Letter to a Bumper Sticker

This article was just so great I had to reprint it here.  That, and I'm too lazy to write anything original at the moment.  It was written by Cate Odonnell at Drake University and I'm very jealous that I didn't write it. Enjoy.

I would like to take a moment to acknowledge my favorite bumper sticker I used to see in the Goodwin-Kirk parking lot. I’m talking, of course, about the one that asks me, “Aren’t you glad your mother was pro-life?”

Good call, bumper sticker. Yes, all people who give birth are automatically pro-life. But just for argument’s sake, what might it be like to have one of those crazy, baby-eating, pro-choice mothers?
Bumper sticker, it might interest you to know that I personally have one of those baby-eating mothers. “But that’s impossible,” you might say. “You have not been eaten and surely you were once a baby.”

Well played, bumper sticker. One of the choices offered by being pro-choice is giving birth. My baby-eating mother didn’t decide to keep me out of fear, lack of access to a safe, legal abortion or because she saw a creepy pro-life billboard. In fact, it would seem that she kept me because she wanted me. Sometimes baby-eaters do stuff like that.

Pro-life is an interesting term, actually. The men and women who are truly pro-life are awesome. You can tell they’re awesome because they do such things as help pregnant women access prenatal resources and help parents locate health care, childcare and other support they need. Rather than guilting women or taking away their rights, some pro-life organizations also look at more successful ways of lowering the number of abortions, such as educating people about using birth control and preventing unwanted pregnancies. Avoiding unwanted pregnancies means fewer abortions, which means everyone wins. Go ahead and give the people who fall into this category a high-five. I like them.

Interestingly enough, though, many people who call themselves pro-life would more appropriately fit under the title of anti-choice. I’ve noticed that a solid chunk of the people who claim to be pro-life actually do more to reduce my autonomy than to increase the chance of life or the quality of life of my future children.

If you’re confused about whether you’re pro-life or anti-choice, here’s a litmus test: Are you forcing your religious convictions on me? Then you are anti-choice. Are you harassing a woman entering Planned Parenthood, intentionally and cruelly making a difficult day harder for her? Anti-choice again. Do you feel that cells in my body have more rights than I do? Anti-choice. Are you holding up a sign that confuses the terms “zygote,” “embryo” or “fetus” with an incorrect term like “baby” or “child?” Well, that doesn’t make you anti-choice as much as scientifically inaccurate and rhetorically misleading. But you still don’t qualify as pro-life. Boom. Roasted.

Moreover, when women are no longer able to get abortions for life-endangering pregnancies, it seems less pro-life and more pro-death. Also falling under pro-death: limiting safe and legal abortions for women, causing an increase in illegal “back alley abortions.” According to the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, 47,000 women worldwide died from unsafe abortions in 2008, not including the women with serious infections and lifelong physical and emotional scars. Don’t limit my right to a safe abortion and tell me you’re pro-life. Just don’t.
I’ll be real with you, pro-life bumper sticker. If I were to have any other kind of medical procedure and you interfered with it, I would judge you hardcore. There is, for instance, no need for you to protest my knee surgery with offensive signs. If you attempted to pass legislature to make knee surgery more difficult to get, then that would be a jerk move. Ditto in trying to ensure that my insurance wouldn’t cover that knee surgery. When it’s all said and done, I feel like you have no business being involved in my knee surgery at all, really. Seeing, you know, as it is a private medical procedure and also not your knee.

So how do we meet in the middle when you think I’m a baby killer and I think you’re laying claim to my uterus? You may be able to tell from aforementioned comments that I have a few opinions on abortion, and I am not free from blame when I say that as students at Drake, we have polarized the issue to the extent that almost all we can do is close our minds. The crosses in Helmick Commons last year signifying “dead babies” was probably not the most persuasive gesture Drake Respect for Life could have imagined (especially since I find it presumptuous that my embryo would have a cross. Are all “dead babies” automatically Christian now?). Likewise, if you’re one of the people who took those crosses or otherwise destroyed that display, you did absolutely nothing but prove your intolerance to other points of view. Good work, kids.

I would like to call a truce of sorts. As pro-choice Drake students, is it possible that we don’t tear down signs that promote Respect for Life and its events? In fact, what if we go to the events and try to understand their members’ perspectives? They had a non-polarizing speaker come to campus last year that said women don’t have access to or knowledge of resources and options besides abortion. What up, compromise? At the same point, it would be nice if the most recent pro-life speaker on campus didn’t lump together homosexuality, abortion, child abuse and the Holocaust. I can’t say those arguments convinced me of anything besides a misunderstanding of every issue, ever.

What if we had conversations around abortion instead of debates? Discussion around the issue of abortion is important, whether it is in classes, in print or in chalk. Perhaps we could see each other as intelligent and opinionated individuals instead of monsters. It would be nice to see collaborative programs educating students about reproductive rights and issues, and it would be great if you stopped assuming things about my mom. I dream of a day when outspoken pro-choice supporters and passionate pro-lifers can walk hand-in-hand and be judged not by their stances on abortion, but by their willingness to open their minds and respect each other’s seriously misguided perspectives.

Boom. Put that on a bumper sticker.

By the Numbers

My brother and I tend to call each other when we're out driving and we see interesting bumper stickers.  The other day, he called me and said he was sitting behind someone with a bumper sticker that read, "1 in 4 babies dies from choice."  We both thought that number seemed a bit off, so I did some Google-ing and found this at the Guttmacher Institute website:

"Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion."

So I guess that number was (fairly) accurate.

What interested me more, though, was the statistic I found right above that one:

"Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended."  Wow.

So then I thought, I wonder what the stats are in Europe, where they are much more open about sexuality and provide comprehensive sex ed and easier access to abortion.

I couldn't find useful comparisons on the whole population, since I'm lazy and unwilling to go past the first page of Google results, but I did find a teen comparison on the Advocates for Youth Site.  According to their numbers:

"In the United States, the teen abortion rate is twice that of Germany and more than 1.5 times that of the Netherlands. "

You can read their full report here: http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=419&Itemid=177

So what does this tell me?  Our abortion rate could be much lower than it is if we quit insisting on turning a blind eye to the realities of sex.  We seem to tell kids, "Sex is dirty, scary and dangerous, so you should save it for the person you really love and never give it to anyone else."  How realistic is that point of view?

Does it make me sad that our abortion rate is practically 25%?  I guess.  But not because I think "babies" are dying.  It's because I think many of the women who have been put in a position to choose abortion may not have had to do so if they had reasonable access to birth control and education.

Bumper Sticker Blues

So I’m driving to my friend’s house the other day, and as I pull onto the highway, I notice a car in the left lane that’s quickly catching up to me.  The car pulls up alongside me and honks vigorously.  I turn to look thinking maybe it’s somebody I know, and see the driver leaning over the passenger seat (and whoever’s sitting in it) to give me a hearty thumbs down sign.  He then starts pointing towards the back of my car. 

My first thought was, “is my back tire flat?” It’s happened before that another motorist pointed out a flat tire to me.  But then I realize, no, he’s pointing to my bumper sticker that reads “Pro-Child, Pro-Family, Pro-Choice” and showing his disapproval by giving me a thumbs down.

I then slowed down to make sure he got ahead of me a little bit, and by the time I turned left off the highway, he was on my right honking again as he drove by.

I can only assume that he thinks his big display will somehow make me pause and reconsider my point of view, which is asinine because I clearly have a strong enough view of my own on the issue to place a bumper sticker on my car in the first place.

I can also only assume he really could care less about the actual baby sitting directly behind me in the backseat whose life he was endangering by distracting me from driving at 70 mph, not to mention the two children he had in his backseat who apparently weren’t important enough to keep his eyes on the road for.  He seems to care more about theoretical fetuses than about the living, breathing children we were both hauling in our backseats.

So presumably this guy doesn’t care what choice you make, as I clearly chose to have a baby.  He just cares about making sure women have no choice at all.  And he seems to think endangering the life of my baby is an appropriate way to share his opinion.

What a jackass.

Bumper Sticker Logic

I put a bumper sticker on my car the other day that reads "Pro-Child, Pro-Family, Pro-Choice."  I'm a little nervous about it.  Every time I go to the grocery store now I'm waiting for someone to come up and start yelling at me.  I try to avoid bumper stickers because they don't generally change anyone's mind about anything, but I've gotten so tired of seeing pro-life bumper stickers all over town and figured maybe it would uplift some of my pro-choice neighbors to see that they're not alone (if in fact they exist at all).

Here's a rough sampling of the bumper stickers that are very common around here:
-Choose Life
-I'll keep my guns, freedom, and money. You keep the change.
-If Obama's the answer, it must have been a stupid question.
-Abortion stops a beating heart.
-TEA - Taxed enough already
-Work Harder - Millions on welfare depend on you

Not to mention the hundreds of Christian fish I'm stuck looking at in traffic every day.

You see what I'm up against?