By now, I’m pretty sure we’ve all heard about the Susan G. Komen foundation’s decision, subsequent semi-apology, then reversal of course on the decision of giving grants to Planned Parenthood. In my opinion, you don’t make a decision like this in this day and age without being explicit about your reasons. The “not funding groups under investigation” only applied to Planned Parenthood and no other groups getting funding from Komen, so the convenience of that reason made it all the more transparent, especially after the retweets from Karen Mandel, former gubernatorial candidate in Alabama and now a Vice President at SKG.
Please take the next part as my opinion. It’s not an endorsement of anything, but more of a statement about what I think. There is nothing wrong about being pro-life. There is also nothing wrong about being pro-choice. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have the issue of abortion to deal with in the first place, but we live in a place that’s far from perfect.
What I have serious issues with are the deliberate brick-by-brick attempts at dismantling organizations like Planned Parenthood because of one facet of their operation. It’s a convenient target by people with absolute standards, and it leads to dangerous consequences, including the murder of doctors who perform abortions.
First off, as a man, I’m not entirely sure how much say I can have in the debate over a woman’s right to decide what’s best for her own body. Secondly, the theological perspective of when life begins has changed dramatically since the early days of Christianity. Thirdly, if we are to respect all life and treat it with dignity and kindness, what can we do to not be hypocritical about it when it comes to our own priorities?
It’s extremely unfair to paint a pro-choice advocate as someone who wants to kill babies. It’s just as unfair to call a pro-lifer a right-wing zealot. I don’t know of any woman who goes out and actively gets pregnant just for the sake of having an abortion. This segues into my next point.
Why do women feel the need to get abortions? One answer might be financial–there’s no way to afford to have a child. However, I think the largest single influencer on whether a woman has an abortion is shame, particularly from the men in her life.
“I’m afraid my dad would find out.”
“I’m afraid my brother would find out.”
“I’m afraid the father would find out.”
Where does this fear come from? It comes from our semi-puritanical view of sex, sex education, and biological desire. We consistently attempt for either religious or other reasons to impose moral constraints around sex, but they’re usually caged as “don’t do it”, or “if you get pregnant, I’ll kick you out of the house.”
Our bodies are hard-wired to experiment after puberty, and our culture only presents us with more images of sex and desire than we can stand. This isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon, either. In his book “The Way Things Never Were”, Norman Finklestein lays out the truth about how our whitewashed view of “the good old days” was filled with as much unexpected pregnancy as it is now. The only difference is that the girls were sent away from home to a relative’s house.
I’d like to propose one way of handling this, and it’s a way that other countries (which MUCH lower abortion rates than the U.S.) use: demystify sex. Educate kids. Teach them about contraception. Teach them that it’s part of life. Teach them about the consequences of it as well (including pregnancy). Sure, you can still teach them about making the choice to wait for marriage (which I did, by the way), but if you turn it into a “must be pure for her husband” type of thing, that leads to the shame I mention up above. Now it’s not just disappointing her parents and family, it’s disappointing God.
Can you imagine having THAT as a burden?
This is where I admire my friends Kevin and Deborah Ausman and how they’ve treated their son with respect to alcohol. They’ve taught him about it in a practical, no “forbidden-fruit” kind of way, were present when he had his first beer (in Germany, no less), and encourage him to be moderate about it. If we could take that attitude of de-forbidding and apply it to sex, I truly believe we would have fewer abortions because we’d have fewer unexpected pregnancies. And as a person who is pro-choice, I’d still love to see the number of them drop.