Full human beings

In 2005, at Maclean's 100th anniversary bash, I was seated next to Dr. Henry Morgentaler and his wife, Arlene.

We'd never met before.

''My God, for a man of such courage, here is a man of such of fragility,'' is what I thought as he sat down.

I was expecting a giant.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Morgentaler decision, a judgment he risked everything to win.

As he said at the time, "It was a vindication of everything I believed in. For the first time, it gave women the status of full human beings able to make decisions about their own lives.”

Two weeks ago, I issued a Canadian Bloggers for Choice challenge. I am proud to say that my sister and brother bloggers have stepped up to the plate.

I am going to take some time culling through their posts -- and I will be back to update this one as soon as I do.

AND THE BLOGGERS ARE ...

(This is by no means a complete list of those who joined in. If I missed you, please add your link to the comments!)

Dave at The Galloping Beaver has been blogging for choice for what seems like forever. But he didn't run out of stuff to say today, taking the discussion to a whole new level:

Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, it has been women fighting for freedom from the male dominance of society which has brought about most of the positive changes we take for granted today. Most young people today would not accept that women in this country at one time were not allowed to vote, were not allowed to own property and were, in fact, considered "minors" under the governance of their husbands with no more rights than their own children.

A simple observation is that the majority of those who oppose a woman's right to make her own decisions regarding her own body are men. The majority of voices in western governments opposing health initiatives for young girls which would protect them in adulthood are, you've got it, men.

Why?

Dominance. And it isn't sustainable.

Too often, when women actually do achieve something nearing equality in some aspect of life, it is framed by a male demand for compliance. True equality always falls a little short of the mark.

Look at make-up of the Canadian federal government ministry. At last count there were 28 ministers in cabinet and 5 outside cabinet. Six are women.

This same government has made a meal out of wreaking havoc on the ability of women to advance to an equal standing in this country.

Dr. Dawg weighs in on the language of the debate here:

"Pro-life" is a disingenuous purr-word that upholds life against those who are...what? "Pro-death?" You mean like supporters of the death penalty? Whoops, most of them are "pro-life." See the problem here?

"Pro-abortion" is what we supporters of reproductive freedom used to be called by the media and, of course, by the "pro-life" folks, who were called "anti-abortion" much of the time by those same media. You've got a "pro," you've got an "anti." Simple.

And wrong. No woman I have ever met supports abortion per se, as a good in itself. Those who have decided to have one don't propose that everyone should do so. State policy that mandates abortion (as in China, with its one-child policy) might arguably be called "pro-abortion," but not the feminist/pro-feminist position.

Last week, Pretty Shaved Ape at Canadian Cynic excoriated The National Post's opinion series on the anniversary. Those posts are here and here -- brilliant but much too bleepable for this blog. Today, the Cynic himself went on the attack, against the Blogging Tories who still don't get it.

Oh, dear ... what with the 20th anniversary of R. v Morgentaler, the Christopaths among Canada's Blogging Tories are outdoing themselves in an absolute frenzy of pearl clutching and panty twisting.

All of the above have been from progressive men.

MWAH!!!

Now for les femmes ...

Unrepentant Old Hippie was, of course, there:

The last twenty years of choice has been accompanied by twenty years of being hassled (and worse) by those who mistakenly think it's their business to dictate our reproductive decisions. The word "debate" keeps coming up: debate? What debate? The "debate" over whether women have the right to self-ownership (makes me sick just to type that) ended on January 28, 1988.

Justice is Woman with a Sword made a stab at it here, with sad words about a demo that didn't attract much support.

Today, a small group of pro-choicers proudly walked in downtown Montréal to remind their fellow citizens of this important date, and show that they want abortion in Canada to remain legal, safe, accessible and free.

Despite our numbers, the event was a success because the participants responded individually to this call for action. They walked in the cold, not because they're part of some group or organization that told them to be there, but because they believe in reproductive freedom.

Creekside takes on the ''fetus fetishists'' here:

(S)ome fetus fetishists, who presumably hope to one day celebrate the supremacy of the state over the individual here, have attempted to mark the occasion by selling anti-abortion billboard ads for buses and shelters in St John's, Fredericton, and Hamilton. The ad was declined on the grounds that it was misleading.

It reads :

    "Nine months… the length of time an abortion is allowed in Canada. Abortion.
    Have we gone too far?"

Yes, fetus fetishists, I'm afraid you have gone too far this time.

A fetus becomes viable at around 20 weeks, no?

According to Statscan, the percentage of Canadian abortions performed at the 20 week mark in 2003 was .7% or 0.007. That's point double-oh-seven.

Needless to say, Birth Pangs didn't stay silent, noting that, just because we have the right to choose, that that right is protected by legislation.

Twenty years ago today, Canada became the only country on the planet without a law on abortion.

Last but not least, my friend Megan -- who got preggers two seconds after her husband returned home from serving in Afghanistan last summer -- has this to say:

As you know, I have a healthy, happy fetus kicking around in my uterus right now, distracting me from all sorts of other important things that I should be doing. And as you also know, this was a planned pregnancy – so it’s safe to assume that I would never have considered terminating it, even for one second.

But a lot of that is down to luck, and to my particular combination of circumstances. I’m tremendously lucky to have a loving, supportive partner, who is as excited as I am, and who can’t wait to be a father. I’m also lucky to have loving supportive family and friends nearby, and lucky to have enough money to raise this child into adulthood. She won’t be getting a car for her 16th birthday (although if all goes well, Sandy and I might just be able to afford one for ourselves by then!), but she will have food, clothing, school trips, Christmas presents, and everything else she needs.

So I’m immensely lucky as a parent…but of course my daughter is going to be the recipient of tremendous good fortune as well. Not only the supportive family and friends mentioned above, but she will also have plenty of food and clean drinking water running freely in her home. And not only will she have this clean water available for drinking and cooking, but she will be able to pour litres and litres of it down the drain as she takes a shower or flushes the toilet. In fact, my daughter will be flushing the toilet with cleaner water than most of the world has to drink – and I hope we can raise her to understand what a privilege that is.

She will also have access to some of the best taxpayer-funded education and healthcare in the world, and if she chooses to go to university, she will have both the rights and the means to make that happen.

But what if you’re not so lucky? What if you’re too young, too poor, too sick, to be able to raise a child? What if you already have six kids, or you live in a country where you don’t have access to enough food, water, or medical care? It’s hard work, this parenting thing, and not everyone has the emotional or financial wherewithal to handle it.

Of course adoption is always an option as well. But I’m discovering that pregnancy is also very hard work – there’s nausea, fatigue, a thousand different kinds of discomfort, crazy hormonal surges, and of course the financial cost of replacing your entire wardrobe as your body expands.

Plus you have to take a ton of time off work for doctor’s appointments. My pregnancy is about as low-risk as they come, and still in the past five months I’ve had six medical appointments and four ultrasounds. And more are scheduled for down the line as well.

I urge you to read her whole post -- and then consider that there are people who would force this on teenage girls, victims of rape and impoverished and desperate women. They say that these women should ''face the consequences'' of their actions, as if they are evil fallen women, as if forcing women into being baby incubators is okay, as if an act of sex should be a life sentence.

One last thing: I notice that many of the people who object to a woman's reproductive rights also are against state-funded daycare. Why is that?

UPPITY DATE: Miss Vicky posts here and also points to Judy Rebick and Politics'n'Poetry.

Oh and I decided to go with an all-Canadian banner at the top of this post.

ONE MORE WITH FEELING: Many more posts included in the comments but I wanted to extend a special shout-out to Aurelia for her very personal post.

And then there's the women like me, the Bitches with the scarlet A on our chest. The ones no member of the public ever wants to discuss, the women who get a fatal or severely disabling prenatal diagnosis and make the hard decision to end the pregnancy of a very much wanted and loved child. We make that decision for the same reason that people decide to stop life support on the elderly, on the fatally ill, on those suffering in agony. Doctors like to pretend that they can save everyone, but sadly, they have limits too. The Catholic Church even recognizes this and allows live born people to decline extraordinary medical measures and simply die in peace, without tubes and machines in every orifice of their body.

But for some odd reason, this kindness and logical acceptance of a dignified death all stops at the door to the womb. Women like me are supposed to become living coffins waiting for the moment when the wrecked and barely functioning hearts of our babies stop. We are supposed to risk dying from preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome to birth dying micropreemies. We are supposed to risk our future fertility and our future children's lives to give birth to chromosomally damaged ones who be stillborn or die shortly after birth.

I've always said that the only thing worse than having a dead baby is not knowing you have a dead baby. Well, even worse---knowing you have a dying child in your uterus and being forced to sit in limbo wondering which day, which hour, which moment the death knell will sound. The psychological torture of that is incomprehensible.

Only a pregnant woman knows.

Comments

[rev.paperboy]

Antonia, I don't know whether you saw my early posting over at the Galloping Beaver, but I know you didn't see the original post over at my crappy little 20-hits-a-day blog at The Woodshed.
http://kevinswoodshed.blogspot.com/2008/01/obligatory-abortion-post-toronto-stars.html

[JJ]

Here's mine: http://unrepentantoldhippie.blogspot.com/2008/01/thanks-again-dr-morgentaler.html

Happy Choice Day!

[Pedgehog]

Here's mine: http://antichoiceantiawesome.blogspot.com/

[CC]

Zerb, sweetie, how are things? And while he's not a Canadian blogger, I've rarely seen better writing than this piece from TBogg: http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2008/01/21/unpregnant-like-me/. Enjoy.

[The Regina Mom]

From the midst of a wicked winter blizzard, here's mine:

http://thereginamom.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/twenty-years-of-freedom/

[April Reign]

one here http://aprilreign.breadnroses.ca/?p=374
and
one here http://www.breadnroses.ca/frontpage/?p=100

[skdadl]

Antonia, you asked, so here I is:
http://www.pogge.ca/archives/001774.shtml

[Dr.Dawg]

In fairness to PSA, she's a she!

[Antonia]

Uh ... no, Dawg. Not unless s/he misled me.

[deBeauxOs]

Bonjour Antonia. I'm a member of the Birth Pangs gang, and my contribution to the BlogFest: "The Right to life", is here http://breadnroses.ca/birthpangs/?p=368

[Kuri]

My contribution: http://www.redfez.net/thoughtinterrupted/?p=198

[pale]

So many great posts today.

And ummm. PSA is a he. lol. One of our mostest favorites. :)
Just a few notes. 20 years later.

http://www.acreativerevolution.ca/node/699

[Red Jenny]

I did mine last week, with a quick look at The Jane Collective: http://redjenny.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-for-choice-jane-collective.html

[fern hill]

Yay us! A good day for choice. And a lot of silence from the fetus fetishizers. :D

[Aurelia]

Thank you Antonia. More than you know. Thanks.

[matttbastard]

My contribution:
http://bastardlogic.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/a-landmark-victory-for-reproductive-liberty/

Also check out Jill @ Feministe:
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/01/28/heres-to-you-canada/

[Twiss Butler]

I'd like to commend your column identifying the current rash of US media stories and films pushing pregnancy for teens, glitteries, and grandmas.

You might want to think about the way that the problematizing of abortion in the US intensified after men's successful defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (intended to prohibit discrimination against women as a class entitled to equal protection of the law under the US Constitution). It was
a neat way to cast feminists in the role of enemies of motherhood.

Just as "forced busing" to racially integrate schools served as the substitute political issue to promote public determination to maintain racial discrimination after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, defeat of the ERA required that a new issue be trotted out to promote and test public determination to keep women subordinated. Like pornography and prostitution, abortion went straight for the feature men love to use to distinguish women as "different" from themselves - their reproductive
organs. Invidious discrimination is based on identifying a "difference," however irrelevant, and punishing the hell out of it.

Feminist leaders unfortunately chose not to confront opponents on this and some other basic sex discrimination issues in vain hope of winning the ERA - which would have been rendered ineffectual by this policy of exclusion.

I am appending a short essay on the abortion subject:

STOP ABORTION? FIX MEN!

Writer Toni Morrison once remarked on: “what men frequently do when they want to manage and govern women. They focus on their babies – whether they’re having them or not having them. Reproductive organs become the focus.” [Washington Post 1/6/98, B2]

Pregnancy discrimination is the perfect form of sex discrimination, letting some men harass and dominate women without penalty to themselves or other men. Pregnancy – actual or prospective - has long served as the all-purpose pretext for everything from job discrimination and insurance exclusion to forced marriage, forced sterilization, social ostracism, physical assault and genital mutilation. And all without violating a revered constitution that has repeatedly denied women’s right to bodily integrity and equal protection of the law. Continued denial of the Equal Rights Amendment preserves the framers’ original intent to privilege men by excluding women from constitutional rights and protections.

Restricting abortion is just another way to control women through a condition that men create but do not experience. While some men have described a pregnant woman as “in a fix,” and noted with a chuckle that “there’s no such thing as a little bit pregnant,” abortion spoils this age-old gotcha because it lets a woman who is a little bit pregnant be not pregnant after all. A painful medical procedure is apparently too little punishment for such insubordination.

A moral stance inapplicable to one's own behavior is a fraud. Pregnancy is virtually impossible without, as it were, male input. To have any credibility, therefore, abortion opponents must deal with the primary cause of unwanted pregnancy – uncontrolled male fertility.

One and a half million abortions per year in the United States testify to a million and a half occasions when men chose intercourse without contraception. Had they prevented conception, there would have been no need for abortion. It should be obvious, therefore, that men who say they have a problem with abortion should address it realistically by working for regulatory legislation to curb men’s fertility. A variety of effective methods are already available and putting some real money into research should make it possible to manipulate men’s hormones just as readily as women’s.

In the United States, child abuse and neglect is rampant while funding for child care, health care, and the education of children is chronically inadequate and given low priority in state and federal spending. Children are all too often impoverished along with their mothers in the wake of divorce or abandonment by fathers. Or in other instances, taken from their mothers in custody battles weighted in the father’s favor by his ability to hire more costly legal firepower. Does this sorry situation for real children square with the overblown rhetoric of tender devotion to fetuses professed by men who oppose abortion, or does it call their bluff?

But what about the women who oppose abortion? They are equivalent to the women who in times past obediently beseeched legislators to protect them from the awful burden of the ballot. Women who, making the best deal they can under the circumstances, pledge allegiance to men’s authority over their minds and actions, as well as their – and other women's – bodies.

As for pro-choice activists, it is time to stop defending abortion and start attacking the outright misogyny that made it a debatable issue in the first place. If activists prefer to continue treating this human need as a shaky “right” always on the brink of extinction, they reveal themselves as part of the problem, not the solution. Any law treating abortion differently from other medical procedures is sex discrimination.

Women know that abortion is an essential aspect of pregnancy and they also know that denial of access to abortion is misogyny that privileges all men (whether anti-abortion or not) at expense to women’s dignity, autonomy, and right to bodily integrity. Our first responsibility is to women.

-- Twiss Butler

[godammitkitty]

Hi Antonia! Sorry I'm so late with mine. Had to read all those other wonderful posts first ;)

http://hopeandonions.blogspot.com

[fern hill]

For a terrific round-up of the day, read GDKitty at Hope and Onions:
http://hopeandonions.blogspot.com/2008/01/celebrating-20-years-i-am-mine-and.html

[sheena]

Crap. Now I feel totally guilty about all those wire hangers in the closet. Choose Wood! It's better for your finer fabrics.

[Pedro Guevara-Mann]

It is so difficult for a guy to get into this conversation, because we are so made to feel that it's a woman's issue. But I don't get it. The real issue here is whether an unborn human being is actually a human person with all rights and freedoms as you and me. It has nothing to do with women victims of rape (0.04% of all abortions are to women vitims of rape), or women dying after back-alley abortions. Can anyone here prove to me that an unborn child has no rights? That the rights of a woman, no matter what her circumstances can trump the right of that innocent, defenseless life? We give more rights to a puppy. It is illegal in Canada to destroy a Canada Goose egg!
I think we can find common ground here. You are right in a lot of what you say, which would make perfect sense if an unborn child was not a human person. But can you be certain it isn't?
I'd be happy to show anyone, clearly and methodically that the real question in the abortion debate is exactly that.
P.

P.S. All these new movies are not promoting Teen-pregnancies - that's the silliest thing I've ever heard. However, clearly, there are screenwriters out there and film producers who want to tell these stories.

[Karol Karolak]

Hi Ms. Zerbisias I do not think that you would let this info on your blog or would you???

http://www.afterabortion.info/PAR/V8/n2/finland.html

Abortion Is Four Times Deadlier Than Childbirth

[Emily]

Pedro Guevara-Mann it is about women's rights first. Before that fetus existed, there was a living, breathing human being able to make decisions and exercise freedoms. She is here first and foremost. Back alley abortions are rare now. But my mother risked life and limb for an illegal abortion when she was 15. At one time, it wasn't rare for a desperate woman to seek an abortion from questionable providers. The woman is glossed over by anti-choice activists.
It's not about why she needs the abortion. Married women go abortions too. Those in your life who have required one, aren't going to tell family and friends about it.

[Flashman]

"aren't going to tell family and friends about it."

It's called "being ashamed".

[fern hill]

A little late to the party, Elizabeth May guest-blogs on choice at http://netroots.ca/?p=80. NetRoots is a sister-ship to Birth Pangs, both created by Bread and Roses's Empress Debra. NetRoots represents an idea apparently ahead of its time. It was created to offer a space for elected politicians and active candidates to communicate directly with the people. Oddly, or maybe not, pols and candidates from the newer parties leapt on board. The old-line parties, not so much.