Skip to main content

I: mother, daughter, thinker, healer, writer, fighter, wife. I. I--not some mindless life--am woman!

By Valerie Tarico ~

In the storm of controversy surrounding the (pink ribbon, race for the cure) Komen Foundation’s decision to defund breast care at Planned Parenthood--and their subsequent reversal--people I call pro-birth are out in force. They talk as if they alone know what is good or, as many of them claim, Godly. On the Komen Facebook page, one sneered at those of us he sees as hypocrites because we value both the work that Planned Parenthood does to save women’s lives and their contraceptive and abortion services. Abortion kills 25 million women a year, he said.

Abortion kills 25 million women a year, he wrote. 

Women.

Women. Women?

I’ve grown used to the ways that these people, the pro-birthers, caught in the righteous certainty that all life and death choices should be theirs, manipulate our instinctive desire to protect children from suffering and harm: “It has a heart-beat.” “It has fingernails.” “It has a head.” I get annoyed, but I have my mantras too. “A fly has a heartbeat.” “It has an empty cranium.” “It’s a half-inch long.”

But women?! I am woman. I am more than my heart-beat and fingernails. I am more than my skull. I am –speechless, so insulted that I am left staring at the wall when I try to find words for the feeling in my gut.

Let me tell you about woman.

I am woman because I spent a long time being a girl, and a teenager, awkwardly trying to find my place among friends, trying to pray away bulimia, trying to find the clothes that would make my sturdy Italian body beautiful.

I am woman because my husband loves me, and his love nourishes me, and because my mother loved me before him and nourished me for nine months from her body, then another nine from her breasts and another seventeen years from her kitchen table.

I am woman because the world’s pain calls to me; makes me ache, leaves me certain that I will never be completely content with my little heaven while others are suffering in some version of hell.

I am woman because my legs are scarred from surgeries and broken bones, and my joints twinge, and my belly has wrinkles from carrying two daughters.

I am woman because I lie awake at night making lists of little things: the blackberry pastry I promised the girls, a call from my mother I forgot to return, the thermostat on the oven, the stains on the couch, the appointment with the pediatric orthopedist.

I am woman because I have had migraine headaches that took me to the emergency room, because I have known the death of a parent, because Schindler’s List left my body and soul shaking.

I am woman because I aborted a pregnancy we both wanted.

I am woman because I am never fully free of the fear of men, their ability to physically force me, to force my daughters, to force my sisters, to leave us torn or dead.

Tell her I am no more precious to you than an embryo.I am woman because I can remember the hot Arizona pavement on my bare feet and Puget Sound in August so cold I could barely breathe.

I am woman because my friends demand my company when I get too cave-bound, and feed me dark chocolate, and tell me that my writing is unnecessarily rude.

I am woman because I am fully a person. In me the universe is momentarily, minutely self-conscious. I know myself to be. I feel pleasure and pain. I can form preferences and intentions. I can lie awake in bed angry to the bone because someone values my life no more than that of an embryo.

If I could stand before that righteous pro-birther, the one on the Komen page, I would say to him. “I want you to look my daughter in the eyes and tell her I am no more precious to you than an embryo or fetus or near-infant. I want you to look my mother in the eyes and tell her that I was just as valuable before her body went to the work of closing my neural tube and developing my digestive system, before she went to the trouble of hanging 4000 diapers in the sun, before she made all those trips to the library, before she sat at the graduation ceremonies she had earned. Tell them.”

The pro-birthers are smart when they call what grows in a woman’s womb a baby or child or person. They know that those terms mean something sacred to us, they elicit a complex of emotions, intuitions and obligations that go deeper and wider than our rational minds can grasp. The blueprint that gets locked in when a sperm fertilizes an egg, the microscopic blastocyst, the embryonic lizard-thing, or the humanoid fetus with a hollow head isn’t substantial enough on its own to trump the hard won personhood of women.

It’s wisdom born of pain, I say to my daughters. But look how much I’ve gained. If you have to, you can do anything. You are strong. You are woman.
______________________________
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~   S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden –  Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we

Morality is not a Good Argument for Christianity

By austinrohm ~ I wrote this article as I was deconverting in my own head: I never talked with anyone about it, but it was a letter I wrote as if I was writing to all the Christians in my life who constantly brought up how morality was the best argument for Christianity. No Christian has read this so far, but it is written from the point of view of a frustrated closeted atheist whose only outlet was organizing his thoughts on the keyboard. A common phrase used with non-Christians is: “Well without God, there isn’t a foundation of morality. If God is not real, then you could go around killing and raping.” There are a few things which must be addressed. 1. Show me objective morality. Define it and show me an example. Different Christians have different moral standards depending on how they interpret the Bible. Often times, they will just find what they believe, then go back into scripture and find a way to validate it. Conversely, many feel a particular action is not

On Living Virtuously

By Webmdave ~  A s a Christian, living virtuously meant living in a manner that pleased God. Pleasing god (or living virtuously) was explained as: Praying for forgiveness for sins  Accepting Christ as Savior  Frequently reading the Bible  Memorizing Bible verses Being baptized (subject to church rules)  Attending church services  Partaking of the Lord’s Supper  Tithing  Resisting temptations to lie, steal, smoke, drink, party, have lustful thoughts, have sex (outside of marriage) masturbate, etc.  Boldly sharing the Gospel of Salvation with unbelievers The list of virtuous values and expectations grew over time. Once the initial foundational values were safely under the belt, “more virtues'' were introduced. Newer introductions included (among others) harsh condemnation of “worldly” music, homosexuality and abortion Eventually the list of values grew ponderous, and these ideals were not just personal for us Christians. These virtues were used to condemn and disrespect fro