I Don't Have Any Problem With Ultrasound

"I don't have any problem with ultrasound."

Of course you wouldn't, Scott Walker.

After all, your office lends you authority on a whole variety of topics.  Being the Governor of Wisconsin, you have responsibility for the well-being of 2,864,586 women and girls.  Surely, you have learned everything one can about what is medically necessary--or just plain good--for them.  So, of course, you support a bill that would require women seeking abortions to undergo ultrasound.  

With all due respect, I would like to know how you came upon such knowledge.  Did you read medical journals?  Or did you do some--how can I say this?--field research?

If you did, you realize that for some women, mostly those in their first trimester of pregnancy--which, of course, is when women usually seek abortions--a transvaginal probe is necessary in order to perform the ultrasound.

Being a man, I suppose you could be forgiven for not knowing that--or what it's like to have anything harder than human flesh thrust into you.  Sometimes even flesh hurts, so you can only imagine what metal or hard plastic are like.

That's the thing, Mr. Governor:  You can only imagine.  Again, I do not want to excoriate you for that:  After all, it has to do with the way you're put together.    But since you can imagine, I'm asking you to do so.  If you can't imagine how it feels, imagine such an object stuck into your wife, your daughter, your mother.  

You don't want to imagine that?  I understand.  All the more reason to re-think your position on the bill.  Now, I know that you're a conservative, so I can understand (but not agree with) your desire to close one of your state's last remaining abortion clinics.  But, please, don't confuse conservativism--a perfectly respectable philosophy--with misogyny.  

And please, whatever you do, learn as much as you can about medical issues before passing laws on them.  Even if your mother, wife or daughter have never had--and never will have--an abortion, think about the transvaginal probe.  Better yet, try to imagine how it would feel.

On Abortion And Same-Sex Marriage

As the Supreme Court hearings on same-sex marriage are taking place, I've read and heard more than a few comparisons between that issue and abortion.  I guess it was to be expected, as the 40th anniversary of Roe v Wade has just passed.  

Once upon a time (well, all right, in the days of the so-called Moral Majority), Evangelical Christians and various other social conservatives opposed both same-sex marriage and abortion rights.  However, they were more concerned with the latter, as Roe v Wade had  become the law of the land (which they were trying to repeal) and there wasn't as much of a movement for same-sex marriage as there has been in the past few years.  Also, in those days, even most people who favored legal abortions opposed same-sex unions, whether on religious or other grounds.  So there really wasn't much reason for Jerry Falwell and his friends to get worked up over Adam marrying Steve.

The fact that Evangelicals were against abortion and same-sex unions was really about the only thing those two issues have in common.  And, oh, yeah, they both involve sex, which is probably the reason they got Jerry and his friends all hot and bothered.

But more recent polls show that younger people--even the children of those fundamentalist Christians who helped Ronald Reagan and scores of state and local officials get elected--support, or are willing to entertain the idea of allowing, same-sex marriage.  And many of those same young people want to overturn Roe v Wade, as their parents did or do.

Part of the reason is simply that younger Evangelicals have grown up in a different world from what their parents knew in their youth.  But, more to the point, I think, is that abortion and same-sex marriages aren't just apples and oranges, or even apples and onions.  They are, simply, profoundly different issues.

First of all, for all of the controversy it has created, abortion is still mainly a private issue.  The girls and women who end their pregnancies do so, for the most part, alone.  Their boyfriends, husbands and families may be involved in the decision, but no one else is--save, perhaps, for the abortion provider, if the procedure should go wrong and he or she faces a malpractice suit.  Most girls or women who go through the procedure get on with their lives because, well, for most of them, that's the point of getting an abortion. The few exceptions are those who have to end their pregnancies for medical reasons.

On the other hand, getting married is the most public action most people ever take.  The union of two people affects themselves, their families and many other people in their community, mostly in positive ways.  In contrast, almost nobody is happy about an abortion.  The woman terminating her pregnancy as well as other people in her life might feel relief, or at least that the least bad choice is being made.  But almost no one who has ended her pregnancy will tell you that it's a cause for celebration.

Also, there are many legal ramifications to marriage.  They include tax benefits, inheritance rights, health care, insurance, hospital visitation rights and custody over children and, in a few cases, other relatives.  

Those consequences (both in the positive and negative sense of the word) last as long as the marriage does.  Most people, when they get married, want their unions to last for the rest of their lives.  And, if they don't, ending their marriages certainly has little, if anything, in common with ending a pregnancy.

Finally, let's just say that the kinds of people who want to enter into same-sex unions aren't, generally speaking, the same people who get abortions.  If same-sex couples want to have children, and they don't want to adopt, they have to find surrogates: One to impregnate one member of a lesbian couple, or one to carry a child for a gay male couple.  Somehow, I don't imagine that  very many people in those circumstances think about having abortions!  In fact, about the only way abortion might intersect with the life of anyone in, or who wants to enter, a same-sex union is if he or she is bisexual and has a heterosexual relationship outside the marriage, or has had such a relationship before getting married.

All of those things being said, I will reiterate a position Hillary Clinton articulated when she was First Lady:  Abortion should be safe, legal and rare. And, as I've mentioned in other posts, I support same-sex marriage because it's the best we can do for same-sex couples until the state and churches lose whatever power they have to determine whether or not people are married, and until there are no longer any tax or other benefits to marriage.  That is why I support both the right to same-sex marriage and abortion, and my support for one is not tied to the other.

Someone Else's Decision

Yesterday I was talking to a young man--a former student of  mine--who'd gotten a young woman pregnant.  I told him the sorts of things an older, and presumably wiser, person is supposed to say:  Having the baby, or not, is a serious decision, and whatever they do will have an effect on him, not to mention her.  I also advised him to get some really good counseling because, while he might make a good father, he still needs to work through some of the issues his own family left him.  

A part of me wanted to admonish him for getting the woman pregnant. But I knew that doing that would have been pointless.   I think that, on some level, he wanted to impregnate her, or some woman, because he's talked about having a child.  But he also knows that he doesn't have the sort of job or finances he wants; if he has the child, those won't improve for a while, and going for his master's degree, which he brought up the last time I talked with him, would be all but out of the question for a long time.

But most of all, I don't think he's ready to commit.  Part of me wants to say, "Typical guy!" But I also know that browbeating him into a commitment wouldn't do him, the woman, the baby or anyone else any good.  I have never believed the conventional wisdom that having a child "steadies" a man and makes him realize that it's time to "settle down."  I've seen too many men in whom the exact opposite happened:  They equated committing themselves to, if not marrying, the mother of the child and the expectation that they will help to raise, or at least support that child, as the proverbial "ball and chain."  They became even more reckless than they were before the birth of the child, or they simply spent most of the money they made on themselves.  

Now, lest you think I'm man-bashing, remember my history.  Yes, I have felt the same kind of fear and revulsion so many young men feel at the prospect of giving up their "freedom."  Interestingly, those feelings are not at all incongruous with wanting to have a child:  Many men see, in child's play, the very kind of freedom they want to keep.  I've heard more than one man say that he didn't like being married but he loved having kids.

I think the young man in question also wants kids more than he wants marriage--or a woman, for that matter.  Having been on his side of the fence, so to speak, I can see his point of view.  I could also understand his dilemma in one other way:  I've also gotten a young woman pregnant.  In fact, I did that twice.  One time my family knew about:  I was in my early twenties, if I remember correctly, and the young woman and I had talked about marriage.  But I knew, even before the tests were positive, that I was not suited to be a husband or father--for a variety of reasons.  Most of those reasons are still valid, at least for me.  

So the young woman had the abortion.  Our relationship didn't last very long after that.  Even then, I wasn't surprised, any more than I was the first time I got a young woman pregnant.  No one in my family  knows about it--unless they are reading this.  I was in high school and working a part-time job so that I could save money for college.   I usually gave my mother the money, who deposited it for me.  So of course she noticed when I wasn't giving her money. 

I don't remember what excuse I gave.  Whatever it was, it was better,or at least easier to tell, than the truth.  

I don't know who, if anyone, else that young man has told about his situation.  Whether or not he's told anyone, I can understand why.  Still, I firmly advised him to at least talk to a counselor.  

As I write about that encounter with him, it seems even stranger than it did when it was unfolding.  Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I was giving him advice based on my experience, but not necessarily my own life.