some history or take a trip to India or the Middle East, you fucking moron. Willful ignorance is possibly the worst trait anyone can ever display.

Second of all, let me let you in on a little secret. Life causes psychological pain. No, really. There is pretty much nothing that you can do to avoid being hurt in your life. There is pretty much nothing you can do that will ensure that you never struggle within yourself, that your sense of right never gets put up against your sense of duty, that what is practically possible will always fall in line with your ideal world. The world is an imperfect, messy place and we are all imperfect messy people, and living causes psychological pain and suffering. I know you're a psychiatrist and your job is to eliminate this pain and suffering for people, but you realize that if such suffering could be alleviated through the use of law and society, you wouldn't have a job, right?

The world is not perfect. You will hurt, regardless of your gender.

And perhaps this is unendurably female-centric of me, but I firmly believe that given the fact that life will hurt you one way or another, on this particular issue, the final decision should always rest with that person that will have to actually grow a child in her body and carry it around for 40 weeks. When the technology exists to implant a fetus in a man, with a womb and all so he can carry it around himself, then he'll have standing to veto an abortion. But the fact of the matter is that pregnancy is fucking traumatic even for women that are happy about it and want their children. You get fat, and slow, and dumb. And I mean that: you get dumber during pregnancy. Blood redirects from your brain to your uterus and without the blood flow and the oxygen it provides, you do not think as well. It's a hard thing to live with, having your body change without your will or consent, having your very thoughts change without your will or consent. Forcing a woman to endure that against her will is far more psychologically damaging than most of the other things that hurt us in our lives.

The law is not the forum for regulating moral questions. Morality is a thing of self-regulation, and the limits you place on yourself are always the ones that are going to hold strongest. You act in the ways that will win you the approbation of the people that you look up to the most. I'm very sorry, Dr. Ablow, that more people don't look up to you so you have to write this tripe to satisfy your power-hungry ego, but that doesn't mean the law ought to follow your example. The law shouldn't follow my example, either. The law should be written such that people can follow the examples that they wish to, and if you want more people to think and feel like you do that's your prerogative, but you have to earn their approbation. You don't get to use the law to beat them into submission to your ideas.

It just doesn't work. For me.

It's pretty much a cliche. A friend of mine even has a joke about it. A girl who tells you she got pregnant on birth control is a liar. Because she was never on birth control.

Only, sometimes, she's not. I'm not.

I got pregnant on birth control. Twice.

The birth control pill is not foolproof. For all the things written about how the sexual revolution would never have occurred without access to easy contraceptive methods, I think it's high time that it's acknowledged that the birth control pill is not a goddamn silver bullet.

For starters, you have to take the pill every day, at the same time, to get those 95% effective rates. I suspect that's probably the source of the joke: telling a guy you're on the pill but neglecting to mention that you've forgotten to take it for the last three days.

However, the other issue is exactly what the pill does. The pill is not a condom or a spermicide or a diaphragm or an IUD. It does not physically prevent sperm from entering your uterus and possibly meeting a nice egg that it would be nice to settle down with. The pill messes with a woman's hormones, tricking the body into thinking that the woman is already pregnant, thus preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus and becoming a pregnancy.

Sidenote: this is the reason for Catholic condemnation of birth control. Morally speaking, the Church holds that a fertilized egg is life, since it contains all the genetic material. Stopping the egg from implanting in the uterus, thus causing the "life" that is the fertilized egg to be discarded, is tantamount to murder. While I find this position untenable in terms of actual living, it is a morally principled and logically sound position.

But it's universally acknowledged that most biology is not exact. Particularly when it comes to biochemistry, there is massive and statistically significant variation across the population. So trying to artificially alter that biochemistry is going to be a hit-and-miss proposition. Think anti-depressants: they don't work the same for everyone. Not even close.

Birth control pills are not much different.

I happen to be one of those people who's hormones fall waaaaay outside the norm. I should have known this, considering all the trouble I had getting through puberty and the ways in which my reproductive system still decides to punish me every month.

But I was a teenager and I bought into everything.

And I got pregnant at the ripe old age of 18. While I was on birth control. I had an abortion. And for those of you keeping score at home, my Catholic upbringing still asserts itself over that decision. I still sometimes cry for no particular reason and then realize I'm still processing a lifetime's worth of guilt and shame over having killed someone. But I do not doubt that it was the right decision, regardless. If I'd had that child, I'd still be married to an unmedicated, obsessive-compulsive control freak that liked to tell me I was worthless, didn't like me leaving the house, and had a penchant for trying to kill me. And there'd be a child in the household to worry about.

So, good decision. Even if it kills me now and again.

I put that experience out of my head. I told myself that I must not have been vigilant enough about taking my pill at exactly the same time every day. I set up a system with alarms and carrying extra packs of pills in all my purses and all manner of elaborate schema to ensure that it didn't happen again.

Well, I've got a two-and-a-half-year-old, so obviously that didn't work out as intended.

I love my daughter. I love her fiercely, dearly and unconditionally. But she was an accident, and I do wonder what my life would look like right now if I'd had the emotional wherewithal to go through a second abortion. Looking back, I think that her father wanted that, which may explain his current absence from our lives. No matter. No one should be forced to have a child they don't want, and men aren't an exception to that.

But these days, I put no stock in the pill. I don't even take it. I don't want to risk the temptation to fall back into the idea that I'm immune from pregnancy because I've got a silver bullet called Orthrotricyclen or Seasonique or what-have-you. Because obviously, it doesn't work for me.