Note: this was originally written as a comment on a pro-life blog, in response to a post that acknowledges the trauma of rape and tells pro-lifers not to mock it. However, the writer does say that rape shouldn’t be an exception.
I’ve never thought of myself as a blogger but I’ve decided to publish this as a standalone piece.
i’m confused. are you aiming to make abortion illegal or not? i think for many pro-choicers that’s the main issue. i support anything you do to help women (and afab people) who don’t want to have an abortion but feel like they don’t have another choice. just please stop as soon as they say they don’t want your help.
apart from the legality, the condescending attitudes are offputting. as a modern cis woman you probably think about abortion before your first actual period. before you’ve ever had sex. before you seriously realize how much of a risk rape is. we think about it as long as we’re (potentially) fertile. and pro-choicers don’t go around convincing us to have an abortion. they are merely defending our right to choose, and they may be campaigning to have a variety experiences heard, like that of Caitlin Moran. even if we already believe a fetus is not a child, we might not immediately accept that it doesn’t have to be a tragic, painful experience.
meanwhile the pro-life crowd seems to be revelling in the tragic side of it (hmm i guess for you it’s kinda how as a feminist i’m often accused of deliberately choosing to see sexism). it’s turning a philosophical and ethical debate into a legal one. it speaks in a condescending way, as if assuming we’ve never thought about the issue before, assuming we haven’t considered some obvious arguments. worst of all, especially when religion is involved, pro-lifers speak from a position of authority. another condescending way is to treat us as victims of propaganda and make the argument about the “abortion industry”. (guess what else is an industry? child products of all kinds)
and we know you won’t stop at birth. some pro-lifers may be anti-vaxxers (at least in specific cases), some even dare to sneer at poor families and even say they have too many babies… and most pro-lifers will be unhappy if the kid grows up an atheist or LGBT+ (especially if we open-mindedly note the signs early and let them do simple things like change their name or wear the clothes intended for a different gender). oh speaking of which, pro-lifers deny the very fact that not everyone who gets pregnant or has an abortion identifies as a woman (though the pro-choice side is guilty of that too), and guess what, somehow the pro-choice side is also more comfortable with using the words vaginal birth (as opposed to “natural” or “normal”), which aim to remove the stigma off c-sections.
wow tbh i didn’t mean to write such a rant. but yeah, there are kinda many other factors apart from rape. is the pro-life side ready to say “we won’t value your unborn child less if they turn out to be LGBT”? that would be a start…
Originally published at https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/responding-question-rape-wisdom-compassion/#comment-3588114986
I was going to disable the comments but it seems I can only hide the responses once there are some. I’ll see what I’m going to do.
Also, I’m a non-native speaker of English (but also a linguist). Corrections are welcome, preferably in private.
