Warning to HGers: please do not read if sensitive to discussion of abortion. I'm about to lambaste someone.
My girlfriend Megan recently blogged about a woman at Yale who claimed to self-induce abortions as an art project.
This is what I wrote in her comments box.
As someone who volunteers with pregnant women whose pregnancies are life-threatening, many of whom contemplate aborting much-wanted babies and some of whom do abort against their true wills in order to stay alive, this makes me want to vomit.
I'm going to be blunt: I know what an abortion looks like, a real one at a Morgentaler clinic. It is NOT art. If you're pro-choice, it's a nasty surgical procedure. If you're pro-life, it's homicide (note I use the word "homicide," which means the killing of another human being, and not "murder", which has a different legal definition.)
If you haven't guessed, I consider abortion homicide. Full disclosure: For a full week (week 18 of gestation, to be exact) I considered killing my youngest child in the womb due to a terrifying and life-threatening pregnancy disease called hyperemesis gravidarum (for more info check out www.helpher.org). I'm holding that sleeping child, alive and well and 20 months old, in my arms right now as I type this.
I cannot stress how deeply I feel abortion is a subject where brutal honesty is necessary, no matter what you believe about it. And this kind of artsy-fartsy nonsense is nothing but pretense and lies.
An embryo or fetus is not menstrual blood and semen, but a living human organism with a system that is dependent yet distinct from its mother. Any scientist will tell you human life begins at conception, duh. So we need to cut the bullshit about this and be honest. We need to say: when is it OK to kill a defenceless human being? Is it ever OK?
My eventual decision was the disease which threatened my life may take both of us, but it wasn't taking just my daughter. It was the hardest decision of my life, choosing death or life together. I never got to a place where I had to reconsider; I found a treatment regimen that relieved most of the disease's effects. I won't judge a woman who chose to abort in order to live. I often spend my spare time mourning with her over the Internet.
But people like this woman, who has taken that week I spent on my bathroom floor wishing my daughter dead and made it into some kind of game, some school art project to cause scandal and attention? Yeah, I'm going to judge her. What a f*cking bitch.
*With apologies to those with sensitive ears, and to my Lord for my judgemental attitude. But I have to be honest, Lord, and I am very angry at this woman and her flippant nonsense. Trying to pray for her and failing utterly.*
2 comments:
Cindy,
I'm with you on this one, on so many levels. Regardless of whether or not one is pro-choice, abortion is serious business. Contrary to popular sentiment, it is a serious medical procedure and having given birth to two babies, I know that it would have serious mental effects for years to come. I pity this woman - I expect that she will look back on this with regret and sadness. . .
I don't think she was ever pregnant. The odds of getting pregnant with a turkey baster are close to zero.
I think she's been in art school so long that she actually thinks upsetting people is art. I also think she was shocked when the pro-choice and women's groups criticised her so harshly.
Someone else came up with a fitting (but not perfect) analogy: if a male art student wanted to display a year's worth of used condoms and claimed he had used them to rape women, we wouldn't applaud and call him an artist.
This sort of thing makes art and women's studies look bad. And I'm willing to accept a LOT of things as art.
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