I am writing to The Call because I’m very concerned about the sociopolitical atmosphere at Clarion University. It seems as though the “pro-life” rhetoric has reached a fever-pitch recently. This is unsettling to me because I strongly believe that the pro-life/anti-choice worldview is based on contempt for women, especially young women of reproductive age.
When students walk past Gemmell, I wonder if they critically think about the faux-graveyard they’re seeing. It’s meant to be shocking. But if you actually take time to think about it, it’s in bad taste and it’s ludicrous. Why did Students for Life decide to use crosses to represent aborted embryos/fetuses? Not everybody is a Christian, and certainly not everyone is religious. I don’t see how they expect to draw anyone to their “cause” with such a display of hyper-religiousity. Furthermore, by creating the symbolic graveyard, it sends an illogical message — that many people have tragically died. An embryo/fetus is not a person and it cannot survive outside of the womb before 23 weeks gestation. Abortion is not a universal tragedy. I think time would be better spent addressing real tragedies…
On that note, I would like to ask several questions of the pro-life community:
1. Where are the symbolic graveyards for victims of war, genocide, and poverty? What about the missing and abused children in the United States? What about the doctors murdered by the “pro-life” movement (Have you forgotten Dr. Tiller already)? Actually, what about a symbolic graveyard for the thousands of desperate women who died from unsafe, unregulated abortion before it was legal?
2. Do you believe that people deserve the right to bodily autonomy? If so, how do you get around that basic right if you also believe that a woman must be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term?
3. What do you personally think should be done to women who choose abortion? If you think abortion is murder, then it logically follows that you would like abortion to be made illegal. About 800,000 abortions are performed in the U.S. every year. If you think women should be in prison for “murder,” then do you realize that you will be imprisoning 40 percent of the entire population of American women? If you don’t think they should be sent to prison, then you must not “really” think that abortion is murder, because in our country, people who are found guilty of murder are imprisoned. If you think that only the doctors performing abortions should be imprisoned, then you are saying that women do not actively make the choice to have an abortion on their own, and that idea basically negates all of your efforts as an activist to persuade women to choose an option aside from abortion. Furthermore, even if you only wanted to imprison the doctors who perform abortions, women would still use abortafacient herbs that are found naturally in the environment. How would you regulate something like that?
4. Have you considered the fact that your time might be better spent advocating on the behalf of the millions of war-ravaged/abused/orphaned children in the world, instead of trying to convince people what they should do with their pregnancy and the fetus growing inside their body?
5. Do you advocate for better, more comprehensive sexual education for young adults, knowing that teaching youth about condoms, birth control and any other form of contraception will prevent pregnancy, and therefore, prevent abortion?
6. Most fertilized eggs don’t even make it to the uterus, and many women have natural miscarriages. If you think abortion is murder, then would you want to investigate all miscarriages to make sure that they weren’t induced abortions? Would you go so far as to investigate all miscarriages as negligent homicides?
7. Suppose there was a fire in a fertility clinic and you could save either 100 embryos scheduled for implantation in 100 women – or a 2-year-old child. Which would you save and which would you let burn? If you believe that an embryo has the same right to life as any person, then by your logic, you would choose the 100 embryos, because this would be saving 99 more “lives” than the 2-year-old child’s life.
8. Thousands of women died before abortion was made legal. How do you come to terms with the fact that thousands more women will die if abortion is illegal and unregulated? Studies have shown that banning abortion does not make abortion less prevalent, it only makes it a lot more dangerous. How can you call yourself “pro-life” when you know that women die if they do not have safe and legal access to reproductive health care such as abortion?
9. Do you believe that abortion is acceptable in cases of rape? If not, how do you come to terms with the knowledge that many women feel that by being forced to give birth to a rapist’s baby, they are being raped and violated a second time? Some women feel that being forced to carry to term essentially “condones the act of rape as a legitimate sexual encounter.”
10. Do you support the current war in Iraq/Afghanistan and/or do you also support the use of United States military force in general? If so, how do you rationalize supporting a military campaign that has taken thousands of innocent lives, while also calling yourself “pro-life?”
I would actually like serious and thoughtful answers to these questions and I welcome responses from readers sent to e.l.young@eagle.clarion.edu.
Sincerely,
Emily Young
