Watching the Palin/Couric interviews
You know the whole pro-life even in cases of rape and incest thing? I get that. I do. Because if you truly believe every embryo at conception is a person like I am a person sitting here typing, you can’t quibble. You can’t say it’s ok here but not there. (And I have to add here that I’m bothered by this assumption that every pro-choice woman would handle an unexpected pregnancy the same way; that one has to be politically pro-life to carry a child to term who was conceived by rape. That’s simply not true. Pro-choicers believe that it’s a personal CHOICE, which doesn’t mean that we would all make the same choice whatever the circumstances. I know politically pro-choice women who have given birth to children conceived by rape. It’s about CHOICE; not mandates.)
So that — while I philosophically disagree with it — I get.
But I don’t get her willingness to trudge forward even though she is so obviously unprepared to be president. And I don’t get why people are still voting because they “like” her. Listen, I like my mom a whole lot. I love her politics and she’s a helluva lot more informed than Ms. Palin but I sure wouldn’t vote for her to be vice president. It’s not a learn as you go job.
I’m intrigued that she calls herself a feminist. In my mind, CHOICE is central to feminist belief. Not just (and not necessarily) reproductive choice. Although I find that absolutely unequivocally at the heart of my feminism, I understand that if you truly think an embryo ought to have the same human rights as a child that you just can’t go there. (It bothers me that you want to stop anyone else from going there either but I get it.) But other choices matter, too. I don’t know how she feels about supporting programs that give women choices because she wouldn’t talk to Moms Rising about it. That her office wouldn’t even let them drop off a stack of paper doesn’t reassure me.
Note — she says she wants to make adoption easier. Easier how? And for whom? Adoptive parents who adopt newborns from private agencies (you know, adoptions that are held up as the great alternative to abortion) already get huge tax breaks. So now are you going to eliminate homestudies so we don’t have to clean our houses and answer all those pesky questions? Maybe she means easier by creating a plethora of infants available for our hungry little homes.
Or does she mean she’ll make it easier for women to place? How’s she going to do that? It’s already pretty easy to find someone who’s willing to get your baby adopted away from you — especially if you’re white and healthy. Boy howdy is it easy! Just set up a myspace mentioning that you’re young and pregnant and out come the wolves! (That link goes to Jenna’s blog — if you haven’t read that post yet, you should. It will make you insane.)
Yeah, I’m not getting that whole “easier to adopt” thing. (She said this during the interview where they talked about evolution, charging for rape kits, and whether or not she’s a feminist.)
Oh one more thing. I HATE how often she uses passive sentences. Yikes. She’s never doing stuff — stuff is getting done. “Adoptions to be made easier” not “make adoptions easier” or “make it easier to adopt.” MS Word’s grammar check would have a field day with her!
I don’t think her being pro-life disqualifies her as a feminist. I think her continually voting against or speaking out against issues that are important to women and children may. Things like signing off on the rape kit controversy, lowering funding for a program that works with teen moms, cutting special ed funding.
She may think equal pay for equal work is the only issue you need to worry about as a feminist (though I haven’t seen anything that shows she has done any real work for that). Maybe she thinks she is a feminist because she believes she is qualified to do jobs that are primarily given to men.
I don’t care what she calls herself, as long as she never calls herself vice-president.
I believe it should be much easier to adopt.
What I mean is that the children who really need adopting (older kids, major special needs and large sibling groups) need to be supported more in finding families. The current system is too slow, inefficient and lets too many kids fall through the cracks.
But I think when politicians say “make adoption easier” they mean something totally different… they’re vaguely referring to private infant adoption. It’s irritating, especially since there’s more state adoption than there is private adoption, if you look at the statistics.
Right, Atlasien, because when they’re talking about adoption as an alternative to abortion, they’re not addressing the needs of kids in foster care.
That’s something else that bugs me — the co-opting of National Adoption Month (meant to highlight the needs of kids in the foster care system) sometimes gets co-opted by domestically adopting parents. (I’m looking at you, Sheryl Crow!)
“I understand that if you truly think an embryo ought to have the same human rights as a child that you just can’t go there. (It bothers me that you want to stop anyone else from going there either but I get it.)”
I’ve thought about this one, and I *don’t* get it, because I don’t think we have the right to demand the physical burden of pregnancy from another human being, even if it is the only way to save the embryo (which we are presuming is considered human in this instance). I analogize this to donating an organ or donating blood, which cannot be compelled from one human to benefit another their will.
Fine to apply whatever moral pressure one thinks is appropriate, but not legal.
Make no mistake about it: this election is a referendum on abortion. The right-to-lifers are *so close* to repealing Roe v Wade in this election, I can hear them salivating. The economy is a red herring, deliberately placed in this time frame to instill fear and sway voters to vote Republican and stay with the devil they know than go with the devil they don’t know. This psychology has worked before. There will be no debate — absolutely no dithering — over the abortion issue, despite what you may think. Voters that disagree with the Republican pro-life agenda do not count.
I, too, understand that there is philosophic integrity in arguing that abortion is always, under all circumstances, wrong. If indeed you believe that a fertilized egg is an innocent human life, and that it is always under every circumstance wrong to kill an innocent human life, regardless of all countervailing values, then yes, there can be no exceptions. However, it seems to me that if that is ones position, then one must also be absolutely opposed to all war, because innocents are always killed in war. To argue that some innocent lives can be sacrificed to a greater good in a war is to admit that there ARE some countervailing values that justify the taking of an innocent life. To admit that makes the abortion argument a completely different one — the argument is no longer that NO value is greater than human life, just that — in the opinion of the abortion opponent — the value of a woman’s right to control her own body and her reproductive freedom is not greater than a human life. And THAT is a value choice about which, obviously, reasonable people can disagree (just as we can disagree about whether wars can ever be justified), but for which there is no longer philosophical integrity in insisting on an absolute ban on abortion, even in the case of rape and incest (any more than we probably ought to take away from our elected officials the right to use force in all circumstances). So my litmus test for respecting the integrity of abortion opponents is whether or not they are absolute pacifists. I actually know some (Shane Claiborne of The Simple Way in Philadelphia comes to mind), and I respect them. But they are rare, and Sarah Palin is certainly not one of them.
PRIVATE adoptions get huge tax breaks? Not really. Sure, we have that tax credit, but it’s not like the government actually gives us $11000. Even if they did, the average adoption costs far more than that, as you know. In California, to qualify for tax breaks, you have to adopt through foster care. Adopting through foster care is often just about free.
Adoption isn’t an option that is talked about in the upper circles of government, and it’s obvious that when it is discussed, people don’t know what they’re saying. Adoption reform is vital, not only to the anti-choice lobby, but to all people in the adoption triad and to the pro-choice groups, who can then point to adoption as another choice.
I absolutely think that more education needs to happen - educating politicians but also the general public. I would like to see more women and girls consider adoption as an option. Now, I come to adoption knowing that my son’s birthmom is in an awful situation, and placing was the best choice she could make for Jack. The fact that teenagers can’t get car insurance but can have a baby causes massive cognitive dissonance.
Usually when politicians talk about making adoption easier, I find they mean making infant adoption less emotionally risky for adopting parents (shorter/no revocation periods, no waiting periods before signing consents, eliminating protections for fathers, that sort of thing). And the money bit.
I wonder if the reduction of feminist principles to slogans like “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people” (that bumper sticker is everywhere in my town) over time has made it too easy to claim to be a feminist. Because a Palin can say, “Of course I think women are people with rights. (Unborn pre-women, too),” without really addressing inequity and bias.
I’m suddenly full of lots to say and unable to make real phrases and sense and what not.
Brain exploding.
Simply: I adore you for continuing to speak your truth for others to read.
You know, I’ve been reflecting on the question of why Palin bothers me and this is it. She’s the embodiment of my least-fave bumper sticker, “Choose Adoption, Not Abortion!”
The reasons I hate that are in the dozens, but the main one is that these two things have little to do with one another. Of the dozens of women I know born after 1960 and before abortions became nigh-unto-impossible to obtain in many states and regions, literally zero of them wasn’t aware when facing an unwanted pregnancy that placing an infant after a full term pregnancy was an option for her.
Making a placement of a healthy newborn, in terms of the practical aspects, is way simpler than getting a driver’s license or registering to vote. There is no way to make that ‘easier’ because what makes it not-easy is that it’s a hard f-ing choice to make.
So when politicians say they want to make adoption easier, I want to know, For whom? and In what way?
Word.