By Angie Vogt, political commentary
On Tuesday, depending on what side of the issue they advocated, people protested or celebrated the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision.
If anybody believed for a minute that a Supreme Court decision is the last word, they have since been proven sorely mistaken.
Let’s rewind 16 years ago to 1992. Vanguard of democracy, soldier of the pro-choice, “every child a wanted child” movement, I had just finished a tussle with a kindly elder Irish lady named Lorna at church. Yes, that’s what I said. I got in a fight at church. My Scottish bearing had little sense of decorum in my twenties, what can I say?
In any case, Nora had implored us to pray the rosary on the upcoming anniversary of Roe vs. Wade to end all abortions and to put an end to “that terrible Roe Vs. Wade law.” I had just straightened her out about how my generation was making things right for women in the world and we were not about to succumb to her old-fashioned world where women were just baby factories for their men.
Feeling quite satisfied with my Scottish sense of righteousness (the Irish can be so sentimental, after all), I proceeded to walk out the church, on to the next injustice, I presume. I stopped at a table with some “issues” related brochures. One, in particular, caught my eye. It read “How Abortion Exploits Women.”
What? Exploits women? Why, abortion was the latest in all the most promising opportunities for women! After all, how can a woman pursue her dreams and independence if she isn’t given “reproductive choice?” I couldn’t wait to read it and write the publisher about all their wrong facts and twisted logic.
Instead, what I got was an earth-shaking, old-fashioned Scottish paradigm shift. The logic in the brochure was in complete agreement with my feminist assumptions, but my assumptions about the meaning of freedom and independence were incoherent, to say the least.
My feminist values were based on the idea that women deserved respect and dignity and equal opportunity for being women. I sought to transform and humanize the world by bringing the perspective of feminine values into the workplace and society. I did not want to be a man. I wanted to be in the world, engaged with the world as a woman. And if you are at all familiar with the world of feminist language, you know that they reject violence in any form, most especially violence against women and the environment (aka, “Mother Earth”).
So how does “safe and legal” abortion lend itself to this vision?
Consider this: The very procedure of abortion is a most barbaric form of violence to the body. But isn’t radiation treatment or chemotherapy to kill cancer just as violent? Yes, but the target is cancer, not a human life. Cancer kills. Are we prepared to compare a developing baby to cancer? How depressing.
Whether using vacuums, saline solutions or chemical ingestion, the abortion procedure is violent and targeted against the woman’s body and the fruit of the very natural feminine process of conception, the embryo or fetus.
Feminists rightly protest violence against women, whether government-imposed or in domestic, cultural venues. But they should be consistent and recognize that abortion is a form of procured violence against the self, against the only process on God’s Earth that is uniquely feminine, that is the process of conception. Abortion is an assault on what Pope John Paul II referred to as “the feminine genius.”
In the miracle of conception (and from a scientific view, it really is a miracle when one studies all the factors that mitigate against conception), an unrepeatable biological life with its never-before-known DNA forms and begins a lifelong process of development and self-revelation. The process, uninterrupted, continues until natural death.
But, “every child a wanted child,” right? Let’s use that same logic to other areas near and dear to women. In Muslim countries, fathers are permitted the right to murder their daughters who “dishonor” the family for any reason. I’d say they’ve adopted the “every daughter a wanted daughter” motif quite well. When we see our own elderly citizens, struggling with depression, illness and loneliness, our own society is broaching ever closer to this ethic by offering “assisted suicide.” Perhaps advocates can sport bumper stickers that say “Every elder a wanted elder.”
Snuffing out the “unfit” is a violent proposition. Snuffing out life to suit our own lifestyle choices is not a free choice. It is, if anything, a type of slavery. This is nothing to celebrate.
Federal Way resident Angie Vogt can be reached at vogt.e@comcast.net.
