Abortion concern troll at large...
OK, XX Team, most of you are solid supporters of choice, so please help me out here. After my piece on Michelle and Barack Obama’s marriage ran yesterday, a lot of the reaction I saw on the Web boiled down to: I’m not interested in anything that woman might write, because I disagree with her on abortion. Even though the Obama piece contained not a word on that subject; why would it? And even though my actual views in that regard are somewhat less thrilling than advertised. My question: Has it really come to the point that we only listen to people pre-certified as in agreement with us on all crucial matters? And if so, what does that cost us?
For months, I’ve been in John Kerry mode, thinking that nothing could possibly be gained by answering people who are too mad to listen. (Who, me, thin-skinned? Let it go.) But is this What Hillary Would Do? Think again, caballeras.
So, belatedly: Contrary to the provocative headline on my mild but reviled June op-ed in the New York Times, I never posited that “Pro-Choice is a Bad Choice for Democrats.’’ In fact, on the sheer politics of the abortion issue, I’ve said just the opposite.
What the piece argued instead is that pro-choice should not be the only choice for Democrats in good standing. And that Democrats are losing voters they don’t have to lose by out-and-out insulting any who dare differ on this one matter.
These are not classic single-issue voters, in other words, but otherwise liberal pro-lifers who just want to be able to attend a party function without hearing themselves described as extremists. But even the modest proposal that we make more room at the table was shouted down, perhaps in part because so few readers were in possession of their temper by the time they’d finished scanning the headline.
The fact that the paper’s normally judicious headline writers – not exactly grab-the-reader-by-the-lapel types, in my experience – saw an argument for self-interested tolerance as indistinguishable from a call to overturn Roe was only one indication that when it comes to this subject, subtlety is out of the question, and middle ground very hard to stand on.
When some of the women I interviewed for my book about what women want in a president first spoke about feeling unwanted in the Democratic Party as dissenters on abortion rights, I thought that was interesting, but not something I had ever experienced personally.
The over-the-top reaction to the op-ed changed that, though; Google me now and you’ll come away convinced that I spend off-hours throwing rocks at pregnant teenagers. Though none of my critics on either side – the National Right to Life took exception, too – seemed to have gone to the extreme of cracking open the book the op-ed was based on, its pages are actually filled with women expressing all points of view. (Because, perhaps poignantly, the object was never to come up with six easy ways to win the women’s vote; it was to help us understand one another a little better, and maybe even see that, as Barack Obama says, there really is more that unites us than divides us. Or so I’d like to think.)
Among those I met along the way were opponents of choice who said they’d never be happy Republicans, but found it hard to stick around and subject themselves to abuse from fellow Democrats. And in my new life as an abortion concern troll, I now know what they were talking about.
Yes, I am Catholic, and try to hang in there with my church – except when I don’t. Or won’t. So I happen to oppose abortion, same as I do the death penalty and the war in Iraq and the truly immoral disregard for the already born. (And while we’re obsessing over Roe, isn’t the Supreme Court busy overturning everything else we thought was nailed down?) After 35 years at the barricades, it’s clear that this is an issue that will never be solved by either the Congress or the courts. Or that most politicians even want to be shed of, since it has been so darned good for business in both parties.
I sympathize with those on both sides of this debate, and rue that we are so busy doubting each other’s motives and calling each other names that the mothers and children we all say we care about end up quite beside the point.
As far as I can see, the only actual result of the whole baby-killers-versus-women-haters craziness is that it keeps those who genuinely fear for the health and safety of women and those who genuinely see “termination’’ as an Orwellian name for a thrown-away child -- considered less than human just as slaves once were -- from ever working together to help anybody, other than those who raise cash whenever we clash.
Which is why I have long since had it with the leaders on both sides of this electric fence; they carry right on fighting and raising vast sums on the backs of women in trouble, while the abortion rate remains ridiculously high – whether you see it this way or this.