Photo by radarxlove / Chelsea
I feel so sorry for the women of South Dakota who dare fall pregnant against their wishes. Personal reproductive choice is being limited even more than ever all over the country as illustrated by the new bill signed into law by SD Governor Dennis Daugaard. This new law requires a three-day waiting period before a woman is allowed to have her abortion–the longest wait anywhere in the nation. Women are also forced to attend anti-abortion counseling sessions at pregnancy help centers.
Since many of these centers are specifically Christian institutions, the balance of this “counseling” is easily called into question. The point of these centers is to convince women that their choice is wrong and that they are broken, fallen people who need to carry their babies full-term. I used to volunteer at a pregnancy counseling center as a teenager, and our training centered around convincing girls and women of three things: God loved them, abortion is murder, and sex before marriage is wrong. At my center, we were taught to show you care for the women by praying with and evangelize them. You want them to trust you and believe what you say so that you can save the life of the unborn children. Your entire mission is to save the baby and the woman’s soul.
This piece explains how I feel about the new SD law:
That the anti-choice movement is mostly a Christianist movement bent on imposing its religious beliefs on the public at large is one of the most under-discussed aspects of the abortion debate. This law should highlight the theocratic underpinnings of the anti-choice movement. Most and probably all crisis pregnancy centers are religious organizations that object to abortion because it conflicts with their religious dogma about female sexuality, women’s roles, and their belief about when the soul enters the body. Requiring women to sit through a lecture on Christian ethics about sexuality before getting an abortion should be a clear-cut case of a violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, even if the crisis pregnancy centers are careful to avoid saying the word “Jesus” too much.
Republican state senator Al Novstrup claimed the bill is somehow protective of women, offering them a “second opinion,” which indicates not just his disrespect for religious freedom but his profound ignorance of options counseling typical to abortion clinics, especially Planned Parenthood, which runs the sole abortion clinic in the state. I don’t imagine he’d see it that way if the state required citizens to hear a “second opinion” about other private decisions based on personal religious beliefs (or lack thereof). Would Novstrup enjoy having to listen to a lecture from an atheist or Muslim group before joining a church, getting married or making plans for his own funeral? Why then is it appropriate to force women to listen to religious lectures before making a decision that involves their own religious beliefs about life?
from 'Wonderfully Made' (1967)
I used to think my education about sexuality and reproduction was sub-par, but this woman who wrote in to the advice column Ask Amy [Note: article not online anymore] takes the cake, cookies, and the whole damn tub of ice cream.
Dear Amy: My husband and I are devout Catholics. We have chosen to protect the innocence of our 7-year-old son by not educating him about the “facts of life” until he hits puberty.
We have told him that the Virgin Mary puts a baby on your doorstep if you pray for one. He is in a Catholic school, so we don’t have to worry about “sexual education.”
My sister knows about our choice, but she does not approve of it. She is pregnant. Recently, she wore a “Baby on Board” T-shirt when visiting.
Our son asked about it, but I did not know what to tell him! What should I do if a problem like this arises in the future?
— Worried Mom
My reaction:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oaa1MkSG5EQ
And then I nearly peed myself.
This is ridiculous even for Catholics. This poor child—who will undoubtedly discover the magical powers of his penis before his parents even admit he has one—can only be defined as a victim. His parents’ efforts to shelter him from all knowledge and curiosity will fail miserably thanks to his friends, television, the internet, and print media. They may be Super Catholics™, but they don’t live in a bubble.
I can understand the desire to protect your children from the more crude and basic aspects of life as much as possible, but by blatantly lying about something as obvious as Mary “the Stork” Mother of Jesus and the fact that babies grow in a mother’s womb they are also killing his trust in them later once he finds out they deceived him. Why should he listen to anything they have to say about sex or the bible when they lie about something so innocent?
One of the main thrusts of Catholic morality is to wait until marriage to have intercourse. If this boy doesn’t learn that babies are a natural consequence of intercourse, he will be even more likely to go out and have sex early on, won’t he? And what a surprise it would be to have a young girl pregnant and the parents hearing their son say, “But I didn’t pray to Mary for a baby. Why did she bring one?”
Don’t even get me started with the mother’s offense at a “Baby On Board” t-shirt.
Oh, but let’s not forget the columnist’s response! Here’s what Amy said [Note:article not online anymore]:
Dear Mom: You could ask your son’s teachers or clergy for guidance, but because you’re asking me, I’ll respond by asking you: Isn’t an essential element of the drama of Jesus’ birth that he was born of a human mother?
In the biblical version of “Baby on Board,” wasn’t Mary “great with child” when she and Joseph stumbled into Nazareth?
A baby isn’t a newspaper, left on the doorstep by an omnipotent delivery person.
All animals and humans give birth to babies, and even if you don’t want to explain how babies are conceived, it is both truthful and religiously defensible to tell your son that babies grow inside their mother’s bodies (or “tummies”) until they are born. If you want to fabricate the story of how they got there, go for it.
Bravo, and I hope she gets some sense knocked into her.
P.S. The image in this blog post is from Wonderfully Made—an amusing children’s book about families from the point of view of the 1960′s Catholic church. Check it out. Classic gold!
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