Can I fit this in to 45 minutes?

I'm actually going out tonight- a friend from the union is in town to defend her dissertation, and since I passed my comps, I'm game for some shenanigans. Anyways, I've got to go in about 45 minutes, but this has been on my mind for a few days.

Somehow, I entered into the abortion discussion Tuesday. And somehow, Eric Baker- an old friend of my husband's who I have never met- was directed to my blog (yeah. Thanks, Larry). And somehow, we got into a spat.

I don't apologize. I'm not sorry for anything I've written (maybe I should be... but I'm just not). But I feel a little inane for having ventured into that topical terrain; in my rather insular world in grad school, pro-choice is a given. It needs no explanation, and certainly no explication of the logical fallacies of the "other" side of the issue.

But I realize Iowa City is unique, even as college towns go. It's not called the Republic of Iowa City for nothing. And I know that when we move to Dallas in December (yes! We are!), I will no longer be one of many but will instead be the wingnut, like I so kindly called Mr. Baker and those who share his beliefs. I haven't been gone so long from Oklahoma to forget how, shall we say, special it is in terms of its ardent conservatism; I mean, the politicians were still debating freakin' cockfighting when we moved away three years ago. It was a shock- a shock, I tell you- to move somewhere you could actually distinguish between the Democrats' and Republicans' platforms and where the Democrats didn't try to out-Republican the Republicans (I'm thinking the Carson-Coburn race here). And, after all, it was the Texas delegation that, in the name of "compassionate conservatism," bowed their sweet little heads in prayer when a gay Congressman spoke at the RNC in a few years ago.

But, I come back south with an agenda. I won't be quiet about it; my husband certainly knows what's on my mind. I'm writing my dissertation on Oklahoma simply to criticize the hell out of the place I (maybe hesitantly) love and call home.

My point: the "abortion is murder" position is flawed for so many reasons, namely that it reduces something as emotionally and ideologically fraught as pregnancy into a life or death issue- that is, the baby's life or death. Not the mother's. In this position, the mother is completely elided and subsumed under the "rights" of a entity that cannot sustain itself outside of her. I love being a mother. I can't wait to be pregnant again. But that doesn't mean I have the right to assume that every woman loves being a mother or wants to be pregnant, much less to force them to be a mother, at all costs.

In this country, we have the right to our own beliefs, and the right to resist the imposition of others' beliefs upon us. Furthermore, the reductionist argument that abortion is murder, or, put another way, the criminalization of abortion that once existed in this country and that certain sectors are trying so hard to re-introduce, led to the deaths of women across society. Not only did women die directly from back-alley abortions, but they also died from the system in which this ideology was a part that allowed and even condoned violence against them in a myriad of ways: domestic violence, sexual violence, numerous pregnancies that strained their bodies to death.

Because that's just it; the reductionist "abortion is murder" argument fails to take into consideration so many contigencies that I think ultimately cancel out its worth. If you don't condone abortion in any instance, what do you do if, around week 28 of an otherwise healthy pregnancy, you find your wife has preeclampsia and they need to induce labor, despite the risk to the baby? I mean, if the "life" inside the mother is ultimately more satisfying, is there ever an instance when it takes the backseat? Does the mother ever come first? This example follows the trajectory of the "abortion is murder" argument; the baby comes first. But should it always?

Perhaps more disturbingly, I realized as I cooked dinner tonight that the reductionism of the abortion is murder position is analogous to the reductionism that landed us in Iraq. It's this same black-and-white approach to ethical questions, the very same approach that ignores contingencies, and yet extrapolates one belief or position onto every decision that has landed us in war. It leads directly, although perhaps not quickly, to violence.

This is what feminism responds to. In a feminist world, women are respected. We are all equals. Women are not objects of violence. Women, indeed, all people, are free. In yours, Eric Baker, women, literally and figuratively, die.