OK, I gave you one good thing from The Washington Post today. Now I’ll show you something not so good — an amazingly facile headline, leading to a story to match:
When I spoke to one of the nation’s most prominent anti-abortion activists this week, she was in the car, rushing to meet her 10-year-old daughter at the school bus.
“It’s not a very neat exercise,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, when I asked how she manages her work-life balance. Dannenfelser is the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which has grown to 330,000 members since she and a group of friends founded it in her living room in 1991….
Recent news stories about the new vitality of the anti-abortion movement and its legislative achievements — more than a dozen states enacting record numbers of abortion restrictions this year alone — have glossed over one crucial fact. The most visible, entrepreneurial and passionate advocates for the rights of the unborn (as they would put it) are women. More to the point: They are youngish Christian working mothers with children at home.
Really? I mean, where is the novelty in this? Are you saying you didn’t think there were women who opposed abortion? Or are you saying they weren’t feminine enough? I mean, Helen Alvaré (the first person I think of when I try to think of someone prominently identified with the pro-life movement) always seemed plenty feminine to me.
At first, I thought it was a typo. I thought that the Tweet where I saw it had been imperfectly typed or copied, and that it was supposed to say, “A feminist face for the anti-abortion movement.” There wouldn’t have been much new about that, either (I find that there are a gazillion kinds of feminists, with all sorts of views), but I could see how a copy editor who had really been sheltered — the kind who had only ever talked about such issues with people who look at the world one way — might write a headline like that. And I know plenty of such people.
But feminine? To begin with, most of the really prominent, passionate, committed people on both sides of the abortion issue tend to be women. And it has been thus for as far back as I recall being aware of such things — to Roe v. Wade, and earlier. When I think of the issue, I don’t even think of men. (I realize fully that it is very different for pro-choice feminists, who think entirely in terms of opposition to abortion being some male plot to oppress them — the currently popular overwrought phrase being “war on women.”)
The writer of this story explains the headline thusly: “These women represent a major strategic shift in the abortion war, and not just because they are generally more likeable than the old, white fathers of the pro-life movement: Jerry Falwell, Henry Hyde, Jesse Helms and Pat Robertson…”
Say what? Who in the world cares what those guys thought? I mean, having Jerry Falwell or any of those other guys take a certain position has always been, to me (and I would think to most sensible people) a reason not to agree with that position. They weren’t advocates, in the sense of anyone who might go out there and change anyone else’s mind. Those guys were cartoons; they were not factors in the minds of serious people.
When I think back to when I was forming my own thoughts on this issue — which I roughly place at the point when I started college, a couple of years before Roe — I remember the main influences on me being very strong, committed women. Off the top of my head, I can only remember two guys with whom I discussed the issue at any length during that time in my life, and they were pro-choice (although a painful personal experience later in life changed the mind of one of them, while a similar experience confirmed the other in his original position.).
I remember one woman in particular, from a few years later than that, and she is the reason I’m writing this post — because I think she had some influence on why I have an instinctive aversion to the approach of Occupy Wall Street (how’s that for throwing you a curve?). This was back in Tennessee.
I can’t remember her name now, but I remember what she looked like. Partly because she was strikingly good-looking. No one would ever have doubted her gender, or her femininity — although it wasn’t the kind of prissy look that many associate with the word. She had a dramatically good figure, which was generally casually dressed in pants and a knit top, and dark hair with a few premature gray highlights. I’m thinking she was 30ish. She was very fit. I recall her mentioning going running at night, like around 10:30, and I questioned the wisdom of her doing that alone, but I only mentioned it once. I’m sure if her husband ever expressed concern over that practice, she was just as dismissive of him. She was very confident.
I knew her from the church folk choir. This was the early 80s, and I was a brand-new Catholic. I could strum chords on a guitar, and figured I could put that to use for my parish. She — I’d better make up a name for her, to make this easier to write. I’ll call her Beth; that seems to fit.
Anyway, she and one other woman sort of ran that group, and I mostly stood back and strummed. We were all friends, and we got along great. I was vaguely aware that Beth was involved with a pro-life group, and seemed to approach it in exactly the same way she had approached her deep opposition to the Vietnam War — in the street, at the fore, on the ramparts.
This was confirmed for me in the fall of 1982. My newspaper, The Jackson Sun, was sponsoring a debate in the U.S. Senate race between the incumbent Democrat, Jim Sasser, and Republican Robin Beard. We had rented the Jackson civic center for the purpose. As one of the editors in charge of the event, it fell to me to go out and tell the various demonstrators for various causes outside that they were welcome to come in, but only if they left their signs outside and didn’t disrupt.
Next thing I knew, “Beth” was in my face, quietly literally, loudly denouncing me as the Establishment oppressor trying to silence her authentic voice. She was immune to reason. I was shocked. I mean, I agreed with her completely on the issue, but I wasn’t going to say that, because that was not my role. I was there to foster rational debate, not this chanting in the street stuff. Sasser (the true object of her ire, which also seemed off-base, he was such a bland guy) deserved to be heard, and so did Beard, without unruly cheering sections.
She was a reasonable, intelligent, warm, personable woman the rest of the time. But put her on the street with a sign in her hand and she was — I don’t know, Madame Defarge or something.
I don’t remember how we resolved that — whether she and her folks eventually came in and behaved themselves, or stayed outside chanting. I just remember the extreme discomfort of that moment of unnecessarily emotional confrontation. I remember thinking, This is no way to express or advocate political ideas.
And I still think that today.
