An Open Letter to Republican Women #akin #rapeisrape
I know only about five of you will probably read this. I know you’re expecting that I will write to you with disrespect for your values or your religion or your beliefs about how governments should run.
I’m going to do my utmost not to do that to you.
I’m writing to you as a woman. Woman to woman. That’s all. Okay? You have female reproductive organs and so do I. You can get pregnant, so can I. You can get raped, so can I. No man can know exactly what it is like to live with those realities. We have some common ground here, ladies.
Women, whether republican or democrat, need to be the ones who decide what happens with their bodies. I understand that you may feel that tax payers should not have to pay for birth control, I understand that you may feel, very strongly, that abortion is murder. You may feel that it is a sin against God.
I don’t agree with you, but I understand and respect your point of view.
What I would like you to consider is that, regardless of how you feel on these issues, it is not men who should be deciding them. They don’t ever physically have to live with the outcomes of those decisions. We do.
I would also like you to consider that we are humans with free will. And that is a pivotal and fundamental aspect of religious devotion and secular humanism. We can agree that, if we have free will, we should take personal responsibility for our actions and the sins we might commit.
Can we agree on these things?
Birth control and abortion may offend you greatly. I don’t think there is anyone, on any side of the political divide, who believes that abortion is a good thing. But I think it is the individual who should be responsible for making the decision. Not a government, and certainly not a government run, primarily, by men.
Whether republican or democrat, the vast majority of women are intelligent, thinking beings. They are capable of deciding what to do with their bodies. You are capable of making good decisions for yourself. So am I.
And if one day, you or I were to be raped, forcibly or by bullying or coercion, and we were to become pregnant, I would want you to be the person who made the decision as to what to do about it. Not your father, your husband, your pastor, or a bunch of politicians who don’t know you and don’t live your life or inhabit your body. And I hope you would accord me the same freedom.
And, if you’re tremendously pro-life, and you feel that having an abortion is murder, and that, if I chose to abort that baby my soul will be condemned to an eternity in hell, then that’s fine. You have a right to feel that way. And you can rest assured that God will punish me accordingly. I just want you to allow me to make that decision myself.
That’s all.
I’m not asking you to vote democrat. I’m not asking you not to vote. I’m asking you, as women, to inform the republican debate on this issue with your voices. Because I think there are many republican women who are staying very quiet on this issue. And I don’t think that’s right.
That the women you are trying to reach with this open letter will ignore it, or perhaps read it and vehemently disagree with it is one of the reasons why I have little hope for the future. I hate to sound like I’ve admitted defeat – I honestly haven’t – but this ongoing celebration of willful ignorance in the United States fills me with dread. I’m a man who has, since Limbaugh’s tirade against Sandra Fluke, gotten into multiple debates with women, family and friends included, about their endangered reproductive (and other) rights. I refer to women who are god-fearing, and presumably well-meaning but completely out of their depth and unaware of the seriousness of the issue. I’m talking about an entire cohort that I suspect has been browbeaten into believing that they don’t deserve the same rights as men. That they are willing, even eager, to throw away their own basic rights is deplorable. Don’t get me wrong, no individual can be forced to embrace his or her rights; that’s why they are called rights, presumably, and not laws. It’s just that this mentality usually includes a drive to eliminate the rights of others as well.
Of late I’ve found myself telling the aforementioned women that just because they don’t plan to use birth control doesn’t mean they will never need to. Perhaps these women, should they ever be raped, plan to accept their rape-baby as a gift from God, just as Rick Santorum suggested they should. Maybe they believe Todd Akin’s inane claim that “legitimate rape” doesn’t lead to pregnancy. Whatever the case, it’s clear that they are so afraid of the prospect of an eternity in Hell – something that doesn’t stand up to rational thought – that they are willing to compromise everything that a sane, rational human being should hold dear. In my experience, most of these women don’t even realize that birth control offers a host of benefits not directly related to sex. Upon being confronted by such spectacular ignorance I was reminded that such people are entirely content to let another individual, typically a politician or religious leader, make up their minds for them.
I just went to Google, and in the search window I typed “birth control is”. The autocomplete feature, attempting to predict what I was going to type based on existing Google searches, guessed the following: “…sinful in the christian marriages”, “…bad”, “…wrong”, and “…abortion”. That’s all that came up. Not even “…legal”. Also, am I the only one that finds it distressing that sufficient numbers of individuals consider The Pill abortion for it to be part of Google’s autocomplete results? I thought the right-wing fundamentalists believed that life began at conception. Now they apparently think it begins before conception, since by taking a pill they believe you’re aborting a not-yet existent fetus. That, or they have no idea how birth control actually works.
The thing that people tend to overlook is that many right-wing fundamentalists lose their virginity long before marriage, despite what they would like their parents, their children, and their clergymen to believe. If the young Christian women I’ve known in my life are any indication, they are sexually active. But the difference between them and the rest of us is that they are taught their whole lives that premarital sex is morally wrong, they don’t plan to have sex, and therefore they aren’t prepared for it when it happens. They don’t know enough about their bodies to gauge their cycle and the likelihood of conception. They don’t use birth control. They don’t know how to put on a condom. And when they get pregnant, I imagine that many of them have to reconcile their desire to get an abortion with the belief that they will go to Hell for doing so.
Sorry. Once I feel a rant coming on I am powerless to keep it bottled up.
Well, I’m glad you didn’t keep it bottled up. And I’m glad you talk about it to people you know.
You wrote “they are so afraid of the prospect of an eternity in Hell – something that doesn’t stand up to rational thought – that they are willing to compromise everything that a sane, rational human being should hold dear”
This is what I find rather disturbing, because – operating on the same premise, and according to Christian doctrine – God doesn’t forgive you for doing rotten things just because you relinquished your decision-making abilities to others. According to even the most fundamentalist Christian doctrine, an individual is held morally responsible for their own actions.
And that is, to my mind, where we have some common ground. We can agree that both religion and rationalism, obligate adults to make decisions for themselves and take moral responsibility for them.
And so that’s where I feel is a good place to discuss this. Christian women who get raped, or get pregnant should be making decisions for themselves. And I support their right to decide anything they choose. And they need to support, not my actions, but my right to be the decision-maker.
There have been some extremely strong, extremely intelligent women who are on the ‘right’ side of the aisle. Very conservative, very Christian. And I’m positive they would not approve of having a government full of men take away their decision-making capacity. That’s really all I am looking for. Their voices.
It’s a start.
While rape involves sex, isn’t it really about power and domination; and the patriarchy?
And as for pregnancy, well until a few centuries ago, it was accepted that a woman had to orgasm to become pregnant. So if you said you were raped, but were pregnant, you must have enjoyed it, so it couldn’t be rape, could it? (It also says a lot about how men pleasured women.)
(Apologies; I’m neither a woman or a Republican.)
There will always be debates on the motivations behind why someone rapes. There will always be studies on historical attitudes towards rape, and examinations of contemporary beliefs about pregnancy. I just don’t think it helps to bring those things into the discussion. It just dilutes the debate.
For me, it comes down to something very simple. Here, now, at the beginning of the 21st century, is my body mine, or am I chattel. Should a government be allowed to trespass on my rights by forcing me to carry a pregnancy to term or not?
I think debates about whether birth control or abortion are right or wrong, and in what cases they might be acceptable have gotten us nowhere. There is no common ground in those discussions between the opposing sides.
What I hope we can all agree upon is that it is not appropriate for a government run, primarily, by men, to be the decision makers in this case. It’s a matter for a woman, her conscience and her God (if she has one).
I seek to understand motivations. If american men have what so me are strange ideas about rape and pregnancy (and sex in general) I remember that the country was founded by Puritans, and that their ideas and beliefs are still current, and embraced by politicians for their own ends. Yes, I agree with your proposition that the government has no place in adults’ sex lives; and that, as a man, I should have no power over birth control, abortion and what women do with their bodies. In the same vein, the “Swedish Model” is just as wrong.
I agree wholeheartedly with your position on everything you say here, with the exception of “The vast majority of women are intelligent, thinking beings”. I’d have written the majority, but not vast. I apply the same to men. The majority of us have the intelligence and capacity to think. But does that not still auger a need to help the minority, who either cannot, through poor social and educational backgrounds and, if it does, how can it be done, if not by some form of legislation. Don’t get me wrong here, I have no axe to grind and do feel there should be way more women in government then there are, but the majority / minority split is a crucial democratic issue.
By the way, I enjoyed reading this well written piece.
Yes, I do think there are women who, because of poor social or educational background, have a very difficult time making healthy decisions for themselves. However, they are not the majority. And on this issue, there is a large majority of intelligent, republican women who, I suspect, have not given voice to their opinions on this matter. Being a fiscal conservative does not necessarily mean that you are willing to let men legislate over what happens to your body. If we could get them speaking up first, it might help the others.
Yes that is the worst of crimes, not exercising your democratic ‘right’ (for which please read ‘moral obligation’) to vote and speak up. Either they are not speaking up for fear of rebuke or exposure within their own society, or they are so up their own backsides that they presume to believe that it would never happen to them, that “only bad girls get raped”..?. Sorry, I hope you don’t think that, as a man, I’m stepping out of line here, but the same kind of behaviours occur in men as in women in any area of political controversy, but this particular subject, like you have illuminated in this post, takes us back a hundreds of years to a feudal era, when women were treated as chattels. I wish, as you do, for a good political outcome in all this.
When I was growing up my Mum once told me that she felt sorry for men, because they would never know how it felt to live in a body that had the potential to bear human beings, that the uniqueness of having a womb is so deeply affecting that just having it there makes your life experience different.
That keeps coming back to me as I hear male Republican politicians making decisions for people living in bodies they cannot even begin to comprehend. Except now I don’t feel sorry for them, I feel angry.
Thank you, so much, for writing like this, so respectful, but so honest. The world needs more of this.
That is a fantastic letter. It needed to be said. I wholeheartedly agree. I intend to share a link to it, too, if you don’t mind.
I wish the women who need to heed it most will take it to heart. As someone currently condemned to live in a red state, surrounded by people who believe in abstinence in place of actual sex education, I have to say…I know those women won’t. The fear and ignorance of the Bible Belt is not to be believed by sane, educated people.
Yet the tone of the letter, I find, is something I find I miss in today’s America. I miss the ability we used to have to agree to disagree. You presented your views politely and respectfully, giving others room to disagree without name-calling, without bullying, without denigration.
They may not listen, but thank you for saying it, and for saying it in just that way.