Pretending to be guilty to please others
As a woman one of the most annoying things I can think of is the social expectation that women pretend to be guilty about something that we may not feel a bit guilty about. Off the things that are that list, abortion is the most important. A woman who gets an abortion should not behave in a manner that says “I’m fine with this”.
This was brought into the limelight on Alternet earlier this week by Courtney Martin about the alleged complexities of abortion. In her article Martin talks about a woman she saw at a Planned Parenthood on “abortion day”:
Planned Parenthood was packed on a Thursday in the frigid Colorado dead of winter. I remember giving up my seat to a woman who looked to be in her thirties and totally unfazed by the crowded lobby on abortion day. She alternated between gabbing on her phone and yelling at her toddler. I flipped through a magazine without really looking at the pages and hated her a little.
It wasn’t that I thought she was an evil person. I am not, nor ever was, a conservative Christian — despite having grown up just miles away from Focus on the Family. In fact, I was at that Planned Parenthood, in order to support a pregnant neighbor. After a condom-break and twist of fate, she was too scared to tell her parents, but too determined to protect her own future. We marched past the pro-lifers with their gruesome placards and went inside, arm in arm.
I was unequivocally pro-choice, but I hated that woman in her 30s because she seemed (I didn’t ask) to have such an uncomplicated relationship with abortion. I was jealous. Past my conviction that abortion should be legal and safe, my own feelings were a mess.
This is just wrong. For starters, who knows what the woman was there for (PP does more than provide abortions) and even if she was there for an abortion - why should she have felt guilty about it? Some people treat going to the dentist as, well, a trip to the dentist.
I hate dentists and practically hyperventilate while in the waiting room. Seriously - I was put on Prozac to handle having my wisdom teeth pulled. I do not “hate” the people who do not share my anxiety and most would think I was being foolish if I did.
Yet, with abortion it’s considered okay to “hate” women who aren’t anxious about it. How dare they talk on the phone, yell at their kid and otherwise behave in a manner that doesn’t say “guilt” or “shame”.
It’s not that we non-anxious women deny other women the right to their own thoughts or opinions on what abortion means to them. I think most of us are well aware that other women find abortion to be a complicated issue that each of us has to deal with as individuals.
But this expectation that we pretend that it’s complicated for us personally really rubs me the wrong way. If we’re all entitled to our own personal thoughts about abortion as it relates to ourselves, then we’ve got a right to say, in deed or word, “this doesn’t bother me”.
For me, abortion is not “bad” by default. It’s bad when the women who seek them feel compelled to abort for whatever reason. Even then, abortion is only bad because it causes mental harm for the woman.
Why should I pretend to be guilty about that opinion? I’m not.
It seems to me that this is just another sign that the anti-choice activists have so screwed society up that we can’t even be honest to ourselves about it anymore. We have to pretend that “abortion is a tragedy”, forgetting that the opponents think we mean “for the pretend human“.
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Comments
I know where you’re coming from - especially about kids. We only have one and would rather be shot than go through pregnancy,labour and infancy again. It’s annoying how many people, pro-choice even, will state that “accidents happen” and get that horrified look when the snarky bitch in me says “so do abortions”.
I agree. That’s what really pisses me off the most about the fundies and right wingers, that they work so hard to make women who get an abortion feel guilty about it.
Like Slut, I think I am here due to your winning a Stermy Award for this post (congratulations). It’s been a long, long time since I stopped by.
I met a woman in the mid-seventies (who later became my girlfriend). During one of our first serious discussions, she (a liberal, pro-choice individual) started crying as she told me about an abortion she had a couple of years previously. I have always remembered that moment. Other than giving her comfort (and my assurances that I was “on her side”) I didn’t say (or even really think) anything about the implications of that emotion, even though I couldn’t really understand it. Now maybe I do.
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I just stumbled across your blog (immediately after discovering Atheism Central) and I’m loving it. This post is dead on. Although you talk about a Big Deal issue, it’s still true on the micro-scale - I’m sick of having to fake that I feel guilty for ordering “too much” food, which basically means as much or as (gasp!) maybe a little more than the guy I’m eating with, because otherwise I must be a pig. Why should I have to appear embarrassed that I’m hungry?
I’m sick of reading articles talking about how the poor boys are falling behind in school, like I’m supposed to be ashamed that feminism has gone “too far.” I’m sick of people who act like I’m either just kidding (or don’t know what I’m talking about) or else I must be a horrible human being because I don’t want kids. And I am sick of the looks of shock I get when I calmly say that if I were to get pregnant right now, regardless of how, I’d be getting an abortion as soon as humanly possible.
Even though this statement only ever takes place in discussions with close friends, who know me well and are pro-choice, they still act like that’s a horrible thing to say. Should I be ashamed to admit I have no interest in having a child? Should I act guilty that I realise that being pregnant, even if I gave the kid up for adoption (assuming the pregnancy went okay all the way to the end), would screw up school and totally ruin my plan for my life? Should I feel selfish and wail about how I’m a horrible person because I don’t want to spend nine months in physical and emotional peril and pain?
Well, I don’t. And I am absolutely fed up of people assuming I must not mean what I say, or else I must be internally wracked with guilt, or some other such nonsense.