Saturday, April 17, 2010

Weird Abortion Tales Part II

I started Weird Abortion Tales by looking at just one patient of an abortion worker.

Now it's time to look at the rest of her odd post.

Our writer strives to be poetic in her prose, but ends up saying things that I, at least, find mystifying:

I was outraged when I met abortion, yet fascinated.


WTF? The rest of the paragraph doesn't explain what the hell she means. What exactly was she outraged by? What does she mean by "I met abortion"?

Actually, the rest of the paragraph is one rambling sentence that leaves me wondering if she was under the influence of a mind-altering substance when she wrote it:

Mostly, I wanted to tell everyone why my job was a refreshing and insightful entryway into the professional world and why everyone should take the time to care for reproductive justice, but in the comforting presence of my own mother, I wanted to weep the injustices out like screaming underwater, how I could see that life wasn’t fair and how women struggled silently, valiantly, gracefully, and I might not be able to do anything about it even in my entire lifetime.


I get the feeling that at some level this woman almost sees abortion as a form of performance art, and herself as a spectator.

It gets weirder:

I wanted to weep-out how strange and frightening folks harassed me and my doctor and my colleagues and our patients and our patient’s families and the mailman, how they took our most sacral life, and how they covered it in jelly then blew it up on posters.


Okay, I get that she's ranting and raving about the mean prolifers who dare to exist within eyeshot and earshot of the women whose babies are about to be shredded. But what the hell is "our most sacral life"? "Sacral" means of or pertaining to the pelvis, specifically the large bones of the pelvis. But she seems to be referring to aborted fetus pictures. She's degenerated into something of a cross between a Rod McKuen poem and a schizophrenic word salad.

Ignorance is expensive.


Which seems to be a jarringly lucid thing for her to say. But then she rushes headlong into a melodramatic and overblown gush of impotent fury at prolifers. So it's us -- the ones who are accurate about what abortion is, what it does, when it's legal, how often it takes place, etc. -- that she's screaming about. Whereas the prochoicers who think that abortion's only legal in the first three months, and think that the fetus is entirely unformed and just a blob, are somehow not ignorant.

In turn, women, mothers will quietly move this world until it swallows us all whole.


What the hell is she moking? I can't even hazard a guess as to what she's trying to say.

Yet, I cannot leave abortion because in the deep recesses of my most essential being, in the private conversations I cannot share because self-righteous fools are wretched wolves in their sleep, because not everyone can understand a love so deep it will sell its grandmother’s pearls to preserve maternal agency and the however blessed plight of offspring, as costly as abortion may sometimes be, I know abortion is sacred.


I can understand that she's trying to express her patient's actions as heroic and noble, but beyond that -- well, it's like an Elton John song, where I don't know if Bernie Taupin is too deep for me or just full of shit. Here, I think she's just drunk or stoned off her ass and not making any sense.

She goes straight from her declaration that abortion is sacred to this closing zinger:

I see daily that it is profound and puzzling joy.


A joy? For whom? Certainly not for the weeping patient on the table.

I'm back to having to conclude that the only way this woman copes with working in an abortion clinic is to view it all as a melodramatic piece of ongoing performance art performed for her benefit, so that she can go home deeply moved by the experience.

This is some seriously f-ed up shit.

What's even more f-ed up is the supportive comments she gets from people whose thought processes are so muddled that it terrifies me to think that they probably all have drivers licenses:

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. This made me tear up.


That one reinforces my idea that there's a subset of "prochoicers" who view the whole thing as some sort of melodramatic performance art done for their benefit

It is so unfortunate that you cannot share such things with your family.


If she tried, they'd probably be trying to get her back on her Haldol.

The next one is lucid in that the ordinary reader can understand what she's trying to say:

Your sharing the painful story of your client ... should certainly open some minds about the unbearable suffering that many women endure. I hope that by sharing your story, you move many to open their wallets for those who have little to nothing. I also hope that your story enlightens the black souls of those anti-choicers who feel they have a right to moralize and legislate women’s sexuality.


I'm very unclear as to why so many prochoicers think that the compassionate response to such suffering is to take the woman's money, kill her baby, and send her home to be abused some more. We do care about these women, which is why we want better for them than what an abortion mill offers.

More of the same from Mom:

Don't keep the stories inside of you. Let them out and let them be heard so that others might understand women and the agonizing decisions they must make in life, especially regarding an abortion.


Why do they think that wallowing in how ugly it is will make people more likely to embrace it? It's as if the agony is what attracts them, as if they somehow get off on seeing how wretched, lost, trapped, and despairing other women are. It's as if they embrace abortion for the same reasons people watch Jerry Springer -- to see people whose lives are even more wretched than their own. But rather than being mere spectators, they become Saviors, who...

And there it all runs aground. The patient ended up in the same swirling eddy of abuse and despair, along with her siblings. No joy of any sort, much less "profound and puzzling joy". The patient left their dubious care minus her heirlooms, her baby, a chunk of her self-respect, having gained nothing but one more reason to cry herself to sleep at night. Yet these people view the whole thing as some sort of triumph.

It's like these people view abortion as an endless production of new episodes of "The Vagina Monologues" which they then critique -- feeling superior to both the prolifers (who want to cancel the whole production and replace it with wholesome family entertainment, like the uncultured plebeians we are) and the women whose suffering they relish from a comfortable distance.

4 comments:

Osumashi Kinyobe said...

What I get from this post is that drugs are bad and that the woman who scrawled out this garbled "word salad" is a fruit cake.
EE Cummings was a poet. This woman- not so.

Lilliput said...

Christine I once volunteered in a hospice and I have to say it was the most joyful place I have ever worked in and it was all about death. Saying that - I'm not sure what she is trying so say either

Christina Dunigan said...

Lil, I can imagine there being joy in a hospice in spite of the death because nobody there is inflicting death on anybody else. I imagine a meeting of, say, Parents of Murdered Children would be pretty much lacking in any joy, because the people there are dealing with deliberately inflicted death. From what I recall, natural death -- even a painful, premature death -- while traumatic to deal with, lacks the dimensions of human agency that add another level of trauma and horror to deaths that are deliberately inflicted by one human being on another.

Katie said...

Just more proof that it's all about them and what special, insightful snowflakes they are.