Sherry Chandler » 2006 » March » 22
Ampersand at Alas a Blog seeks an answer to the question, does the right really think abortion is murder?
A lot of people who favor forced childbirth for pregnant women say that they believe that an abortion, even early in pregnancy, is identical to child murder. Have an abortion, shoot a four-year-old in the head; morally, it’s the same. Or, anyhow, that’s what they claim to believe.
In contrast, pro-choicers tend to think that the abortion criminalization movement is motivated by a desire - perhaps an unconscious desire - to punish women for having sex.
I used to reject that latter view as a pointless ad hominem attack. Nowadays, I’m not so sure. Although I’ve met some rank-and-file “pro-lifers” whose policy preferences were consistent with a belief that a fetus is morally indistinguishable from a child, those folks usually have policy preferences which are totally out of step with the abortion criminalization movement as a whole.
In contrast, the leaders of the abortion criminalization movement have consistently put their political weight behind policies which make little or no sense if they genuinely think that abortion is identical to child murder. And those same leaders routinely endorse policies that make a lot of sense if their goal is to penalize women who have sex.
I picked up the link at The Washington Monthly.
Headline at the Onion: Constructionist Supreme Court to Revisit Women’s Suffrage
This post was written by sherry
Back in July and August, David Caddy, editor of Tears in the Fence, and I had a rather extended e-mail correspondence, trying to find a poem of mine that merited publication in the magazine. David said he liked my poems but “the narrative angles … tend to close rather than open into the world of the poem.”
I am still thinking over the implications of that statement for my body of work.
In the end we settled on a poem called “Ice Storm, February 2003″ that I had pretty much given up as a failure in which I had attempted something beyond my skill or perhaps beyond my intellectual/spiritual depth. The occasion of the poem was receding rapidly into the past and I had very nearly relegated it to the status of somewhat overworked journal entry.
Still the poem was important to me – as are all my attempts at poems – and I was pleased to think that it had meaning for some one else. I hope David was pleased too.
The poem is in the current issue of Tears in the Fence: Number 42 for autumn 2005, along with a number of other poems that spiral outward, some fine short stories, and some excellent essays/reviews.
Some samplings:
Shieling
The tumbled stones are not enough
to tell you more than we were here.
Your trowels discover nothing:
we ate, had beds, used clay, chased deer,
else we would have died too soon
to make the burnt and broken ground
that’s left — though you’d prefer a text.
Without, you forget our games, our song,
our joy, love, grief, our enmity,
guess we growled in bestial ignorance….— Grahaeme Barrasford Young
Mr. Young lives in the West Highlands of Scotland and a “shieling,” says the American Heritage, is a a shepherd’s hut.
The Aphrodisiac Effects of Power
When you’ve got it, grabbed
hold of everything you ever wanted,
mainlined it,
machined it to perfection
each bone, muscle, nerve,
restructured that over-powering mass
of brain matter
so even the untrained eye can see,
even the dullest mind know
you have won…
Tears in the Fence is published in the United Kingdom. Subscriptions are £15 a year, single issues £6. Subscription requests and U.S. submissions may be sent to Deane Laczi, 805 South 9th Street, Lafayette IN 47905.
This post was written by sherry
