I must say, I'm kinda proud of myself. The very first book that I've ever blurbed is now out. It's by Cristina Page and it's entitled, How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Sex, Virtue, and the Way We Live Now. For me, Page's book was a revealing look at what's really driving the Christian right. Reading it made me realize, really for the first time, that religious conservatives aren't simply driven by their opposition to abortion; they're also driven by opposition to out-of-wedlock sex, and, in some cases, opposition to all sex that is not for the purpose of procreation.
Page starts out the book by discussing a very interesting conundrum: Why can't pro-choicers and pro-lifers get together and find common ground on policies that would at least reduce the total number of abortions, if not ban abortion altogether? That's the question that leads her into the inquiry at the center of the book, and that eventually brings her to the realization that abortion isn't the only factor in the mindset of the Christian right, and that indeed, its importance may have been exaggerated.
Conservative Christians are cultural traditionalists who are trying to impose a larger moral vision upon society. They're also complete absolutists in their thinking. This leads them to oppose contraception out of the fear that it promotes promiscuity even though wider availability of contraception would nevertheless also decrease the number of abortions (Plan B emergency contraception being a perfect example).
In short, the anti-abortionists aren't necessarily who you think they are: They are far more radical, and way out of touch with mainstream American culture, which has long since accepted the notion of women regulating their own fertility. I hope all of this comes across in my official blurb of the book, which was as follows:
The Christian right is often pilloried, but seldom understood. Cristina Page shows us that pro-lifers aren't just waging war against abortion; they're targeting contraception and even sex itself--abusing science, and causing considerable societal damage, in the process.
So please check out Cristina Page's new book. It's really quite eye-opening.
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YOu know this is right up my alley! I just pre-ordered it. Your blurb was all I needed to make that choice.
Well, that's the idea.....
Yup, and it is a GOOD idea ;-)
Feminists have been calling "the Christian right" on their horror of sexuality for close to 40 years...
The recent news regarding the conservative reaction to the HPV vaccine drives this home. There is a contingent for whom anything that allows women to reduce the risks involved with 'immoral' sex is to be opposed. For these sanctimonious folks, piety is more important than the lives of 3,700 women a year.
And of course, most all of the onus is on women in these matters from the religious Right.
It's not just about abortion, or even just about sex--it's about control of females and their sexual independence.
The book covers the HPV vaccine stuff as a key example, as I seem to recall.
At least one day a week I volunteer as an escort for clients at a Planned Parenthood clinic in suburban Philadelphia. Every day I'm there from two to 20 protesters picket the clinic with a range of signs that defies decription. The posture they assume is exactly as Page describes: Opposition to much more than abortion. Aside from trying to preach their brand of Christianity, they rail against the clients' "life styles" with more hate than white racists mustered for the freedom riders. In what passes for conversation with them, I've learned that they are opposed to all forms of birth control, pre-marital sex of any kind, all sex education other than abstinence, and "loose life styles." They devote most of their energy to pushing their life style, which given the venom with which it's pushed has no appeal to the clients. Their effectiveness has got to approach zero as I've witness no curbside conversions in my more than two years as an escort. In fact they usually elicit open hostility from the clients and their friends, from which we often have to shield the protesters.
Excellent! This reminds me of a recent Katha Pollitt article where she writes that for pro-lifers, when a woman is denied access to abortion giving birth is essentially her punishment for having sex.
Purchased! I actually wrote a blog post about this last September, and pledged never again to write about the Pro Choice/Pro Life debate. It's really Pro Sex/Anti Sex.
What's really significant about Page's book is that it effectively concedes that elective abortion is wrong and does not make a single meaningful moral argument in favor of it. Her argument is basically that we have to draw the line up at abortion to prevent it from being drawn further down at contraception. It's a pathethically weak, ad hominem, slippery slope approach that deliberately refuses to address the very issue at the heart of the pro-choice/pro-life debate.
Dear Raving Atheist,
Page works for NARAL. I seriously doubt that's what she thinks, and it's certainly not what I remember her arguing.
Thanks to Pandagon for linking and elaborating on this post:
http://pandagon.net/2006/01/18/taking-on-anti-choicers-for-being-anti-c…
Chris,
I read the book and didn't see any defense of elective abortion. If you can quote a passage in which Page specifically defends it, please do. I don't doubt that personally, she regards the fetus as nothing more than parasite or clump of cells, but in her writings she was careful not to make any arguments about the morality of the procedure. I found that omission to be astonishing in a book with the word "pro-choice" in the title. Instead, she argued that people who oppose abortion are bad because they have a secret (or not so secret) agenda which is opposed to things OTHER than abortion.
Sure, she doesn't make the explicit moral case *for* the pro-choice position. That has been done to death by various ethicists and bioethicists. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time when writing these books.
Can we please agree that there is a yawning chasm between "effectively conced[ing] that elective abortion is wrong" and "not. . . mak[ing] any arguments about the morality of the procedure"?
I think if you're going to say that the pro-choice movement "saved" America, you at least have the obligation to say whether you believe that the procedure at the heart of pro-choice -- abortion -- is good or bad. The reader needs to know that to make any sense of what you mean by the word "saved," and it would also be helpful to know exactly where on the very broad pro-choice spectrum she stands. Ethicists and bioethicists are all over the place on the issue; is she with Peter Singer, who givew you a year after birth to decide? That would also factor into my understanding of "saved."
As to the chasm between conceding the argument and not making it, the confusion largely her fault. On the one hand, she prattles on endlessly throughout the book about the her alleged believe in the need to "reduce" abortions, which strongly suggests to me that she thinks there's something "wrong" about them in a way that's not wrong with removing warts. On the other hand, most people affiliated with NARAL believe in the legalization of abortion up to birth for any or no reason, and I have no cause to suspect she's any different. My statement that she "effectively" concedes it is based on the fact that every thing she says about abortion is negative and she offers no countervailing moral reasons -- other than we'll lose contraception if we let go of abortion.
...she prattles on endlessly throughout the book about the her alleged believe in the need to "reduce" abortions, which strongly suggests to me that she thinks there's something "wrong" about them in a way that's not wrong with removing warts.
Moral, schmoral. The last I heard it was still a non-trivial, painful procedure with many possible side-effects, what other reason do you need for wanting to reduce them?
Someone might feel that liposuction etc. is "immoral" and the only moral way to stop obesity is to eat less. Others could care less about what's moral but might still want to reduce unnecessary medical interventions.
A relative just got pregnant at 17 because another drug messed with the effect of her pills. I don't really care what the R.A. thinks she should do, but she might be interested in one of those no-more-trouble-than-removing-warts abortions...
thank you very much for your post.
the same sentiment - that the pro-life movement is really anti-sex and anti-women's rights - hit me last week when i found myself having to scramble for emergency contraception.
EC isn't abortion - it can prevent you from having to have an abortion - but the fact that the Bush admin. scuttled the FDA approval process that would allow women to buy EC over the counter is what really pissed me off. It wasn't about saving babies. It was about punishing me for having sex.
I think life in a Bush world is as bad as life in an Al Qaeda world - where women have no rights and religious fundamentalists invoke God to further their cause for more money and power. I don't think the Christian right is any better than Al Qaeda.
The Raving Atheist is onto something.
Why do abortion advocates claim that they want to reduce the number of abortions? To make abortion "rare"? This isn't said about any other legitimate medical procedure. No one says, "Let's try to get rid of dialysis." Or "let's make heart transplants rare." People might wish to make kidney or heart disease rare -- the underlying conditions. But they would never say, "Let's make dialysis rare," as if dialysis itself were morally problematic. No, if the prevalence of dialysis were ITSELF on the table, practically everyone would say, "The issue isn't whether dialysis itself is rare, the issue is whether people who need dialysis get it or not. If that happens to be a lot of people, so be it. And if there's some way to reduce kidney disease, great. But dialysis isn't the thing that needs to be reduced."
Same for abortion. Again, why do pro-choicers say that they want abortion to be "rare"? Why don't they just honestly say, "There's nothing wrong with abortion, and if 100 million women happened to need abortions in a given year, there should be 100 million abortions, no fewer."
Niels,
To answer your question, I don't believe that pro-choicers actually think that abortion is equivalient to kidney dialysis in terms of its moral consequence. I certainly don't think that. I'm pro-choice because I want to let women make morally difficult choices for themselves, not because I don't think abortion poses a morally difficult decision at all.
Why do these nasty people want to eliminate heart transplants, then?
www.crt-online.org/20030901.html