Choice May Not Be An Option Anymore

The question of feminism is being brought up by some unusual interrogators lately, including several able media players, such as Cathy Young at the Wall Street Journal, writing, of course, in the aftermath of Cyclone Sarah. In her 9/15 column, she poses the question, "Can conservatives be feminists?" I would like to reframe the question a little, to something that to me seems a little less rhetorical and more urgent: "Can an anti-choice advocate/apostle be a leader of women?"

Canvassing for Obama last weekend, I had a long and interesting exchange on the porch of a thirty-something woman, a school teacher who had been supporting Ron Paul and now deeply interested in deciding which remaining candidate was best. At the end of our conversation, as we were shaking hands and I was preparing to open my umbrella and head back into the rain, she made one final comment. It was sufficient to stop me in my tracks. "I guess I'll probably decide on the basis of the abortion issue," she informed me. "I'm a thorough pro-life person," she smiled at me cheerily.

You know, I like to consider myself a pro-life person, too, really. As a lifelong pacifist, it's disconcerting to find that I have been robbed of that designation by people who don't really mean "pro-LIFE," but rather "pro-EMBRYO." I mean, if you are really pro-life, then you really need to be anti-war. If you are really pro-life, then you shouldn't advocate dropping bombs on babies in Baghdad or Kabul or supporting governments whose rule is based on the physical slaughter of their opposition. Slay them in debates, kill them with impeccable rationality, but please keep the guns and machetes in your pockets, boys.

When I was a young woman hewing my first pathway through the thickets of thorny issues and the insidious intellectual vines of contentious philosophies of individual rights and governance, I learned that if I was pregnant, badly injured in an accident, and taken, unconscious or incoherent to a local Catholic-run hospital, I might be left to die in favor of saving the fetus in my womb should a choice need to be made. That stunned me. It stuns me equally to hear both men and women rage against abortion while finding nothing wrong with supporting the wholesale slaughter of innocents in foreign countries or denying health care to poor people here at home, accounting for a dismaying difference in mortality rates between the rich and the poor. Yes, I am pro-life and anti-war and pro-choice, and neither Palin nor McCain are either.

A friend suggested to me recently that perhaps we will some day be rid of this controversy over when life begins due to our vastly changed abilities to read activity in the brain. Legal death is now defined by a loss of brain activity, not by heartbeat. Maybe soon we will be able to determine when life begins using this same criterion. In fact, I have to suspect that maybe we could do this sort of brain wave measurement already, if someone made it a priority. Not that I'm so naive to think this would quiet all the turmoil, but perhaps it would give us a legal starting point, just as Roe v. Wade is now our starting point, a place to stand in the thorny thicket.

Which is what I offered by way of perspective to the "thoroughly pro-life person" standing on her porch talking about the presidential candidates with me. Whomever is elected will enforce the law of the land, I reminded her. That is the function of the President. The law is Roe v. Wade. McCain will have to enforce that, just as certainly as Obama. As for the people panicking about the appointment of Supreme Court justices, well, perhaps it's time to remember that we do have a system of checks and balances.

Can an anti-choice candidate be a leader of women? Do women really want to hand over the ability to make their own decisions about their biological functions to anyone? Most of us don't even appreciate being told by someone else how to wear our hair or how much exercise we need; do we really want someone to dictate our what we must answer to one of life's most consequential decisions? Sarah Palin can believe whatever she wants about her own reproductive responsibilities and freedoms, and I will defend her right to do so as firmly as I will defend my own. But I will not willingly allow her to decide the matter for me nor for my daughter nor for the granddaughter I may be fortunate to have some day. And I will certainly not let any man decide what I can do to my own body!

Meanwhile, while I await November's verdict as to whether an anti-choice candidate can be elected the leader of American women, I'll be busy making this world a better, safer, place because you see, I'm a devoted pro-lifer.