Alright kids, listen up: I am exhausted. I just worked, entertained, and partied my hedonistic little ass off for over a week through Carnival. I just worked an 8-hour shift with a splitting headache dealing with (mostly) pricks all night. My legs, knees, and ankles scream in pain any time I take a step. I've been dealing with illness, crippling nausea, a wide range of sniveling douchebags, drama, and bullshit.
So, for the record, don't expect me to be especially articulate, or illuminating, or blah de blah blah blah. The only reason why I am here on this bar stool at work after getting off instead of high tailing my tired ass on my bicycle back to my tiny, leaky windowed, and wonderful home is because I was perusing the lovely world of the internet (I don't get much internet anymore as I only get internets at work) and was slapped hard in the face by a line, a single line, in an article, but it is a sentiment that is spread throughout most of feminist thought, and it pisses me off.
I'll quote the line directly:
Every family is different, and every pregnancy is different. Nobody WANTS to get an abortion and nobody takes getting one lightly (well, if you do on either count, you have far more problems than I can to go into in this space).
Alright, it starts out nice and strong. I totally agree that every family and every pregnancy is different. That, to me, is entirely obvious. I'd also agree that pretty much no body out there WANTS to get an abortion -- I've had two, and I'll tell you what, they fucking suck (figuratively and literally, in my case: ha ha!). But it's this, this lovely gem of a line right here:
..nobody takes getting one lightly (well, if you do on either count, you have far more problems than I can go into this space).
Um, WHAT?
Look, I'm half asleep, and when I am less asleep, I will go into a much deeper interrogation of why this kind of attitude is so damaging, but seriously, for now, just, FUCK THAT. I am really tired of feminists touting this party line of "god damn, it's so hard for women who have to get abortions, it fucks with their psyche, it messes them up for a long time man! they aren't monsters, because they feel incredible guilt at this thing they have done."
I think that this viewpoint is highly damaging to the idea that abortion is a perfectly acceptable medical practice that should not have guilt and shame tacked on to it. I have had two, yes two, abortions. I felt no guilt for either. I felt no conflict in the idea of aborting these cells from my uterus. I actually affectionately refer to both of my clinical abortion procedures as my "dates with the hoover."
Yes, I understand to most people this is crass. Yes, I also understand that not every person who gets pregnant in the world and decides to have an abortion feels the same way -- in fact, I am pretty certain I am probably somewhere in the minority. But my point is not that people should be waving around crude humor and irreverence as the banner of their own emotional response to abortion. My point is that this response to getting an abortion is viewed, even by most other feminists, as monstrous, inhuman, unwomanly. I have a much more sophisticated critique of this, with many other examples, but god damnit, it's 8AM, I've been up for 24hrs, and I'm god damned tired. I'll come back to this later. But people who tell me I am too fucked up to even talk about in a linguistic space because I don't carry around an emotion trauma that is mostly entrenched in us by a patriarchal, fundamentalist worldview based more in evangelicalism than science?
You know what? Fuck that.
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