Imagine my shock last night as I opened up Facebook to double check my blog feed and scan through news, and noticed this: “Do you think it can be repealed? Something this bad needs to be completely destroyed, in my opinion. Isn’t this like turning history around? Poll Shows Opposition to Pro-Abortion Health Care Bill Increasing After Obama Signed It- LifeNews.com.”
My first reaction was to check who had written such nonsense and then investigate how they came to be friended in the first place. I didn’t have to look long to find out. My dear old Aunt, who joined Facebook not a year before with my instruction no less , had a wall and newsfeed full of these LifeNews.com updates.
We are Italians. My Aunt, like my father, is a first generation Italian American. Use your imagination to sum up the political and social ideology of many within my father’s family. If you guess they are fervently Catholic and blindly Pro-Life you are correct, if not, well I just told you. With this fact, it did not surprise me that my Aunt was posting stuff like this on the internet, she was a faithful Palin/McCain supporter during the 2008 election and often alludes to her volunteer work at Catholic Charities when ever I have been forced to be around her I sit next to her during family gatherings.
Still, it bothers me. How does one who believes so passionately that people have the right to reproductive freedom, one who abhors gender discrimination, and one who tires of hateful and intentionally misleading rhetoric surrounding reproductive health services, deal with family or close friends that are on the extreme opposite of the spectrum?
Because my Aunt and I have never been close, I chose to delete her from my Facebook. This garnered a rude remark from her the next time I saw her, but other than that it didn’t cause any issues. The irrationality of her rantings reveal she is too far gone for me to attempt a factual debate surrounding reproductive health services and equality, thus cutting her off solved that particular dilemma swift and painlessly.
My mother, on the other hand, sees my blog posts and frequent updates that carry a definite pro-choice tone and emails me lengthy objections. She is, I have found, one of the most hate filled, pro-life persons I have ever met- and she is my mother. Don’t get me wrong, I love her immensely and I am so grateful to her for a number of wonderful things she does for me, but the vehemence with which she opposes abortion rights and reproductive health equality I just cannot abide. The problem is cutting her off is not an option.
At the age of 17, my mom had a “back alley” abortion that left her so severely scarred that her ability to reproduce, when she wanted to and felt ready to do so much later in life, was jeopardized. We have heard the horror stories before and please believe, my mother lived through all of them. For this reason alone I find it so difficult to comprehend how she turned a complete 180 on the issue.
I decided the best thing for me to do was initiate a conversation about all of it, something we hadn’t done even though I myself was a pregnant teenager, in a safe environment. We sat in front of a nice fire place at some swanky, downtown restaurant and chatted mindlessly about the weather, my classes at school and the recent renovations at her home. I had stage fright, I remember thinking, because each time I began to broach the potentially volatile subject I clammed up and awkwardly sipped my drink.
Finally, I said fuck it and plainly told her the recent email she sent attempting to sway me toward a pro-life stance, offended me to the core. Her stoney silence was cue that I pissed her off. “Good” I thought and launched into a full attack of the pro-life, “pro-hypocrite” I think I said, way of thinking. I asked her to please explain how she supports something that if successful, would cause hundreds of thousands of women to suffer the way she did at 17. Yet, with each point I made, her counter was simply, “they should not have sex.” After explaining the unreasonableness of that approach at least 4 times, I gave up. We went our separate ways and avoid speaking about that meeting or that particular topic, which is just as well.
There is no way I can reason with my mother or my aunt, that much I have concluded. Plainly speaking, the situation sucks. I don’t want to fight with family or cut “those I’m not close with” off at the sign of a disagreement, but what else can I do? I won’t budge on this issue and feel that a violation or the denial of a basic human right to only a set group of people is disgustingly wrong. So I’m left with a significant quandary that I fear will not yield happy results.
How about you? How do you deal with any pro-life family members or close friends?
Abortion Gang 
I’m lucky in that most of my family (at least those I’m willing to talk politics with – always a risky choice of topic) are pro-choice, and when it comes to the anti-choice colleagues, friends, family, etc… it depends on where on the spectrum they fall. If they fall in the middle, I may try to lay out some rational explanations for my pro-choice beliefs, if they’re rabidly anti-choice (and we share blood so I have to sit next to them at a holiday or two each year) then I take a ‘agree to disagree’ stance and don’t discuss it with them…
Being a Jewish child, teen, and now adult has meant being able to ‘agree to disagree’ with most of the world from the time I entered kindergarten and learned my first Christmas carol for the school winter songfest – I knew Santa didn’t exist, but out of respect for my classmates’ beliefs, kept my mouth shut… the same is true for friends of other religions now (or none at all) – I’m never going to try to convince anyone to convert – your beliefs are your own, and that’s fine with me, but I’m also not interested in having the “the Jews did not – really, I promise – kill Jesus” conversation on a regular basis… Hope that made sense!
Fortunately most of my pro-life family (i.e. all of my family) disowned me once I told them I was a transsexual woman and I was moving to Denver to transition. I mean, they got mad when I told them I was an atheist but the fact that I’m a transsexual woman probably made them shit bricks. ;-P
This is an important question. My family are all anti-choice. We have come to a very important agreement that we won’t have debates about the subject. They know I volunteer with PP & blog about choice – so it’s not like I have to closet myself. But we won’t engage in any discussions about the issue, because none of us will ever change our minds.
Racism is a similar problem. My grandmother lived through the Nazi occupation and helped smuggle Jews out of the country. And yet she says some of the most racist stuff I have ever heard. It’s really hard to love someone who makes your stomach sick. But the only way that I can deal with it is to delete any e-mails I get, without reading them first. And if she says the n-word, I will correct her. That’s all I can do. I love her, but that doesn’t mean that I have to love everything about her.
This is a hard thing. My family is anti-choice, too. They’re also anti-immigrant (which is to say, racist), and anti-welfare/universal healthcare/poor people. We’ve had conversations like yours about all these things, but they usually ended with me in tears and them telling me that once I’d experienced “the real world” (which really means “get a real job,” since I’m in grad school right now), I’d understand. I told them if experiencing “the real world” means “get fucked by the system so much that I desperately cling to my privilege by being racist, sexist, and classist,” then I don’t to experience it. It makes you, according to them, a cold person who hates anyone different or lower on the social scale than you, a cold person who clings to their petty wealth and privilege with the tenacity of an animal guarding their food supply, and I don’t want to be that person. They were, understandably, offended. But I still thought (and still do think) I was right. They’re only anti-choice because slut-shaming women gives them a leg up over those women; my mother didn’t have an abortion (even though the pregnancy pretty much ruined her life for 15+ years), so she gets to think of herself (and gets treated) as better than other women. They’re only racist because they’re whiteness gives them privilege, even though they’re lower-middle class. They’re only anti-welfare and anti-universal healthcare because wage slavery has made them super-defensive about the money they’ve “earned” and “deserve.” And until they see those things, there’s not much I can do. So we don’t talk about it. I block them from Facebook posts. It’s out in the open, but conversation only leads to conflict, so we don’t have it. I hope one day this will change.
Unfortunately, you sort of have to get used to a stalemate when it comes to family members you love (I’m very fond of my mother, as well).
My anti-choice relatives are cut off, period. I also don’t befriend anti-choice people. If people don’t support my rights as a woman, then they don’t get to have a relationship with me.
As you stated, however, this is difficult when the person in question is your mother. If your mother is a good mother, as I assume she is, you have a lot to be thankful for, as do I with my mom. My mother is not pro-choice, but she’s not vocally anti-choice either. She mostly keeps her opinions to herself. If she were more outspoken about her stance, I would support her right to have an opinion, but I would never back down from mine. If she made an anti-choice statement on FB (which she doesn’t), I would argue with her there. I am not anything less than me for anyone, even my mother, but I continue to love her.
But, like I said, that’s my mother, so I don’t want to terminate that relationship. Anyone else (siblings, cousins, friends, coworkers, etc) gets cut off immediately.
I wish I knew. It sounds like your mother is attributing her experience to her own guilt instead of a system that refuses to accept female sexuality without reproduction, regardless of age. It isn’t just young women that “shouldn’t have sex” in that kind of system, it is any kind of woman under about age 60 – teenager, married, single, it doesn’t matter. None are allowed to have sex without wanting a baby, or at least being willing to give one up for adoption (which, let’s face it, many many women are not).
And if that is their worldview, there is really little that can be done about it. The only recourse is to say “we cannot discuss this, because I offend you and you offend me when we do.” Most of my really pro-life friends did stop speaking to me over the years, which is painful, but I’ve yet to find a better compromise.
I don’t mean this comment to be offensive, but just as an attempt to try to explain the other point of view in a reasonable way:
If your family members honestly believe that abortion is killing a child, (for the sake of argument, setting aside for the moment whether or not you yourself agree with this proposition) wouldn’t the vehemence with which they support the pro-life cause be at least logically consistent? (After all, if you thought that children were actually being murdered in some other, presumably preventable situation, wouldn’t you feel passionately outraged?)
You probably don’t believe that abortion is truly the killing of an infant, but you family members DO understand this to be the case. Even if you can’t agree on the scientific and philosophical criteria of what constitutes a human life, maybe you could at least find some sort of common ground in that your family’s convictions are subjectively sincere and based on their own consciences?
@a pro-life Catholic.
I took a religious history course a couple terms ago and learned a great deal more about Catholicism including the fact that the Catholic church could not give one flying flick about “babys inside the womb” and/or abortion. In fact, for hundreds of years there were many parts of the Catholic church that actually supported abortion! Not until abortion and women’s rights movements(eeek) began to advance did the church consider the issue of abortion and the “sanctity of life beginning at conception” to be a worthy one (because it put them back in a position of power which they had been losing due to resurgence of the non-Catholic Christians in American politics) It was never politically advantageous of them to do so before that time.
So, in light of all of that and of course due to the ridiculously patriarchal and gender oppressive hierarchy and principles of the Catholic church i reject all “pro life b/c I’m religious” arguments. The catholic church couldn’t really care less about the “baby” inside the womb or the woman possessing of that womb.
So no, I cannot find some common ground with my Catholic, “pro life” family members on this issue.
I don’t have politically intense talks with people offline, but if I happen to find out that someone I know is anti-choice I do my best to avoid them. I can never see them the same way.
It’s funny, I generally operate under the assumption that people are pro-choice. I have discussed it with my mom, and while she isn’t AS pro-choice as me, she is still pro-choice. My father has not said either way, but my step-mother thinks it’s murder. But I don’t really care about her so I can ignore her. And I do. I have one friend who I’ve been friends with for 12 years. I think she is divided. She made one comment that upset me (that she wouldn’t come with me to have an abortion if I needed one, but she’d be there when it was done) and I’ve decided to avoid the topic since. In this case, I am not willing to throw away 12 years and my closet friend. I think that she is likely an exceptioneer. As for new friends, if they are anti, they are out. I don’t associate with anti’s, period.
@Pro-LifeCatholic – Holding a belief that is anti-choice for moral reasons as opposed to “I don’t trust women to make decisions for themselves” does not make it better – it’s still an anti-choice belief that has the effect of not giving women control over their own bodies — While I understand that the “abortion is murder” notion often is the anti choice rationale, it still is one that I disagree with.
I think the best way to deal with antichoice family and friends is gentle reminders about how awesome prochoice is. For example: http://ow.ly/1WH2Q “Health-care law improves insurance coverage for pregnant women and new mothers.”
If the antichoicers can see how much good prochoicers do for pregnant women and mothers, they might change their mind or at least become less rabid.
Of course, when you have someone who refuses to even think about the issue and simply says “don’t have sex,” I don’t think there is much you can do. Because those people aren’t ready yet to actually think about the issue.
I’m extremely fortunate that my family is extremely pro-choice – not just my parents and sister, but aunts, uncles, cousins, my sister’s boyfriend, and my husband. But my mother-in-law is pretty neutral on the choice issue, and her family (lots of siblings, spouses of siblings, cousins, my husband’s grandparents) are all neutral to downright anti-choice. I haven’t had direct conversations with any of them about the choice issue, mainly because the topic has never come up. But I have talked with my mother-in-law about abortion, and while it was an awkward conversation at best, it was also incredibly educational for both of us. I was able to dismantle some of her assumptions, and she was able to show me how insidious such assumptions are, and that they aren’t necessarily driven by hate or prejudice (doesn’t make them right, of course).
With friends who have the “I’m pro-choice *but*…” attitude, my approach is similar – calm conversation, lots of questions about why they feel the way they do, and as many facts and different perspectives as I can share. This doesn’t always work, naturally, but I think a lot of times people (at least in my life) are more willing to have the discussion than not.
This is already a much longer comment than I intended, but I also wanted to echo something Shayna said – I’m also Jewish, and her comment about learning how to agree to disagree pretty early on is something I’m familiar with. And a pretty valuable tact, in a lot of situations!
Sophia, may I please ask you a question? You say your mom had a horrible abortion experience and was unable to become pregnant when she wanted to?
So are you a biological child to your mom that she was finally able to carry to term or were you given to her via adoption by another woman?
Also you mentioned being grateful to your mother for all the “things” she does for you, have you considered that, if she is your biological mom, that she gave you the opportunity to live so you could have the voice you have today?
Just curious.
Re Sophia’s comment:
I took a religious history course a couple terms ago and learned a great deal more about Catholicism including the fact that the Catholic church could not give one flying flick about “babys inside the womb” and/or abortion. In fact, for hundreds of years there were many parts of the Catholic church that actually supported abortion! Not until abortion and women’s rights movements(eeek) began to advance did the church consider the issue of abortion and the “sanctity of life beginning at conception” to be a worthy one (because it put them back in a position of power which they had been losing due to resurgence of the non-Catholic Christians in American politics) It was never politically advantageous of them to do so before that time.
@Sophia,
If that’s what you were taught in your course, then you were woefully misinformed.
The Catholic Church has always taught that abortion is wrong, as witnessed by documents from as far back as the late first century (such as the Didache and the Letter of Barnabas), and countless others in the almost 2,000 years between then and now.
My family and I split along every ideological line imaginable, something that began when I decided that I liked the Backstreet Boys and didn’t give a fuck that my skin was brown, and have continued to split from there.
I didn’t have the option of cutting my family out, and learned the hard way that I didn’t have the option of acquiescing to their beliefs either. You want to have your family behind you on things that are important to you, as our families are our earliest points of identity and self-formation, but after awhile you have to learn that they’re going to believe what they believe, and that you will too. And sometimes those things can never be mediated. And that’s okay.
I think that if you feel that your heart is in the right place and that what you believe is truly what you believe, that that’s all you’ll need to have peace with what they believe in. Once I felt confident that this is what I truly feel is right and validated my beliefs for myself, it was easier to deal with their ignorance on certain issues and with how close-minded they can be. You’ll be more at peace if you learn to accept that you can’t change people, and even more at peace if you can accept that you don’t have to change people to love them and understand what value they hold to your life otherwise.
I’ve found that a lot of ignorance comes from people feeling an inward sense of shame or guilt, or from feeling small and unheard, and haven’t developed healthy ways of coping with all of that, so these people project their ignorance outwards. Their position has no actual bearing on what is really right and what’s really wrong. I think that when you see ignorance from that perspective, it’s a lot easier to understand and doesn’t feel as threatening or undermining, and makes it a lot easier to both stomach it and debunk it.
@John Jansen- no the Catholic Church has not always been against abortion. It has always be sexist but that is another issue. The Catholic Church did not view abortion before “quickening”, when the woman felt the fetus kicking in her stomach, as something wrong and sinful. The fetus was not considered alive before then. It wasn’t until the 19th century did the Catholic Church start “caring” about the fetus.
My mom is one of the pro-choicers who thinks abortion is okay in certain circumstances but not others. The rest of my family is completely against abortion… as long as the woman having an abortion is a middle/upper class white woman. My family is also incredibly racist, homophobic, sexist, and classist. My family worships the ground Glenn Beck walks on. I’m a Marxist feminist, so we don’t agree on anything. Needless to say, I do discuss politics with my family when I see them, god knows why. However, after awhile you just realize you cannot make them change their beliefs no matter what. So I just ignore them and try not to only see them around the holidays. That is all you really can do. I’ve learned I could try to educate them on the world but they would rather believe the almighty Glenn Beck than me. When they are hopeless, there is nothing you can do. If you aren’t close with them, cut them out of your life. Otherwise, I recommend choosing to agree to disagree.
meant uterus not stomach. Its almost 4 in the morning, my bad. Though I am sure some people who don’t know anatomy do think its in her stomach…
My entire family is anti-choice, with the exception of me and my sisters. We started out anti-choice as well, but have become pro-choice because we actually thought about it instead of just accepting blindly what our parents taught us. With my extended family, I deal with it by just not talking about it. Everyone was accepting when I ended my pregnancy, but that was because the fetus couldn’t live outside of my body. That would not have been the case otherwise. My mom knows that I am pro-choice, but we simply don’t talk about it. My dad is disgutingly vocal about his anti-choice beliefs and I usually deal with it by leaving the room or the house. My two closest friends are not anti-choice but definitely not pro-choice. They are both really uncomfortable with abortion but don’t want it illegal. It’s a frustrating spot to be in, where my beliefs are so different from everyone I am close to, but I love my family so I just deal with it the best I can. I did defriend a person based on their anti-choice ranting on facebook though. It’s one thing if it’s a close friend or famiily. Casual acquaintences? I have no desire to have that in my life.
@ Colleen: I hope that wasn’t a poorly-disguised attempt at using the “but what if your mom had aborted you?” lame chestnut. The answer is still the same. If my mom had aborted me, I wouldn’t be here to care either way. End of story. (And in my case, since I care about my mom, I *would* want her to have that freedom of choice, that right, to have or not have a child as she alone determined – even if that meant I never existed. And no, I don’t hate myself; I have an almost obscenely high opinion of myself actually.)
My friends are all pro-choice, at least, that I know of. If I learned that someone I cared about was anti-choice it would definitely color my viewing of them negatively, and I doubt I’d go out of my way to befriend someone I knew for sure was hard anti-choice. I see that as a personal attack. How can you (generic you) claim to care for me and yet you’d deny me my right to freedom and autonomy? I understand why some women would not choose abortion for themselves and that part doesn’t bother me; what angers me is when those same people would take away ALL women’s rights. That’s where I get offended.
My family – some of them, anyway – are likely pro-choice (based on small comments we’ve exchanged in the past), though we don’t discuss the subject (mainly because they aren’t into discussions on anything at all), much though I would like to. (But we aren’t so close anyway so it’s probably just as well.)
There are at least two members of my family that I know of – one by marriage – that are vehemently anti-choice (I suspect marriage is what caused the blood relative to switch over, though I can’t confirm that – I also didn’t know the one was anti-choice until well after the fact). We’ve pretty much tacitly agreed not to talk about it either, because 1) we know we’ll never change each other’s minds, and 2) they’ve said some of the most ignorant and false things about abortion and birth control (one believes that garbage about the Pill being “abortive”) and stuff like that automatically sends me into a frothing rage. It’s as someone said, “you need to learn how to love someone without loving/needing to change the bad parts of them”, and I’m still learning how to do that.
Jameson posted:
“@ Colleen: I hope that wasn’t a poorly-disguised attempt at using the “but what if your mom had aborted you?” lame chestnut. The answer is still the same. If my mom had aborted me, I wouldn’t be here to care either way. End of story. (And in my case, since I care about my mom, I *would* want her to have that freedom of choice, that right, to have or not have a child as she alone determined – even if that meant I never existed. And no, I don’t hate myself; I have an almost obscenely high opinion of myself actually.)”
Bravo! This is exactly what I always tell anti-choicers who pull the “What if you had been aborted” argument, which is so lame. If I had been aborted, I wouldn’t be here to care. And it would mean that my mom had a choice, which is something that I would want for my mother, whom I love so much.
I actually posted something on Facebook yesterday about how it makes me sad the hoops some women have to jump through to get an abortion. Of course, friends (not people I am particularly close to anymore in part because of our differing views on almost everything “liberal”) were there to basically tell me I was wrong. One said that I shouldn’t “buy into the lie of ‘it’s a woman’s choice’ and ‘all the what-ifs’…” That friend is someone whom I know has had at least one abortion. I don’t understand how someone who has gone through it and benefitted from such a procedure can turn around and say that it’s wrong.
I usually choose not to talk to people whom I know are pro-life about the issue. It’s like politics or religion, it gets heated quickly. Sometimes, though, you have to stand your ground, and I try to do it in as educated and sane-sounding way as possible. And as long as they don’t try to press their views onto me, we’re okay. I offer them the same courtesy, even though I think they’re wrong. And it does put a barrier up on how close I let myself become to them.
I have a few ways of thinking through these conversations…
1) On especially cynical days, I remind myself that the previous generation’s anti-choice beliefs will die with them. This can be interpreted as being kind of mean so bear with me there are more strategies to follow. 😛
2) Background: My mother-in-law and my own parents are fundamentalist Christians. (Granted, my parents’ experiences of Christianity are tempered by their experiences as Chinese immigrants to Canada… but that’s for another day.)
I don’t make it a point to talk about politics with most of my family because I do often feel that my energies are better directed in -horizontal- directions. I’m spending my time making and maintaining political networks, building on historical precedents and opportunities, and enacting the kind of social change in my immediate communities that will have the most effects on the generation that I am a part of, and the generation(s) that are to come.
I’m not saying that we should give up on our families. They are oftentimes so very much a part of our lives in so many ways, and lovely people except for those unbearable things that they believe (which is a position I’m sure they share with us when they look at our lives and shake their heads at what we believe). But there are certain battles that I think I can win, and others that I don’t -need- to win. It’s a similar process to deciding if or when to tell someone I’ve had an abortion. Sometimes it is enough just to be the ideological thorn in someone else’s side… And all they need to know is that you don’t agree with them; they don’t need to believe what you believe too. In the meantime I make strong connections with people who -are- pro-choice/feminist/socialists, like my partner’s sister (who is also a dedicated pro-choice feminist) and cousins/cousins’ partners who are also pro-choice, and we solidify the next generation’s commitment to feminist social change.
3) Rosalind Pollack Petchesky’s work on the history of abortion and reproductive regulation in the USA is SO excellent (even though aspects of her book, “Abortion and Women’s Choice,” are now a bit dated seeing as it was last revised in 1990). One especially interesting point that she makes, which also helps me put these crazily difficult and emotionally explosive situations into context, relates to understanding the psychology of people who are rabidly anti-abortion. She notes that the fetus is the absolutely “pure and untainted” -screen- onto which people project their sense of lost innocence. Which is something we all probably know, or at least suspected, all along… There’s no arguing with the kind of painful traumas in people’s lives that are triggered when the topic of abortion and the images of fetuses arise. We were possibly/probably never a part of these traumas, though we might come too close to these traumas in our roles as children, nieces/nephews, grandchildren, younger siblings, etc… Sometimes it also helps to remember that these traumas aren’t our responsibility to resolve.
Good luck. We don’t always engage in these conversations in order to win them… We engage in them because it’s the right thing to do. I can only hope that your mother finds enough time and emotional space to forgive -herself- for the choices that she’s made… Really, you have my best.