The Choose Life I’d choose
Anti-abortion club should try supporting women for once
Sitting in on SSMU Council the night Choose Life’s club status got revoked made me think about how campus debates often boil down to two sides talking past each other, repeating the same things without much give-and-take.
Here’s what I imagine give-and-take could look like, in the University I want.
Choose Life: you want fewer abortions to be practiced. Speakers from the Silent No More Awareness Campaign said that if they could stop even a few girls from having abortions, that would make their efforts worthwhile.
Why don’t you do this in a way that empowers women, instead of degrading them with signs designed to fill them with guilt?
Specifically, by addressing the material conditions that make it difficult for women to keep their babies, by advocating for a publicly-funded national childcare program.
Your signs don’t help pregnant women keep their babies. Your pamphlets decrying abortion as racist don’t do anything to alleviate the deeply entrenched sources of economic inequality that contribute to higher rates of unwanted pregnancy or teen pregnancy among women of colour.
Helping create the political will to form a national childcare program would benefit women from all backgrounds – would enable them to support their families and advance in the workplace – and would be a pro-woman way of helping individuals choose life.
Matthew Aulis wrote:
Indeed, women are made to feel guilty of their life practices when confronted with the choice to abort. The real issue is, as you say, a lack of financial support for childcare progams, as well as economic inequalities that lead to unplanned pregnancy in the first place.
Let us not forget that we live in a culture that promotes the use of tampons and tampax bleached with harmful chemicals, that in the eighties led to the death of 38 women and made hundreds more seriously ill. Furthermore, the medicalized regulation of women's bodies is something that continues unashamedly to this day. Women are stuffed with harmful chemicals to hide the "shame" of menstruation, drugged to excess to birth babies, and told they should have used dangerous chemicals to prevent a pregnancy that cannot be afforded because our government refuses to provide support.
It's a disturbing situation to say the least, and one can that only be ameliorated through education and movements for policy change. I aim to become a poster-boy for a movement that demands more women in high positions of government, medicine, and education. Patriarchy is alive and well, thriving in fact, bolstered by the all-powerful pharmaceutical industry. Culture jamming seems like the only solution at this time to draw immediate attention to corporate-pharmaceutical dominance of advertising and resources.
Dec 3, 2009 at 10:49 AM
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