Godheval

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Being pro-choice is not the same as being pro-abortion, because I certainly wish that no abortions had to take place, that every pregnancy could come to term and birth a child into a safe, healthy, equitable environment.  The reality, however, is that the world we live in does not often provide such an environment.  The most common argument by pro-lifers it that adoption is always a viable alternative.

Except that it’s not.  At least not for everyone.  For instance, it is practically a given that a Euro-American child of no physical or mental disability has a good chance for adoption – certainly much better than her disabled counterpart of the same ethnicity, or those of other ethnicities.  While there has been a strange almost fetish-like trend of Euro-American families adopting Asian children, no such trend has emerged for African-American children or disabled children.  I do not mean to begrudge those children who were adopted into loving families; I mean to point out all is not equal when it comes to the viability of adoption as an alternative to abortion.

It troubles me when aggressive pro-life propagandists spread messages like “African American children are an endangered species” or suggest that the higher rate of abortions amongst African-American women is reflective of some eugenics agenda by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.  What this does is sensationalize what, for being a very sensitive and complex issue, needs to be analyzed and discussed with discretion and compassion.  Such propaganda glosses over the issue of adoption equity, and attempts to manipulate the emotions of the disenfranchised to serve a political agenda.

Let us make no mistake.  Abortion has become, for many, more a political issue than a personal one.  If you wish to see RVW overturned even when presented with evidence that it will not prevent the “murder of babies” that concerns you so greatly, then arguing for the overturn has less to do with saving children than it does with taking an ideological position.

And for that, you should be ashamed.

It is my opinion that the pro-life and pro-choice positions are not mutually exclusive.  In fact, I would wager that most pro-choice advocates would wish for a world in which all children are able to come into the world safe, secure, and healthy.  None of us rally for more abortions.  All of us want less of them.  But for that, we are not willing to deny a woman her right to choose what is best for her and/or her family, without pressure from pundits and ideologues more concerned with being right, than with doing what’s right.

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Not-Sees are those who accuse people of color of being “hyper-sensitive” for daring to notice what are for POCs obvious instances of racism. Not-Sees are people who would deny the legacy of slavery in the United States, and tell African-Americans – disproportionately poor and still denied access to quality education, housing, and employment – that they need to “get over it”. The Not-Sees themselves have, after all.

Not-Sees are people who see nothing wrong with Emily Blunt posing with crutches, or think that Abercrombie and Fitch are justified within their business ethos to reject a model with a prosthetic arm. They are people who think that gay marriage isn’t an important issue, because after all they are not gay, so why should they care? These are the same Not-Sees who would dismiss a transgendered person’s struggle with identity as mere “confusion”, or some sort of intended sexual deviancy.

Not-Sees are people who dismiss the outrage of feminists around the sustained gender inequalities such as wages, the sexual double standard, or the inordinate pressure placed on women to conform to the beauty standard, and to be judged by their physical appearances first, if not exclusively.

Ironically, Not-Sees can even be feminists themselves, Western or white who ignore the particular experiences of women of color, presupposing that the problems women face are universal or at least the same as their own; who would ignore Islamic women’s own voices while railing against the practice of covering.

It would be a wonderful world if there were no pressures on Muslim women at all to don the hijab. Frankly, if every Muslim woman in the world threw off her hijab, refused to be “modest”, and became a rad-fem activist, it’d suit me perfectly.⁴

Not-Sees are willing participants in a culture of willful, sustained, institutionalized obliviousness – people who out of laziness or for the sake of their own peace of mind ignore, shy away from, or attempt to delegitimize issues that do not affect them directly.

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