Goodman: What can happen when a woman doesn’t have the right to choose
Sometimes you have to remember exactly what it means to be pro-choice. Sometimes, the word “choice” is more than a focus-group label to avoid saying the word “abortion.” Sometimes, the slick bumper sticker — Who Decides? — actually defines the argument.
So much of the Sturm und Drang surrounding the abortion debate has to do with narrow-minded zealots feeling that their perceived moral superiority gives them the right to exercise control over a woman’s body. These are some of the same folks who will wail ti the four corners of the Earth in defense of the individual’s right to have government butt out of their life. Yet, when it comes to a woman exercising control over her own body…well, that’s another things altogether.
So, the decision is a simple one: who gets to choose? Anti-choice religious zealots bent on “saving lives”, even as they support the death penalty and the war in Iraq (on inherent hypocrisy there, eh?)? Pro-choice Liberals who feel that a woman is the one best equipped to make decisions regarding her own body? Or the woman herself, who, depending on your point of view, is either an independent agent best equipped to make decisions that directly impact her or merely a vessel, a two-legged incubator, if you will.
While the story that Goodman relates is of two parents bent on forcing their 19-year-old daughter to have an abortion, it’s indicative of what can happen when an adult female is held to be incapable of making her own decisions. It’s also indicative of the worst qualities of everyone involved on both sides of he argument
According to the arrest warrant, the two grabbed pregnant 19-year-old Katelyn Kampf, allegedly tying her feet and hands, and carried her to the car and headed south. The plan, said Kampf, who escaped in New Hampshire and called the police on a cell phone, was to force her to have an abortion.
The headlines — “Daughter Kidnapped to Force Abortion” — repeated this baldly across the news cycle. It was as if distraught parents could really deliver a captive wrapped in rope and duct tape to a doctor who would perform an abortion against the patient’s will.
The usual suspects chimed in. Cheryl Sullenger, spokeswoman at Operation Rescue, said that forced abortions are “epidemic in scope.” “I have seen sobbing women dragged into abortion clinics by the neck and hair,” she added. She did not, of course, say “who” or “when” or “where,” since drama is best unencumbered by facts.
But the fact is that the Supreme Court protects Kampf. The same precedents that protect a woman’s right to decide to have an abortion protect her right to decide not to have an abortion. The state can’t decide, husbands can’t decide, and parents cant decide. Either way.
What Roe v. Wade accomplished was the recognition that the agent most capable of making a decision regarding a pregnancy and/or her own body was the woman herself. Though both sides of the argument think they occupy the moral high ground, the argument from the anti-choice side is all about power and control: we want it, and you don’t deserve it because you don’t think and believe as we do. Not that coercion from the pro-choice side is any more acceptable, of course, The bottom line is, and should remain, that while we are all certainly free to hold our own opinions, we are NOT free to impose them on others. Period. Any questions?
If you don’t believe in abortion, then don’t have one. Likewise, if you do believe that abortion should be a medical option available to women, don’t fall into paroxysms of righteous outrage when an adult woman decides NOT to have an abortion. It is, after all, HER CHOICE.
