It's no big secret that I don't want kids, as one might be able to deduce from my Ted Kaczynski-esque manifesto aimed at people who are not my husband but who still feel compelled to be all up in my vagina. I suppose it can be boiled down to: I DO NOT LIKE PEOPLE AND KIDS ARE PEOPLE TOO.
Babies are cute, sure, but eventually they turn into that 40-year-old balding, unemployed guy who thinks he's chatting to a 13-year-old hottie online but who ends up on Dateline NBC instead and tries to claim he showed up for the free brownies and lemonade.
Not that I'm completely asocial. I like some people. In small doses. Preferably with contact mostly through an electronic box I can turn on and off at my convenience.
When I look around me and see terrorists hopped up on coke taking out hundreds of hotel guests and travelers, small-town Americans going into apocalyptic mode because a negro is their new president, and adult men who wear pink Crocs and speedos to the beach, the last thought I have is, "My God, we need more of this."
If you told me that you discovered through intense therapy that you're an apotemnophiliac and the only way to put your mind at rest is to go to an illegal basement clinic in Queens and have your leg chopped off, that would make more sense to me than the desire to have kids.
But I'm not a nun, so there's always the risk of pregnancy should my womb cease being inhospitable to foreign invaders, and for that, I'm grateful that abortion is available to me as a legal option. A child should be wanted, not a punishment.
For women in countries like Brazil, though, even if they escape the punishment of an unwanted pregnancy by seeking illegal abortions, some are finding themselves being punished by the legal system for taking control of their bodies and their futures.
In the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, justice officials have indicted 150 women for the crime of having an abortion, while 37 were found guilty and 26 were sentenced to "alternative punishments" (which is better than the 1-3 years in prison they could have faced). The case came to light after officials searched through a clinic's medical records.
In total, 1,500 women (down from the initial 10,000) who went to the clinic in the city of Campo Grande are being investigated based on medical evidence, such as ultrasounds that confirmed their pregnancies.
The judge in the case said an invasion of privacy, including interviewing husbands and ex-boyfriends, is necessary in order to examine the sexual lives of the women and to, I assume, prove they're nothing but baby-killing whores who nonchalantly fit in an abortion before their mani-pedi and to shame them for this trespass. To aid the shaming process, the names of the women were briefly available to the public.
When Sarah Palin was announced as the GOP vice presidential candidate, women shrugged their shoulders at her radical pro-life stance because for a large number of us, abortion has always been accessible and we can't imagine what an America without it would look like. But Mato Grosso do Sul is showing us the natural conclusion to the American pro-life movement, and I don't think most Americans want a return to inquisitions of the Middle Ages.
Friday, December 5, 2008
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2 comments:
i read about that, too. it's really, really, really horrifying. i've decided not to write about it, however, since i've already had one death threat as it is and i'd like to keep those to a minimum. i almost broke up with my boyfriend when i found out he was pro-life. since then, he has become much more open-minded (read: i helped show him the way), but he still doesn't quite get it, and i get the impression that a lot of brazilians see abortion quite differently than some americans do. it's one of the things that's keeps brazil in the so-called 3rd world.
Even though Brazil is slowly starting to modernize for women, there's still "saudades da Amélia" lingering in the air. Of course, you see that attitude in the US too, with articles in men's magazines bemoaning that they can no longer be juvenile assholes who have a woman to clean up all their messes.
But look at Orkut and the number of communities for "I want to be a mom!" "My dream is to be a mom!" or "I want to get married and be a mom!" Sure, marriage and kids are the status quo even for Americans, but you're not going to see the sheer volume of groups dedicated to it on Facebook or MySpace.
There's a lot of pressure for Brazilian women to marry and to have kids, even if it's not what they genuinely want, and with the macho mentality that's all too common, it's difficult for both men and women to imagine a life where you don't follow the typical path. I think that's where much of the pro-life belief comes in. Women are SUPPOSED to want kids, women are MEANT to be pregnant, ergo what unwomanly, selfish monster would seek an abortion?
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