[Peace-discuss] 'Good speaking' about abortion

[C. G. Estabrook]

"Reproductive freedom" as a euphemism for abortion begs the question (i.e.,
assumes the answer to be proved).  It's freedom for the aborted only in the
poets' sense of having shuffled off this mortal coil -- "And the fever called
'Living' / Is conquered at last."

"Choice " is perhaps the most misleading of the euphemisms around.  (I've argued
elsewhere <http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrook04182003.html> that "pro-choice"
works rhetorically rather like "pro-troops.")  Many people who have abortions
don't have the experience of having much choice in the matter at all.  Unless
one is independently wealthy (and sometimes not even then) there often seems to
be no practical alternative to abortion -- no "choice" at all.

Our society says to anyone who's pregnant, "Look, we don't have medical care for
you, a job, housing, or education  --  nor any support for your child after
s/he's born -- but we'll allow you to terminate his/her life, if you want, if
you do it in a timely fashion."  (And you can spend the rest of your life
wondering how s/he might have grown up -- had there been any support.)

The problem is probably particularly acute in the US: a British friend of mine
says, "You Americans seem to regard having children as an expensive private
hobby, like raising polo ponies."  I think it's worse than that: we regard it as
something only members of some classes should be encouraged to do (but the
discourse is occluded because we don't have classes in America...) Nixon's
Supreme Court, which legalized abortion 35 years ago, were not exactly men of
the Left -- in those distant, revolutionary days, they were perhaps a bit more
concerned about the burgeoning of the unruly lower classes than they were about
a newly newly-fashioned feminism...

They situation was even worse abroad, where the U.S. pursued stern anti-natal
policies for explicitly political reasons.  U.S. officials understood perfectly
well why the admonition -- "It's easier to kill a guerrilla in the womb than in
the hills" -- was ascribed to Che Guevara.

To prevent the birth of unacceptable people had been a conscious American goal
for some time, which is why the U.S. was the leader in the early 20th century of
the eugenics movement -- preventing the unfit to breed (in which by the way a
certain Dr. Arthur Estabrook was instrumental).  When the Nazis came to power,
they copied -- with acknowledgments --  the American advances in the field...
(See, e.g.,
<http://www.freepress.org/columns.php?strAuthor=2&strFunc=display&strID=1225&strYear=2005>.)

The world that "choice" envisages is rather like the never-never land of the
neoclassical economists, where isolated individuals make "choices" with their
"dollar votes" (which they have plenty of) from the cornucopia of goods produced
by competitive capitalism.  It's a lie both times.   --CGE

Ricky Baldwin wrote:
> ...And, could I just add by way of aside, that in my own book both "pro-life"
>  and "pro-choice" are silly euphemisms.  If you're anti-abortion, opposed to 
> abortion, or a supporter of abortion rights, or reproductive freedom, just 
> say so.