Entitled

There's a post I've been wanting to write all week, but I just couldn't get it to gel. Sometimes I have no trouble articulating what I think about something, and sometimes I know that if I tried to write about X, all that would come out is a bunch of gibberish. A lot of the time, I just want to keep from writing three identical posts in a row, so I wait until I've figured out some way to unify a couple of different ideas. Basically, this week I almost wrote about a 40-something pro-lifer in Alabama and some BS Mitt Romney pulled back when he was a Mormon bishop, but it took a letter to Slate's "Dear Prudence" for me to bring it all together.

This week, a woman wrote Prudie asking how she could persuade her 21-year-old pregnant sister not to place her upcoming baby in adoption, and instead "impress upon her that she can, and should, take more responsibility for her actions." Prudie (rightly) responded that the woman needs to mind her own business and respect that her sister IS making a responsible choice, and in the process making a dream come true for the couple who will adopt the baby.

But what really jumped out at me is this: the letter-writing sister reports that the pregnant sister, a college student, could have plenty of financial and baby-sitting support from her parents and others while she goes to class (because, as everyone knows, children don't require any care or expense once they're out of diapers). And then she writes this:

"I simply cannot understand why she is choosing adoption when she has support, both financial and otherwise. I think she is being a bit entitled. After all, she got herself into this mess, and it doesn't seem fair that she just gets to put the child up for adoption and resume her life."

DING DING DING! There it is!

Now, Mitt... When he was a Mormon lay leader in the Boston area, Romney (as reported in a 1990 story in Exponent II, a magazine published by Mormon feminists, and this week in the New York Times) barged into the hospital room of a woman whose sixth pregnancy had produced a blood clot that threatened her life. The treatment for the blood clot would terminate her pregnancy, and so the church ok'd an abortion (for, again, a pregnancy that she planned and wanted).

"Her bishop got wind of the situation, she wrote, and showed up unannounced at the hospital, warning her sternly not to go forward," says the Times. According to Judith Dushku, publisher of Exponent II, the exchange went like this:

He said – What do you think you're doing?

She said – Well, we have to abort the baby because I have these blood clots.

And he said something to the effect of – Well, why do you get off easy when other women have their babies?

And she said – What are you talking about? This is a life threatening situation.

And he said – Well what about the life of the baby?

And she said – I have four other children and I think it would be really irresponsible to continue the pregnancy.

DING DING DING! There it is!

(By the way, if I'd been that woman and Mitt Romney - hell, if a member of my own family - had said this to me, they'd have left that hospital room with some teeth missing. Seriously, where the frak does he get off? "Easy"???")

I respect the people who genuinely don't want abortion to happen, and who therefore support better family planning and birth control access, and who support funding for those programs that help low-income families feed, clothe and educate their children. (For instance, the Mormon Church does an excellent job helping member families.) My problem is this undercurrent in every single conversation with an anti-choicer I've ever had, which in the above quoted passages spills right out into the open.

Sooner or later, once you've gotten through the debate about when life begins and the ethics of privileging one life above another, eventually it comes out. "Well, you had sex, so you deserve what you get." (Note: only if you're a woman.) Or, as Letter-Writing Big Sister put it, "it doesn't seem fair that she just gets to put the child up for adoption and resume her life." Or, Bishop Mitt: "Well, why do you get off easy?"

Perhaps it's the juxtaposition of "Mitt Romney" and "getting off easy," but this just occurred to me... When progressives talk about race or class privilege - the consequences of which cost actual, walking-around-human lives - we're shouted down as "class warriors" who want to overthrow America and outlaw apple pie or something. But when a woman exercises her natural and (at least for the moment) legal right not to have a kid, she's a selfish, cake-having AND -eating harpy slut who's dodging her scarlet letter and thereby callously subverting the entire human system of right and wrong.

And don't tell me this is about saving fetuses (fetii? I really don't know...). Letter-Writing Big Sister's pregnant sister is, on paper, doing everything that the social conservatives would want her to do: carrying the pregnancy to term and placing the baby for adoption. But still, she's "entitled." Mitt Romney had the gall to tell a married mother of four that she's selfish for having life-saving surgery that would keep her around to mother her real-life children. That was "getting off easy," apparently.

What this is about is shaming women who have the temerity to do what's best for themselves and their families. It's never an easy choice, and for that reason it's a highly personal choice. If the Letter-Writing Big Sisters, the Mitt Romneys and the other scarlet letter-assigners of the world really and truly cared about justice, or saving lives, or anything to do with making it easier for families to have and raise children, then the woman in that hospital room (or adoption agency) is the last person they'd be going after.

Instead, they'll tell you all about how much they cherish life, up until the moment that life emerges from the womb and needs food stamps, health care, after-school care and public school. Then that little rug-rat needs to start pulling herself up by the bootie-straps, 'cause with that slut single mother, you never know, amirite?

So, who's really the entitled one here? The person facing the most profound decision there is, who frankly assesses her life situation and ability to care for a child, and who seeks out the advice of her doctors and spiritual advisers, and who makes a choice? Or the person who's never met that woman, and who will lecture her about the wrongness of her choices without doing anything to actually help?