Dear Conservatives, I'm Pro-Abortion! And You Know What That Makes You?

Anti-American!

I really tire of the abortion debate. Even so-called liberals that I have contact with through various political groups always claim to understand the motivations behind the Anti-American clusterfuck that is the conservative party and their holy quest to deprive women of fundamental freedoms.

I'm talking, specifically, about reproductive freedom.

You dudes: us women, well, we don't rape people in the same numbers you do. We can also chalk our violence up to mental deficiencies, rather than the self-perpetuating prophecy of masculinity. If you weren't content with the free pass the justice system has given men to rape women that I detailed exhaustively in my last post, your penis-buddies on Capitol Hill also would like us women to know that they value the "life" of a clump of cells, a fetus, or whatever you want to call it, more than freedom.

Because in case you haven't gotten the message: America's "freedoms" only apply to white men. Also, because I'm having a bad day, I tire of talking points and meaningless posturing.

So here it is, for everyone who cares to know: I'm Pro-Abortion. I don't dress my opinions up with fancy terms like "pro-choice" to distance my stance from the fact that I am supporting the systematic termination of a pregnancy that will result in the "death" of a fetus, embryo, fertilized egg, or a sack of cells that might be a human depending on your political agenda.

So, I admit that I am Pro-Abortion. Which means that if we wish to dispose of loaded phrases and cut to the heart of the issue, we're going to redefine "Pro-Life".

Note: graphic shamelessly lifted from Andy Singer's No Exit

First, you are not pro-life. Most conservatives support the death penalty, and holding enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay until presumably the Apocalypse or nuclear winter. Killing people and torturing them isn't pro-life. Conservatives also shoot down any efforts to expand affordable health care, even to children. That's not pro-life either.

To liberal dudes who sympathize with conservatives: you might be pro-life. Sure, you might oppose the death penalty. You probably think water-boarding sucks. Your trendy liberal sentiments might also require you to admit that reducing the cost of health care is instrumentally important to the thousands of children who go without. However, you do share something fundamental with anti-abortion conservatives:

You're Anti-American.

Nothing is more intrinsic to the idea of Americanism than freedom. Not the hijacked definition of freedom which is used to mount submachine guns on a suburban Hummer, but the kind of freedom to go where I want and do what I please, provided I am not impeding anyone's rights. Probably the best and most basic exercise of freedom is that over your own body. Someone that does not even have the right to control their own body would, obviously, be a slave.

Now we've arrived at a point where sound bites are irrelevant. If I wish to be honest, then I must say that I am firmly and completely Pro-Abortion. If you wish to be "pro-life", you must oppose the unnatural and purposeful death of all of humanity. Your policies, instead encourage or allow war, torture, grueling child poverty, or a complete dismissal of the rulings of the Supreme Court. Anti-abortion activists and sympathizers are firmly and completely Pro-Slavery (of the reproductive variety) and Anti-American.

So let's just cut the bullshit, okay? I admit that I love abortion. Now you admit that you love reproductive slavery, and that you hate freedom. Fair is fair, after all.

(Cross-posted)

Abortion as art to protest society's definition of the female body

Cross-posted at Essembly

All over the news is general outrage that Aliza Shvarts, a senior Yale art student, inseminated herself and then induced miscarriages with herbs to harvest the fluids for her art. Now it comes to light that the piece is an elaborate hoax:

"The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body," said Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky.

If indeed, it is a hoax, then I am glad that the poor girl did not have to suffer to make her point. Although, she did make a brilliant and controversial point.

A woman's body is meant to titillate or to bear life. A woman's womb falls under the eminent domain of the state, evidenced by the outrageous controversy over abortion and prostitution. In short, a woman's agency does not extend over her own reproductive organs, or so the popular sentiment continues to claim with insipid discussion of abortion and birth control.

However, Shvart's project directly opposes that notion in the most shocking and contentious way possible. It takes this illogical view of a woman's womb as scared and brilliantly defiles it with the bloody taboo of a self-induced pregnancy termination. There seems to be the general sentiment that a miscarriage is something ordained by God, and that what happens in the magical and mystical uterus is the domain of the Cloud-Father and the all-seeing state, not the woman herself. A miscarriage chosen by a woman, and not for practical purposes? Well, that's just not done.

Furthermore, it may blur the lines. What separates menstrual fluid, an abortion, and a miscarriage? Our morally upright God-crusaders would like us to believe that life begins at conception or some other such nonsense based on superstition, misinterpretations of a really old book, and "ewww gross" reactions that they really should have grown out of at seven. If the story was true, the viewers of Shvart's piece would be unable to tell. The hip and savvy art student could even ask the horrified viewers to pinpoint which blood clot contains the soul for maximum humor.

Shvart's "art" is also the crazy and bizarre statement that her womb is not yours, the state's, or God's. It is her uterus, her reproductive rights, and if she wants to tax her body to the limits for what she views as art, well, that's her right.

Most of all, this story inspires me to great obscene heights. My muse compels me to draw the image of a mother ripping her fetus out through her stomach in my own menstrual blood. I appreciate the irony. Like the pregnant man, stories that produce such stupid and judgmental commentary, especially from people that have no idea what having a womb entails (read: men), is just plain amusing. Bill O'Reilly utterly fails to grasp this point, among many others, when he blogs:

Still, we can't completely fault this girl for trying to start a dialogue. Once in college, I too, created an art project to fire up some discourse.

It was actually a performance piece involving a rat.

I took a live rat and placed him in a diorama of a pre-war, lower-middle class Polish living room. Then I shoved a dradle up its rectum and played "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof while it bled to death out of its ass.

I titled it "The Gift of the Jews."

O'Reilly and his pose of Offended White Men would like you to know that doing what you please with your body is comparable to the Holocaust, animal abuse, and antisemitism. Ignorant men, and the slew of women who mistakenly apologize for them, would rather the other sex remain chained to their bed during pregnancy, lest the generous gift our Cloud-Father has visited upon us not be welcomed by our sinful and devious female minds. Godforbid we use the products of our own body to create anything but babies and boners.

At the end of the day, I figure that it is best to shock and appall as many people (mainly ignorant fuckwits like O'Reilly) as often as possible. I mean, it worked for sexism, why can't it work for reproductive freedom? The more you are exposed to sexism, the more we absorb it into our consciousness as normal. Perhaps more self-aborting art students and pregnant men would do us well.

Update: Apparently it has been brought to my attention that the O'Reilly "blog" is fake. In my defense, it is kind of hard to tell satire of someone as loony as Ann Coulter or Bill O'Reilly from their real sentiments.