Why bother asking when you “know” the RIGHT answer.

“What if your mother had aborted you?” is a sham question that fetus fetishists wave on their placards and scream in the faces of Pro-Choice supporters. Recently Frances Kissling gave a thoughtful and complex answer to that rhetorical query:

"As a fetus I would have gladly given up my chance to enter the world and become Frances Kissling to have given my mother a better chance at happiness. Far too much is made of a mother’s obligations to her children and far too little of what a child’s love for her mother means. If fetuses could love, I think they would be as passionate in defense of their mothers as born children become."

Yet Canada’s ubiquitous Blob Blogger, Babbling Bellicose Wingnut dismissed her response since it was not the Right answer. BBBBW “knows” what it is, though. How can she “know”? … Well, her religious dogma TELLS her so.

Religious fanatics who believe that human beings walked with dinosaurs and maintain that every word in the bible is true, cannot envisage any reality that is different from that which is defined by their church clerics.

Of course fetus fetishists would hate the thought of their non-existence because religious doctrine TELLS them that, even when each and every one of them was a mere clump of cells dividing, they were more important than the woman giving them life. Thus, fed by this egocentric perspective, abortion criminalizers will self-righteously label women who choose to terminate a pregnancy ’selfish’.

BBBBW’s inability to understand Kissling’s answer is a product of her knee-jerk obedience to religious ideology. Her thought processes are a literal extension of established Church doctrine. Zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, toddler are all the same, because her religious dogma tells her so.

The question: “What if your mother had aborted you?” is a very powerful one to consider. It is one that I pondered, as I grew up with the awareness that my existence was unintended. Quite likely, had reliable birth control or safe abortion been available to my mother, I would have not come into being. That knowledge does not make me feel angry or sad. It is what it is.

However, when I gave life and I gave birth to my daughter, it was a choice that I embraced, because I consciously and whole-heartedly made that decision. And my daughter grew up in the knowledge that she was a wanted child.

Yesterday was Mothers’ Day. The origins of the celebration is attributed to many traditions. In North America, historical research identifies social activist Julia Ward Howe …

[who] wrote the Mother’s Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament. Howe failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother’s Day for Peace. [She] was influenced by Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who, starting in 1858, had attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers’ Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.

Unfortunately, these courageous and one might say, feminist declarations in support of mothers’ concerns have been forgotten with the recent commercialization of Mothers’ Day. Fundamentalist religious organizations also promote and glorify ‘motherhood’, when it advances their goals. But their respect is only awarded to those who exemplify a specific, dogma-sanctioned type of mother.

Which would be irritating but acceptable, if fundamentalist fetus fetishists confined the enforcement of their doctrine to their own brethren. But they are attempting to bully everyone with the force of their religious rules, through proposed legislation such as private members’ Bills: C-484 and C-537.

One sane (rhetorical) response to their political manipulations is the oft-repeated chant:

Keep your rosaries off my ovaries!

First posted at Birth Pangs.