In response to irishwitch's excellent diary about how OB-GYNs say that the Supreme Court was in the wrong, and in which she castigated anti-choice Democrats, someone predictably accused her of what's apparently the worst political heresy possible: Being a single issue voter.
To preface my revised and extended response to that, let me just set a proper tone for the discussion ...
Don't stand back while my life is threatened and expect me to give a damn about anything you say or want.
Feminists are often singled out as a type of single-issue voter particularly deserving of demonization at this site. Our adamance, our insistence, it just gets right up some people's noses. Right up there. We are accused often, just as the anti-choicers and the Supreme Court have conspired to have us declared in the law, of not knowing what's really in our best interests. Accused, in the most loaded and demeaning of ways, of being crying hysterics who blow things out of proportion.
Screw that. Let me tell you just a little bit of why we're such demanding, whiny nags, such angry, raging bitches. And let me tell you why a refusal to join with us in our petition for justice and equality hurts everything this site claims to stand for.
This society spends an enormous amount of time working hard to make women afraid. It works. We are.
We can be forced to have c-sections against our will, invasive medical procedures with not insignificant risks to our future health. If we should become pregnant due to contraception failure, we may be given the run-around by medical professionals until it's too late to avoid pregnancy, and then if we talk publically about wanting an abortion we can get death threats and worse. A woman can be dragged to her death like James Byrd without creating any more public controversy than how best to cover up the blood stains on the road. As insult on top of all this injury, and more infuriating things than anyone has room for in a single post, Congress and the Supreme Court got together to declare us less valuable than female farm animals.
Than farm animals? Yes. Because not only is an unborn fetus apparently worth more than I am, an unborn fetus that can't live outside my body and a dead, decaying fetus that's been strangled by its own umbilical cord is worth more than I am. Worth more than my health and future ability to bear children. And a life exception?
If something that might only threaten my health turns out to be fatal to me, well it's too bloody late to grant me an exemption.
Worse, the Democrats have managed to turn the advantage of popular support for the pro-choice position into a politically iffy proposition by joining with our enemies in decrying the ickyness of allowing me to decide whether or I want to host and sustain an entire other developing body inside my own.
I can't be made to donate so much as a square inch of skin against my will if I'm lying on a slab in a morgue and didn't sign up as an organ donor. And these milquetoast 'friends' of mine have equivocated to the point that a dead, anencephalic, spina bifida-having or hydrocephalic fetus could put me in jeopardy of my life or health, because it now has the legal right to commandeer my uterus. Do you get that! I have more rights over the disposition of my body if I'm dead. Dead! You bet I'm pissed at the Democrats over this. And when anyone tells me I shouldn't be pissed off over it, just try, if you will, as an exercise in hypothetical abstraction, to imagine how much more volcanically pissed off that sodding well makes me.
Neural tube defects and late-term miscarriages that don't trigger labor, among other causes, aren't predictable. They don't happen to many women, they aren't genetic, and given proper care, a woman can often go on to have children afterwards. It's just that it's always a chance. And it hits me, a woman of childbearing age who might want to plan a pregnancy in the next few years or might face contraception failure and decide to continue the pregnancy if I had a supportive partner, right where I live. Because I might very much want a child and have my life and health put in danger thereby, even though the means to treat these potential problems are well-known.
This law, this Supreme Court ruling, literally threatens my very life.
Since the ruling was handed down, it's practically been all I've been able to post about at my own blog. I've looked at interesting and important stories about alternative energy, global warming, the Gonzales hearing, the situation in Iraq, and about a topic that I abandoned a lucrative career to study and work in at entry level for the moment, sustainable agriculture. I care deeply and passionately about these issues. They mean a great deal to me and I fully understand their importance to the civic culture of the United States and the world at large. I just can't bring myself to focus on them very much right now.
All I can think about is that these miserable, frakking bastards have taken something that in the back of my mind I had always so looked forward to planning and made me fear it. And I hate them for it. I hate them with every fiber of my being. I have refused to live in fear before, and I refuse to stand by and let other people carry all the water to ensure that I can stop living in fear now.
So I can't give the attention I want to those other issues. I can't fully be present for them right now. Until this ruling is overturned, or until my right to make my own medical decisions is safely enshrined into federal law, I don't know that I will be able to give them the passionate intensity that they so deserve. Especially, I can't do so when I feel that the people working on them and drumming up support for the 'elect Democrats and all will be well' bandwagon don't give a damn about helping me and other feminists fight this.
Simply put: You can stand with me as a brother in arms to support my right to protect my own life, as part of a mutual defense pact, or you can lose some measure my support for your own fights.
I suspect that I'm far from alone in this sentiment.