Having been at the Republican conventions

[dancingsinging]

I've been meaning to blog about this since the caucuses, but have just now decided that it's okay to just jot down my thoughts and not worry about doing the subject justice. I've been going to these Republican party events in support of Ron Paul since '08. (Maybe surprising, since I take my feminism seriously, am committed to social justice, and totally hate what the 'pubs have been trying to do lately wrt immigration and reproductive rights. Perhaps sometime I'll write a post about what's up with that. Lemme know in the comments if you actually want to know.)

So here are my jotted thoughts:

- The caucus made me really sad. Since they're done by geographical precinct, I was in a room with a dozen or two of my neighbors. And they all seemed like really nice people. Sincere, kind, and genuinely concerned about making our society and country a better place. Everyone was sweet about my cute pregnant belly. Everyone was conscientiously involved in a dialogue about the candidates and the issues. Like, they /cared/. They weren't trying to be assholes or anything. And they all said the most disturbing things. Mostly about abortions and America being super special and wonderful and bootstrapping and how deeply moving it is that people can immigrate here legally and be "good" poor people and work hard and become wealthy. (Okay, the "good poor people" wasn't stated explicitly.)

Anyway, I left feeling super discouraged because, I think, there's no nice-ing our way out of some fundamental disagreements. Like, I don't see a way to heartfelt-dialogue my way to seeing eye to eye with the Catholic folks about abortion. And I wish I could just be like, "They're crazy idiots who want to control women. They should fuck off." Because, like, I can understand their position. If I was sure that fetus = baby, I would be fighting tooth and nail to make abortions illegal. I mean, of course I would. (I'd also be dumping hella money into research on gestating babies mechanically and on addressing the injustice of how folks with uteruses had to do all the work with only individually-negotiated compensation within families.) Like, how can I get all aggro with some nice older lady who is just trying her hardest to save babies?

Also, I was all vulnerable about the whole thing because it touched on my fears that something bad would happen to the kid /I'm/ gestating and I have all this cognitive dissonance because he really feels like my *baby* to me. And also somehow it related to my grief over my past miscarriages.

After the caucus, I had a dream that I was making chicken soup, but when I got the whole chicken out of the freezer, it was instead a frozen, dead baby. It was a horrible dream. I tried to wish it back to life and nurse it. But I was also like, berating myself for being too sensitive. Like, somehow, in the dream, it was normal for people to cook up frozen dead babies and I felt stupid for balking at this normal thing. After some reflection and a lot of chanting, I realized that what was bothering me was this feeling of losing my moral compass, of doubting things that I just *know* to be right.

Like how no one should be forced to carry through a pregnancy they don't want.


**Ah, fuck! I just wrote up some nice rantiness and snarkily making fun of my fellow county republicans but hit some weird key and it got all deleted. Then I wrote it again and deleted it again. Screw this. I'm going to bed!


But one quick aside about the abortion thing--I was listening to the radio the other day about that activist lawyer in China who got into trouble after representing people who were opposing forced abortions. Or maybe suing for having endured forced abortions. And I was like, wow! All these Republicans who are super concerned about the babies should be like putting a lot of effort into helping the activists in China. I mean, this is something we can *all* really get behind and agree on! Maybe there's a way to heartfelt-dialogue my way to some progress on that.

Comments

[sonia]

Thank you for sharing this. Both the caucuses and that dream sound disturbing!

Are you inviting discussion? If not, feel free to ignore the following.

Here's a guess at a core issue underlying the different viewpoints: A belief about whether bad things can happen to good people. It applies to people whose skin happens to be a color our society doesn't like, struggling to make a living, and it applies to fetuses who may indeed fully deserve to be born, but happen to be in uteruses of people who don't want to carry them to term.

I think we can care about fetuses and babies and still support autonomy for people choosing to end a pregnancy.

[dancingsinging]

Yes, any time I write something and don't explicitly say that I don't want to discuss it, I'm inviting discussion! :)

My first thought about your comment about how bad things (like being evicted from a uterus) happen to good fetuses/babies is that you can't apply the same logic to actual, born babies. I mean, yes, sometimes parents do kill their alive children. But it's totally illegal and should be. Even if the parents want autonomy in ending their parenthood, you know?

I mean, the reason that I'm pro-choice is that it's really different when the baby is actually inside your body because then there's the bodily autonomy issue. And because fetuses really are different from babies, radically so in the first trimester.

I think my main emotional struggle is that, actually meeting these sweet little Catholic grandmothers, I realized that it's rather ridiculous to expect them to calmly agree to disagree, or to focus on other issues we can all get behind (like taking care of the already born babies) when they really see it that they're fighting to protect the lives of innocent babies.

And it's easy for me to think, 'These people should give it a rest. This issue's been settled for almost 40 years.' But, you know, if Roe v. Wade had gone the other way, I'd still be fighting it.

[sonia]

That's a good point about bodily autonomy. Inside my body = my choice. Once the baby is born, its own bodily autonomy comes into play.

I hear you about the sweet grandmothers not agreeing to disagree. That's a hard one. My gut reaction is, "They need to learn some boundaries!" but that's unlikely to help in practice.

Maybe these particular grandmothers would never have done this, but I'm also thinking of the people who picket at a clinic, show up for an abortion when they need one, and go right back to picketing. Somehow their high moral stance gets put aside when it comes to the reality of their own life.

[jinian]

Yes, I would like to know what's up with that. :)

I feel like on some level wanting a fetus to be a baby makes it so, which isn't very scientific and very importantly only works for the person whose uterus it is in. Emotionally it underlies all the right ways to treat people, though; if someone loses a pregnancy that could have resulted in a baby they really wanted, it would be wrong and bad to tell them that wasn't a baby, even if physiologically it would've been hard to tell from any other vertebrate embryo. A pregnancy that someone doesn't want or can't have right then doesn't carry that emotional weight of expectation, so the developmental reality is more important. An embryo has human genes, sure -- roughly twice as many as each of the millions of sperm that inevitably die in its making -- but without parent investment it's really not a person. I am definitely in favor of inventing outboard gestation, though, and am really curious what people would choose to do if given a magically equal choice between that and abortion.

[dancingsinging]

I think the thing that makes it all difficult is that the whole thing is a gray area. I mean, it's hard to argue that four cells = baby. And I heard that some recent research has shown that there is a radical difference neurologically between a fetus 5 minutes before birth and one immediately after. But a baby born at 24 weeks by c-section is definitely legally a person, even though the same being still in a uterus doesn't seem a lot like a baby.

I used to feel that, since it was a gray area, you have to start with wherever there's no gray area--at conception. But then, after my first miscarriage (at 4 weeks or 6 weeks post-implantation) and working through my feelings about it, I came to the conclusion that since it was so gray and such a personal thing, /only/ the pregnant person could decide that kind of thing.

I'm really curious, too, about what people would choose if they had outside gestation vs abortion to choose from. I also am curious about how the choice would affect my own opinions about the legality of abortion, since so much of my pro-choice stance comes from the bodily autonomy thing. But it's hard to speculate, because so much would depend on how the transfer from womb to machine would work. (That little part seems like the utterly impossible part to me right now anyway. I could more easily see developing a machine that could gestate an IVF embryo.)