This diary was inspired by LivesInaShoe's excellent diary Thank you Keith Olbermann. If you haven't been there yet, please check it out.
Abortion is a loaded gun issue. As an adoptee, and someone who has had an abortion, I believe I have a somewhat unique perspective on choice. These are my thoughts.
As mentioned in LivesInaShoe's diary, I got pregnant in college by someone with whom I was very much in love. Birth control failed. I was uremic. Before I got the results of the pregnancy test, I found myself thinking, "If Roe v. Wade had been the law in 19--, I probably wouldn't be here." While I state it as a "fleeting" thought in LIS's diary, it wasn't. I had to wrestle with that one. See, I was adopted by a preacher. I am a preacher's daughter. The year before I found out I was pregnant, I was the girl who was saving myself for marriage and thought abortion a total moral abomination. I believed in equal rights, equal pay for women, wanted ERA to be put in the constitution, but I thought abortion murder. Follow me beneath the fold.
If you believe abortion to be murder, than Angle's argument is consistent. Repugnant, but consistent. Republicans think differently than us. They are prone to authoritarianism/black/white thinking. I had to re-think life beginning at conception when I was pregnant. I do not regret the decision I made to terminate the pregnancy.
Adoption. My Mother was 14 when she gave birth to me. It wasn't until I was in my early 30s that I learned that my Mom had lied to the adoption agency about who my father was. Turns out she had a nervous breakdown at the age of 28 & returned to the adoption agency to tell them that my actual father had been the high school football coach, and not the young man she had told them was my father. I went to the adoption agency to see what I could learn in particular of my medical background. My adopted sister had died of Hodgkin's disease 6 years earlier. Well, I walked away w/more than I bargained for w/potential mental illness on my Mom's side and, oh guess what, I was a product of statutory rape. I also learned I had a 1/2 brother out there somewhere. This was before the days of the internet, so I also learned that an arbitrary person could charge me $350 an hour if I wanted to know more. The arbitrary person w/all of my personal information-big fat folder-enticed me with it could be as simple as a phone call. "I think your Mom would like to meet you, and I EVEN think your Dad would like to meet you." SURREAL.
Sex & Politics. This is where the Republicans and some Democrats step in it BIG time. Republicans want to drown government in the bathtub? Small government but big enough to intrude in the most private decision a woman can make? If that is not government intrusion into my individual freedom, I don't know what is. Along these lines, in the healthcare package, I'm pretty damn sure that the status quo was maintained in terms of prescriptions - Viagra? Covered. Birth control. Nope. So you won't help prevent pregnancy, but you will pay to make a guy more horney? Where is the respect for my individual freedom as an American woman?
With this said, do you honestly believe that Democrats are the only women who have had abortions since 1973? Abortion is a GREAT wedge issue, because any woman who has had one - well, it's not like a pedicure. It's not something you enter into w/o some thought. In a Sarah Silverman kinda mode, you don't brag to your friends where to go to get the "best abortion." So there is silence. Where there is silence, there is power to exploit. There is power to shame.
Abortion is USED to fire up the THEOCRATS. It is the illegitimate love child of the Corporate Republican marriage to the Jerry Falwell fundamentalists. The Tea Folk are perhaps getting wise to the fact that the Corporatists never had any intention of trying to turn Roe v. Wade. This is what we are seeing come to fruition in the Republican party. A civil war. While we should all remain vigilant of the Angle/Palin/Bachmann tea party crazies, the Corporatists are in charge - and they won't let a theocracy happen because it interferes w/their own interests-$. The theocrats are just more fodder for the Republican mill.
In the meantime, Republicans continue to win the messaging war. It is a big deal for me, or for any woman, to say, "Yep, I've had an abortion, and given the circumstances, I would do it again, if I had to." Abortion as choice is a more difficult message to massage than "Pro Life". The problem with being a thinking progressive is that we think. Life is more nuanced than black and white. It is true but it doesn't make for good bumper stickers in our twitter/140 characters/Paris Hilton society.