Upon entering my classroom in the Fall of 1975 or the Spring of 1976 I noticed some literature in the form of a magazine on my desk, on the desk of my fellow students, and that of our teacher. It was early and the teacher had not gotten in there yet and it was just me an a few other students milling around killing time before class started. Now at the time I and my classmate were all ten, eleven years old so being naturally curious we picked up the printed material and looked it over. What I saw gave me nightmares for years afterwards and the images haunt me even to this day.
What I saw that day in full color were pictures of recently aborted fetuses in test tubes and jars. Some were shredded beyond recognition. Others had fully developed features including a full head of hair. No one had to tell me even then that what I was looking at were human beings and of course when I realized what was behind these pictures I instantly developed a personal hatred of abortion that persists to this day.
However, as horrified as I was I knew that there had to be something more to this than what I saw. That's when I started asking questions of grownups such as my teacher, my older siblings who by then were all in their twenties, my parents, grandparents, and neighbors. Dad of course was enraged that I had seen those images because he knew they had been placed in that classroom by a local Right to Life Conservative group upset over the recent Supreme Court decision in Roe versus Wade which had come down only a few years earlier in 1973 but that said he and others saw it as a teachable moment for me and acted accordingly by educating me on abortion and its history.
That's when I learned about the back alley abortions of coat hangers, pliers, etc., that before Roe versus Wade had been the tragic lot of women who lacked the resources to leave this country and have their abortions performed where abortions were safe and legal. It was during the period immediately following my shock of having seen these graphic images of recently aborted fetuses that I realized that there had to be some logical reason why women would be compelled to go this route that was beyond the full understanding of any male.
It was then that I learned that while a male could make a baby by giving his sperm, that only a woman bore the burden of carrying that child inside of herself to term. As a male I knew even then that I could not and could never begin to grasp what it was like to carry a life inside of me for nine whole months; to understand the profound changes it would make on me in terms of how I felt and how I looked. I knew that as a male I could not begin to grasp the awesome sense of responsibility that goes with carrying a child to term and even more than that I knew that I could never grasp what went into deciding to abort that life before it was born; of being forced to decide whether or not the fate which awaited that child once born would be far worse than never allowing that child to be born at all.
That is why within a few short weeks of seeing those horrible pictures I became Pro Choice and have been so ever since because as I man I knew that I would be forever free of having to bear the burden of carrying a child to term and thus be spared the agony of having to decide whether or not that future child would be better off aborted or born.
There are times when it is more important to support a person's right to do something than it is to oppose that right because doing so means that we seek to stop that which gives us personal offense. There are times when we have to respect the right of others to do that which we personally oppose because by being unable to walk in their shoes and thus see life as they see it, we are not qualified to pass judgment on their decision making or the reasons they reach such these decision. Such is the case in regards to abortion.
I am a man and as such I have absolutely no idea what it is like to be a woman; to experience what a woman experiences; especially when it comes to bearing a child. So when it comes to abortion & women's reproductive rights I have to defer to the woman, period, because by not being a woman I know that any attempts I make to impose my beliefs, and viewpoints on her are likely to be wrong because I will be approaching it from a male's perspective, not a woman's, and as such my assertion that my judgment in these matters should trump hers will be rightly perceived by the female as my regarding her as being less than a full human being because my feelings will trump hers on matters that only she as a woman can possibly understand.
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