A Credible Response to Abortion and other Feminist Objections to Ron Paul
A Unified Theory of Choice and Life: Abortion Access Advocates, Trust Ron Paul!
Sister and Fellow Feminists, I believe in understanding the full point of view of the other person participating in a conversation with me. I want to take a long look at Ron Paul on abortion and on what I think it could be like if he continues to powerfully awaken the sleeping giant, the confused but deeply disgruntled American public. His explanations are by far the most credible offered so far of what is going wrong. It is a good time for we Western Liberal Feminists to grok what’s happening that is centered around Ron Paul.
One of my childhood Canadian heros is another Medical Doctor, Dr. Henry Morgentaler. He survived Auschwitz and wears the tattooed serial number he got there. Part of him wanted to stay out of politics, I’m sure. I doubt any part of him wanted to go to prison or to cause an amendment to the Canadian Constitution strengthening due process in Canada. Part of him wanted to keep it abstract. But women came to him needing medical care including safe abortions and he gave his liberty and dedicated his life to creating a Canada where abortion is a choice. He has received the Order of Canada which moves me and makes me proud.
When I was growing up, I was not impressed by the overall programme of the “prolifers”. They seemed very interested in getting babies born and then immediately seemed to lose interest in the welfare of the people involved. There was a sense that the pregnant girls and women were ruined but that the baby could be saved. There didn’t seem to be much imagination on their part that a baby -- a person -- could be born into and could live through a life that is worse than death. That failure merely shows a lack of imagination.
I think that listening to Prolifers characterize the Prochoice argument was my first experience with how profoundly unhelpful the media usually is and my first experience with the straw man fallacy (wherein someone attributes a stupid argument to you and then proceeds to debunk that instead of your actual point). When Morgentaler came to town to speak, the Prolifers said that morally depraved and horny unmarried females who had previously been somewhat restrained by the possibility of enduring an unwanted pregnancy were using abortion as birth control and license to fornicate in unapproved ways. It wasn’t difficult to find that argument ridiculous. The media covered the nut who disrupted the event for 20 minutes and gave us nothing about what Morgentaler actually said.
Wouldn’t it have been nice to have some actual data? Well, yes and no. Data can be terrifying.
Do you know what we already do? We starve Down Syndrome babies to death in hospitals. We let unwanted people of all ages die of neglect in hospitals. We have all sorts of horrible contradictions at the center of life and death and medicine. Ron Paul’s lived experience is that government involvement is making medicine even less humane. What I found most enraging was the callousness with which the Prolife side treated the women and girls. Vacuous, shallow, hateful words about rape victims were spoken. Anger was felt. What I wanted from either side was the humble gravitas needed to tackle the hard questions.
The hard question that always fractures the Prochoice side is how late in the development of the embryo cum fetus can we stand to offer an abortion. We have never been able to quip out a slogan or a saying to counter “life begins at conception.”
And that was my segue into understanding where Ron Paul stands on abortion. He felt the horrifying contradiction of being in a hospital where, in nearby rooms, a fetus and a baby of barely different in gestational ages emerged. Expensive and heroic measures were brought to bare to save the wanted child. The fetus was tossed into a bucket. That is the traumatic experience that motivated Ron Paul to find another way than abortion for his patients. As he has conducted his life, it was at least equally unacceptable to him to abandon women and girls to their fates. Am I hearing the voice I have been waiting for? I want to hear the voice from the Prolife side that is truly pro LIFE. Let’s not spend our men (nor women) like tokens in foreign wars. Let’s not treat the beginning of life, a precious opportunity for civilization, like a moral flaw -- vaguely understandable, forgivable but still punishable by forced unwanted pregnancy that could have been terminated in days while you can count the number of cells involved. Let’s suffer no more women (nor men) to die at the hands of their spouses. If we can agree that LIFE matters, we have found powerful common ground.
There is my first common ground with Dr. Ron Paul and, I trust, my hypothetical guest in the conversation, Dr. Henry Morgentaler. What I would give to be around a late night camp fire with those two men! They are not going to argue with each other about abortion. They have nothing to argue about. Abortions suck. Rape sucks. Being an unwanted child sucks. Life can be beautiful. People can help each other. Being a Doctor is hard but important. People all matter. Doctors and their patients together handle some of life’s absolutely most agonizing contradictions. It’s a partnership. Ron Paul’s attitude is humble and caring. When he talks about his own medical practice, he is glad that he found other solutions for his patients. He never accepted Medicare or Medicade: he provided care as a doctor, citizen and community member. He didn’t offer abortions. But he would never condone a government or an insurance company meddling in mine and my chosen doctor’s collaboration. I would hope and expect that even Dr. Morgentaler would have a serious conversation with me about my options and his possible reservations about the abortion of a late-term viable fetus if that were my situation.
Another person I admire, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, took the best breath of his life when he spoke the words that government has no business in the bedrooms of Canadians. The government has no business in my doctor’s office either. Insurance companies are out of their depth and out of their league trying to meddle in the relationship between the doctor and patient and trying to rationalize and regulate the agony and seriousness of the situations people face with their doctors’ support. In Canada, too, the government is not helping effectively as your doctor can afford to spend about 56 seconds with you each visit, you have to wait 27 months to get your whatever removed and the brain-trust keeps emigrating. But at least people in Canada have some of the best access to safe abortions in the world. Why? Because of Dr. Henry Morgentaler made a choice and many sacrifices and because brave citizens collaborated around him to make it happen and to make it stick. Only after their effort did the government regulation start working in the right direction. What got it all started and kept it going is the doctor patient relationship.
Dr. Ron Paul speaks negatively about Planned Parenthood. What does he actually say? He doesn’t believe that the government should fund Planned Parenthood. “Like millions of Americans, I believe that innocent life deserves protection, and I am deeply offended by abortion. It is unconscionable to me that fellow pro-life Americans are forced to fund abortion through their tax dollars.” Like millions of other Americans, I believe that there are other matters of significant importance when a pregnancy is begun and want to see the Prolife people show some love for the other lives involved or suffer their hypocrisy to be revealed. But let’s get back to what Ron Paul believes. He does believe that Roe v Wade should be reversed. He’s wrong. When he is President, he will not make his whims or that which offends him into executive orders. His track record on due process speaks for itself. That’s why I do not have to agree with him and he doesn’t have to be right about everything.
What about their funding? Whether I want to (I do!) or not, I give money to Planned Parenthood now. I just don’t give very much. The federal government receives my income tax and gives a tiny bit of it to Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood will get a lot more money from me (you too?) than the 00002% of my pay check I currently give them via their federal money when Ron Paul eliminates the federal income tax. Planned Parenthood’s budget could substantially increase the year the income tax is repealed because I will be giving them a much bigger piece of my money and so will the rest of us who believe in them. Ron Paul is against forced contributions. Once their funding is entirely voluntary, what’s left is that he is offended by abortions personally but that his actual position is non-intervention in the doctor patient relationship. Planned Parenthood includes a bunch of doctors giving medical care to patients. He is going to leave them alone to do their spectacular thing using the money we will be able to afford to give them. If there is truth to the assertion that they are doing something sinister with genetic material, Ron Paul’s government would act to stop that but stay out of their medical care.
I have listened very closely to Ron Paul’s actual words keeping in mind how little I like it when people make up my point of view by picking something dumb and easy to refute. He is letting the Right know that he has lived a life of eschewing abortions and that he believes in life. They are eating that up. He isn’t stressing in the fact that he also values the lives of the women and men involved in agonizing decisions and that he is humble before the difficulty involved. His patients are speaking up for him. He isn’t bringing to the Right’s attention that his agenda is to rightfully knock the government and the insurance companies out of the doctor-patient conversation altogether. The ultimate net effect of the movement centered on Ron Paul will be that physicians of conscience can practice medicine instead of politics. Therefore, although I might have Ron Paul over for a campfire, I would choose Dr. Henry Morgentaler if I was facing nine months of carrying the child of a rape. I would be able to choose because that’s what they both believe in: choice. And life. Finally, is this a unified theory?
If I were a single issue voter and my whole focus was on the choice that is most likely to uphold women’s access to safe and legal abortions, Ron Paul is the one who is most likely to cocreate that world. It’s because he believes in liberty and non-intervention into our lives. He would like to convince you of his point of view with reason rather than by eliminating your choices through regulation.
What Western Liberal Feminists remember is that we have fought for our rights and that we have used the law -- sometimes -- as a forum for the conversation about how the world should be, to solidify helpful changes in attitudes. But we shouldn’t forget that a lot of our efforts have been thwarted, prevented and confounded by government and laws. It’s not like the government is our daddy, with our best interests at heart. At best, they are a sometimes ally and a dangerous opponent. The media fits that bill as well.
What’s really going on is that there are well-intended and relatively enlightened globalists who are working fervently to create a world government and there are a fair number of feminists in their ranks who are feeling pretty great about being included. At the same time, there is a lot of old money jockeying to get its usual absurdly disproportional power and control in the next world order. The movement centering for now on Ron Paul is the voice that says, “hey boys and girls, you don’t get to make decisions for everyone in secret no matter how clever you think you are, how urgent or necessary the problems seem to be nor how convinced you are that the rest of us are going to love your ideas once they are implemented.”
Globalists believe in large, centrally-managed solutions to life’s problems. They are insufficiently cautious and their humility is sabotaged by the conviction that at least they know more than the rest do about what’s going on. (That is untrue and an esoteric question for the epistemologists: The details of the back room deals notwithstanding, what’s going on is a lived and shared experience of human suffering quickly increasing in intensity and scope. Who is unaware of that?) There is a huge undercurrent of the ends justifying the means on the globalist team. Remember A Handmaid’s Tale? We are not making enough babies right now to keep the population up. Women all over the world stop having so many babies once we get access to education, birth control and basically any other choice. When children are your worth as a person and your only hope at a retirement, you have a lot of them. What is it going to be like when the globalists want more babies (with a penchant for their preferred kind of baby)? Those of us who want birth control and abortions to be options will find our agendas slipping out of alignment. Perhaps one day, there will be a vote on who shall impregnate you and who shall raise your child. There are many important questions that need to be handled individually. The role of regulation is to prevent alienation from liberty, not to centralize individual decision-making about abortion, adoption, birth control or other individual matters.
As long as the globalists feel like feminist issues are important, they will be upheld. But there is no mechanism for conversation and course-correction once one falls out of favor with globalist aims. In other words, the revolution in democracy wasn’t the “majority rule” but the “with respect for minority rights.” There are documents that came out of inspired collaborative thinking on how to make a government that doesn’t get carried away with itself. Ron Paul believes that the US Constitution references a sensible way for government to stay responsive to people.
That’s a good voice right now. Right now is when we need to be reminded of the time before we had any place at the table. Right now is when we secure the feedback mechanisms, the checks and balances, the accountability to make sure this new global government forms in the best possible way. The movement centered around Ron Paul is concerned with liberty and liberty covers non-interference in the relationship between the Doctor and Patient. The rest is the conversation for the campfire.
Also posted on dailypaul. http://www.dailypaul.com/209501/a-credible-response-to-abortion-and-other-feminist-objections-to-ron-paul
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