Thank you, Dr. George Tiller

I’ve been thinking all week about George Tiller. As sad and angry—particularly at the negligent law enforcement officers of Wichita—as his murder makes me feel, what I know about George Tiller’s life uplifts me. That there was a man who, knowing he was risking his life, dedicated himself to helping women gives me new love for half the species. Reading the newspaper—yet another story of a man who murdered his children to get back at his ex-wife, or hired someone off Craigslist to rape his wife at gunpoint—I often find myself consumed with misanthropy. (Wrong word, I know—it’s not humanity I’ve got a beef with—but there isn’t the right word. No coincidence, that.)

George Tiller reminds me that while men too often consider women’s freedom a threat to be countered with brutal violence, men are also capable of making the highest sacrifice to defend the right of women to self-determination. Thank you, Dr. Tiller.

Dr. Tiller was one of only four doctors nationwide who provided the kind of late-term abortions he did. As Salon asks, where will women—and sadly, girls—go now?

"We always sent the really tragic cases to Tiller." Those included women diagnosed with cancer who needed abortions to qualify for chemotherapy, women who learned late in their pregnancies that their wanted babies had fatal illnesses, and rape victims so young they didn't realize they were pregnant for months. "We sent him 11-year-olds, 12-year-olds."

To make a donation in Dr. Tiller’s name to the National Network of Abortion Funds, to help provide the kind of health care he did to poor women and women facing major obstacles to getting abortions, go here.

Blue blind spots

Non-evangelical Americans were puzzled as to why Bristol Palin’s pregnancy caused so little distress among evangelicals, so it was only a matter of time until someone in the chattering classes tried to explain the matter. Margaret Talbot’s article on the subject in the New Yorker, “Red Sex, Blue Sex,” is an intriguing stab in the direction of an answer, but its brief, shallow treatment of the question left me dissatisfied.

It’s always seemed to me that right-wing-appeasing liberals of the Hilary Clinton ilk, who think they can find common ground with anti-abortionists in the goal of reducing teen pregnancy, were not only wrong to concede that abortion is a “tragedy,” but also wrong in the assumption of common ground on teen pregnancy. (This showed, I think, the same tin ear for both effective politics and integrity that Hilary exhibited in thinking she could get universal healthcare if she just made enough compromises with the insurance industry, and that Bill showed in just about every issue he ever addressed.)

Here’s what I’ve always suspected: Reducing teen pregnancy isn’t a goal of the religious right. Their reaction to Bristol Palin’s pregnancy suggests I’m right. Religious conservatives aren’t horrified by sex before marriage or sex by teens (in fact, your mainstream liberals may be more uncomfortable with teenage sex). In fact, teen pregnancy is actually more good than bad, in the religious right worldview. More (white) babies is good, but, more important, girls having babies young, as long as they get married—and within a conservative social framework pregnancy can push women into marriage--helps keep women disempowered and under the control of men. The bedrock of religious right ideology is gender hierarchy. Sex, even teen sex, isn’t bad, as long as it’s controlled by men (or boys) and women pay the price for it. (For more evidence that this is so, check out The Girls Who Went Away and my review of it.)

All this makes sense of the various phenomena Talbot describes. Liberals may be as much—or even more—uncomfortable with teen sex as religious conservatives, but liberal culture has absorbed the assumption that women deserve independent lives and careers. Having babies young, in this you’re-on-your-ownership society that lacks either strong government supports for mothers or strong extended family supports, is an economic and personal disaster. These are such fundamental assumptions of liberal culture as to be invisible to most liberals and centrists, which is why they assume without evidence that the religious right must share their goal of reducing teen pregnancy. The liberal worldview on these matters is a muddle—motivated half by a moral impulse, namely feminism's call for the equality of half the world, which it can’t quite yet really own, and half by economic rationality. Whereas the conservative worldview is pure, principled, and coherent (though of course it runs counter both to economic reality in the 21st century and to the great arc of history in favor of the principle of equality).

Juno's feminism?

I haven’t seen the movie Juno, whose star was just nominated for an Oscar, so take what I have to say here with a grain of salt. But after reading all the chatter about it, I’m depressed. This is what the New York Times calls “a feminist, girl-powered rejoinder to Knocked Up”? If this is feminism today, we are in trouble.

A movie that suggests a person can come through nine months of gestating and then surrendering her child unscathed is peddling a dangerous delusion. Before going to see this movie, I suggest reading The Girls Who Went Away: the Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Babies for Adoption in the Years Before Roe v. Wade or Meredith Hall’s recent memoir, Without a Map. Both books show just how devastating the experience of giving up a child is, one these women don’t seem ever to have recovered from. To be sure, part of the devastation was that these women largely gave up their babies unwillingly and they suffered shaming and ostracism for their pregnancies, something women today don’t face. But lest we think everything has changed, see Allison Crewes’ essay “When I Was Garbage,” in Ariel Gore and Bee Lavender’s collection Breeders. Crewes was a pregnant teenager who not so long ago nearly gave up her baby for adoption in circumstances that bear a lot of resemblance to those faced by women of generations ago; she was told she was unworthy of the baby, that it would be irresponsible to keep it, and everyone around her treated it as a given that she would give the baby up.

It may be true that, in the words of Entertainment Weekly’s online review, “director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody really don't give a hoot what you think about the right to life/right to choose/right to make jokes about teen sex,” but they surely knew what would be considered unthreatening entertainment in this political moment. Giving a baby up for adoption can be funny, while abortion has to be tragedy. This line from EW’s review is telling: “Juno would have been a very different movie had the young woman named for the queen of Roman gods chosen termination and brought her admirable young female clarity to that less gentle, more divisive decision — maybe truer, certainly not so funny.” I’m not sure adoption is so gentle.

See my later posting on Juno (after seeing the movie).

What's it like to need an abortion?

In honor of yesterday’s anniversary of Roe v. Wade, check out Salon’s terrific interview with abortion doctor Susan Wicklund. What a breath of fresh air and honesty Wicklund is after all that drivel from even Democrats (Hillary Clinton, this means you) about what a “tragedy” abortion is and how it is or should be rare. Wicklund points out that there’s nothing rare about abortion—it’s the most common minor surgery in the U.S. and Wicklund says 40 percent of women have had one.

There is no typical patient situation. It isn't all students who want to stay in school, it isn't all career women who want to continue with their careers and not have children right now. It isn't all single women who aren't married and not ready to have a child on their own. And it isn't all married women who had kids but now feel financially strapped. It's all of those women.

To think about this issue honestly we have to think what it would be like to be unwillingly pregnant.

People say they would never have an abortion because of their religion or for whatever other reason. Then they're sitting on that table, we're ready to start doing the abortion, and they want to tell me about how, when they were 17, they made a promise to be abstinent, and here they are at 21, not married and with an unwanted pregnancy. They just want to talk about it and say, I didn't realize -- I didn't understand what it would be like when it was me.

Here’s a note passed on to me by an abortion fund after I donated a small amount of money:

I am a 31-year-old single mother of three. I am currently unemployed and I don’t receive support for my three children. After I found out I was pregnant my partner was killed. My children and I are having a very rough time financially and I didn’t feel it was fair to any of us to bring another child into our situation. So I made a decision that was best for all of us.
Due to our financial situation I could not come up with the full amount to terminate the pregnancy. The counselor here at the Center for Women’s Health understood my situation and feelings. She worked to help me very hard. I hope that I am able to help someone else one day in my life.