| As
a woman and a mother, I keep bumping up against the “culture
war” playing out around abortion rights. Let’s
take the language surrounding it for instance; even the phrase “abortion
rights” – coupling the word abortion with the
word rights just causes a whirlwind of dissonance in my brain.
On a typical day during the past election, I’d be called by
any number of candidates or polls. One day I was called and asked
to push either “1” for “yes” or “2”
for “no” if I supported the “right to life.”
At that point I screamed into the phone: your language sucks! When at last a real person phoned me with the same type of question,
I respectfully said: “your question poses a false dichotomy.
I am right to life. I adore life and cultivate it in all
respects – but I absolutely support a woman’s right to
control her reproductive life and her own body.” (How I love
to throw a cog into the wheels of cultural warfare, the drive to divide
us rather than unite us.)
At the start of the school year, I was waiting to meet a friend
before an evening meeting at my son’s school (we were making
a babysitting exchange, sticking together while our husbands were
traveling for work). The first thing I noticed when I pulled into
the parking lot was the bumper sticker on a Ford Lincoln SUV that
read “Another Woman Against Abortion.” I then watched
as the car’s owner corralled her three kids— it took
her over ten minutes of patient effort to get everyone buckled into
the cavernous vehicle, which had nearly as much interior space as
a studio-sized apartment in some parts of the world.
I was struck hard by what played out in front of me. It stands
to reason that the other mother I observed through the windshield
of my more modest SUV believed in her bumper sticker— why
else would she plant it there? What, I found myself wondering, gave
her the authority to take for granted the capacity of another woman
to nurture a child? Clearly, what she was doing in rounding everyone
up was a skillful act, an effort guided by patience and concern—
and providence. There she was, with ready transportation, a home,
I assumed, and food soon to be on the table. Her mothering was much
less constrained by her circumstances than might be the case for
mothers with fewer resources at their disposal. Why would a woman,
any woman, set herself against another? Why not just declare: “I
think that women were meant to suffer and sacrifice for the well
being of others. Women have to bring forth life; that’s
what they were designed— by God, of course— to do.”
Another pithy phrase might read something like “Another Mother
Against Legal, Safe Abortion,” or the obverse— “One
Woman For Criminalizing Abortion And Risking The Lives Of Mothers
Through Back-Alley Or Self-Inflicted Abortions.” I once saw
a book with photos of abortion-gone-wrong crime scenes. Not a pretty
sight; these do-it-yourself jobs with coat hangers or vacuum cleaners
are not reasonable alternatives to legal, safe abortion. How can
you erase the desperation that drives such a thing?
I sat there and thought:
well, when you see a suffering mother, there is usually a suffering
child not too far behind. One may not be “for abortion,”
but what about the other things initiated in the wake of childbirth?
Is one “for” that, too? As mothers, we need to look
not just at the reality and potential of “life, for the fetus”
or when we believe “life” begins, we also need to examine
the concept of motherhood our culture hands us, and the ultimate
consequences for mothers of being the conveyor belt of “life”
on this planet. Why not have a bumper sticker that says “Another
Mother Against a Life of Inequity?”
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