Then he came to one of my classes and pulled me into the hallway to talk. There, he threatened to kill me if I didn’t have an abortion.
Though abortion had been the only thing on my mind, when he said that to me, I suddenly understood that violence and oppression were not the answer. I’d already taken biology, so I guess I knew that human sperm-egg fusion at fertilization creates a new, distinct, living human. I just don’t think I’d cared that abortion intentionally ended that tiny child’s life until I was threatened, too.
In that moment, as a liberal feminist and awkward queer kid, I became a bridge as I comprehended the vulnerability of prenatal children and felt a solidarity with them. I recognized that what my ex was telling me was, “You’re an inconvenience to me and my future, therefore I’m going to kill you.” I recognized that I couldn’t say the same thing to another human being.
And I recognized in that moment that abortion was a tool of the patriarchy, a tool to dispose of inconvenient people the same way that my ex-boyfriend wanted to dispose of me. So then and there, I became committed to a way of nonviolence, a way of rejecting and standing up to oppression, a way of life.
I’d been fairly young when I realized I didn’t “fit in.” Eventually, after experience, that feeling extended to understanding myself as a conscientious objector to the culture war.
This wasn’t about being a moderate, but about passionately standing for human rights for all humans in a culture that was so used to choosing one or the other — pro-immigrant or pro-life, anti-death penalty or anti-euthanasia, and so on. As a young adult, I think I understood that I was going to have to survive in hard spaces, not just building a bridge, but being the bridge between often disparate camps.
In the months and years that followed, I found myself caught up in the tension between stereotypically leftish feminists, atheists, LGBTQ+ advocates, progressives and liberals on one side, and the stereotypically right-leaning pro-lifers on the other. I experienced what a mentor once aptly put into words: “Being a bridge means existing in tension, and sometimes being walked all over without a thought.”
Because in the process of rejecting the tendentious dehumanization and othering of the culture war, I got caught up in the crossfire. I faced countless “No True Scotsman” fallacies, hatred, bigotry and alienation.
When I reverted to Catholicism as a twenty-something, I found myself resonating with the verse from Matthew: “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.” In a world so steeped in a culture war that makes casualties left and right, refusing to throw certain humans under the bus is tantamount to treason.
As we face yet another heated, polarizing flashpoint in the culture war with the potential of Roe’s end in the Dobbs decision, I’m reminded that the solution to this tired culture war isn’t going to be for one side to “win,” because none of these “sides” truly embrace the whole picture of human dignity and human rights. The solution is going to be in rehumanization — in authentic, consistent care for each and every human being, beyond the dehumanizing and polarizing partisan rhetoric we’re saturated in daily.
The solution is going to start with people of goodwill existing in a posture of humility, curiosity and compassion, as we endeavor to constantly remember that those “on the other side” ordinarily have good intentions. We need to come together in a meaningful way that flouts the “culture war,” to build solutions that ensure no pregnant person, nor their preborn child, nor their family, falls through the cracks.
So while I celebrate in hope for the possibility of protecting prenatal humans in our laws, I also recognize that many abortion rights supporters who are lashing out in fear have valid concerns.
People of goodwill — on all sides of this issue — must work diligently and urgently to create and enact policies and systems that will reduce the perceived need for abortion and meet the needs of pregnant people: things like ample paid family leave; a child tax credit; restorative justice after abortion; universal childcare and healthcare including culturally competent antenatal, postpartum and lactation care; guaranteed housing, food, water and basic income; and compassionate medicine for ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages, to name a few.
Instead of retreating to our respective silos in fear, we must conscientiously object to culture war dehumanization, reach across seemingly contentious divides to be a bridge, and heal our communities to build a culture of peace.
Venerable Fulton Sheen said this, “the devil appears as the representative of good. No one does evil for the mere sake of evil. evil is done for the seeming good that is in it. the devil knows that we are not so depraved that we want to do evil.”
you make no bridges, but you are a poison pill, something I am sure you believe gives some “will to power” you have convinced yourself you have.
The ancient Syrians came up with the word “mammon” (lit. “cruel master,” but better translated as “false God”) to describe what the pagans worshipped due to all the absurd practices that all involved the total degradation of Humanity if not outright Human sacrifice in delusion it would make the practitioner become like a “god” if they did it. By the time of Christ, mammon had come to derisively mean money because the ancient pagans figured out that people would degrade Humanity and sacrifice other people (especially Babies) for a few coins, no need to repeat the devil’s lie that “ye will be like gods.”
I see in your principle and laundry list of demands that very same mammon often repeated today: “give us free s-t or the Baby gets it!” The difference between you and your typical leftist is you absurdly believe those demands are in earnest.
In this you exemplify Chesterton speaking in “eugenics and other evils”:
“I know it is praised with high professions of idealism and benevolence; with silver-tongued rhetoric about purer motherhood and a happier posterity. But that is only because evil is always flattered, as the Furies were called “The Gracious Ones.” I know that it numbers many disciples whose intentions are entirely innocent and humane; and who would be sincerely astonished at my describing it as I do. But that is only because evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.“
the welfare state has been tried MANY times before, and the usual adage of “who pays the piper chooses the tune” never changes. Much like how you are desperate to be used by your masters (of which you cannot have two, no matter how hard you boast about being of God, vestigial second), the “free lunches” you demand as the singular value of Human Life were always just a bait for the slaughterhouse.
More importantly, exposing your lack of God, your sneering of Christendom as “patriarchy” and replacing what is Good and True with total slavery to government. You remind me of someone mocking your position online, they said this:
the world demands being Pro-Life is to be more palatable if we concede everything else to government. If so, then why is it that:
1) in western europe, where they have all of the free lunches you beg for, being pro-life is seen of as a total joke; all because it gets in the way of slavish “convenience” to the god-state, leviathan.
2) in the past, each of these “conveniences” have been lead not only to mass death, but the population in loud support of the mass death.
Going back to western europe, multiple copies of the nazi t4 program have popped up, and it is nearly illegal to be against them with how much the people fully support satanic rituals there.
the european pagans have simply supplanted the worst satanic ritual of all (“abortion”) with the third worst of suicide. since “abortion” is the only thing evil enough to get the devil’s attention, and europe already belongs to the devil fully, there is little reason for those who actively practice what you insist “has never been tried” to call on their master. they get their fill of death in desperate sacrifices from suicide and total impotence instead.
the us populace does not belong to the devil, which is why the government and their slaves that do belong to the devil scream like demons about to be exorcised at the winnowing of their ability to get their master’s attention.
you have no answer to this. you were not programmed with an answer to this. you are a trojan horse. The right who stepped on you could see inside you, and were horrified. the left who stepped on you could only see your fake appearance, screamed “why is this warhorse of ours made of wood instead of flesh!?”
you’re trying to play checkers for the other side without admitting it to yourself; but you are really a dangerous pawn in a complex chess game.
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