Religious Static: The Soundtrack of Unnecessary Tragedy
By Rigel Kane | November 21, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
There is a vicious movement in the halls of power, in the churches, and on the streets that has taken hold. While some people are motivated by religion to seek an end to the plethora of injustices in the world today, the Christian fascist anti-abortion movement must be directly opposed if we are ever going to see a day when women can decide their own futures, dream unfettered, and participate equally with men in society, without fear. And ultimately, we must challenge religion itself as a method and an ideology, and dig deep into how it plays into the very real and truly horrific economic, political, and social situation we are in, here and around the world.
In the waiting room of a free medical clinic in Albuquerque, the only healthcare available to undocumented people and indigenous people from a nearby reservation, we talked to two women about abortion, while another listened in. Both women believed abortion was murder, though one was convinced that women must have the right in more situations than just those that are life-threatening. Before we could get very deep into it, the two women were called in by their doctors.
The woman who had been listening said she agreed with the woman who thinks abortion is definitely wrong, but women must have the right to decide for themselves. We kept talking, and it was striking how vehemently she believed both things: abortion is murder, she's never had an abortion and she never would, but women MUST have abortion rights.
Then she told us her daughter had been gang raped. They never identified the perpetrators. Her daughter was pregnant. She insisted her daughter have the baby, and she would help take care of it. She said, somehow, it must have been God's will and somehow, the pregnancy must be a blessing. Rape in her mind was not a justification for what she was convinced was killing a child. Her daughter was convinced to carry the fetus to term and be a mother, despite her trauma. Then she got a genetic test. The fetus was riddled with abnormalities, too many, this woman told us, to list. It was very unlikely the child would live very long at all, and it would be a huge life change and financial impossibility for the whole family to care for such a child. At this moment, she stopped telling her daughter she must have the child and everything would be okay, and told her it was her choice. It was going to change everything, and she needed to want to care for a suffering and dying child if she were to give birth.
Her daughter gave birth. The child died three and a half years later. Three and a half years of struggling to survive, thousands of dollars of debt for medical care, unspeakable trauma from a gang rape with nothing approaching justice or resolution, and watching this young person, who really should have never been a person by all moral and scientific standards, suffer until his early death. The family was devastated.
There is a movement that has gained traction in recent years, that claims this should be the fate for all women in this situation. When asked about pregnancy from rape, powerful Republicans, Operation Rescue/Save America abortion protestors, staff at "Crisis Pregnancy Centers," pastors, priests, and maybe people you know will respond with, "Why should the child pay for the crimes of its father?" In this way they erase women, women like this woman's daughter, dismiss them as less human than an unbreathing, unthinking clump of cells in a womb, and condemn them to nothing less than a life of tragedy. This disproportionately affects poor women, young women, and women of oppressed nationalities, but it also affects how society views and treats all women, and how all women see themselves. This movement fetishizes a fetus to justify a position for women in society that can only be characterized as slavery and subordination. Right now, they are codifying these values into law with "Personhood" amendments (giving a fertilized egg more rights than a woman), with TRAP laws (medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion clinics that result in clinic closure), and with 20-week bans based on pseudo-science about "fetal pain" like the one we are in Albuquerque to oppose. This is not fundamentally separate from the right wing movement in the UN that is banning condoms on HIV-ridden countries in Africa and whipping up violence against LGBT people under the banner of "freedom of religion," or the dehumanization and criminalization of Muslim people by Christians that justifies to Americans the bombing of mosques and the wars of imperialism and drone attacks in the Middle East, nor the Islamic fundamentalism that is choking women to death with its own repressive theocracy, and leading those who would rise up against imperialism into more oppression.
But what of the particularity of the conflict in the hearts and minds of so many today, in this country, around abortion? Why does the phrase, "It's complicated" heralded by Planned Parenthood resonate with so many people? And why, wherever we go, do we hear the same sounds of the torn on this issue: "Abortion is wrong, but women MUST have the right"?
This is the sound of everything that people are led to believe by the method and conclusions of religion—everything that these people were raised to believe and still hold dear to this day—colliding with reality. Religion and traditional morality running up against the real people they have known and loved who found themselves in desperate situations and needed abortions. The belief that there is some master plan from the time of conception dictated by an imaginary and wrathful being, running up against the tragedy of lives lost to illegal abortions, self-induced abortions, and forced motherhood. The cultish and objectifying belief that motherhood is the highest duty of a woman along with the fear of being "dirty," "impure," a "sinner," and going to hell to burn forever, running up against the actual facts that real women, real human beings, are so much more than breeders and if they do not have this right, in reality, their stories are one version or another of the same unnecessary tragedy.
When Stop Patriarchy went two weeks ago to Jackson State University, a couple miles away from the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi, the sound was the same. In a predominantly Black college, where many students were coming out of low income, oppressed, and abandoned neighborhoods, getting pregnant for a woman would likely mean you are going to be a single mother. In the center of the racist and in many ways still segregated South, where the mass incarceration and police brutality that so quickly replaced Jim Crow laws continues to grind away and "disappear" young Black men at astonishing rates, and where religion is so deeply embedded in the culture, this conflict is very real.
One young Black man we approached who was in his late teens said immediately he was against abortion. We continued to talk to him and learned that his cousin got pregnant in her early teens, and he begged her not to get an abortion. He deeply believed, based on how he was raised, that God has a plan for everyone and abortion is murder. He said he begged and broke down in tears at times, and finally convinced his cousin not to have an abortion. She became a mother. A year later, she was pregnant again. He was distraught. He saw her struggling with the one-year-old she had, barely able to survive. To him, the reality of the situation was unavoidable. He gave her a ride to the abortion clinic.
The sound of this conflict, of the acceptance of religion as a viable method for understanding reality—and ultimately the way that this system encourages and legitimizes this very confusing, submissive, guilt-inducing, and frankly terror-driven way of understanding the world—crashing into what humanity needs to survive and to thrive, is a sickening sound. It's the hissing sound of the dreams of millions of women evaporating into totally unnecessary tragedy. It's the whine of male entitlement that is instilled in so many men from an early age, the same entitlement that justifies rape, as well as other forms of domination and forcible control of a woman's body (such as forced sterilizations). It's the nerve-wracking tone of the men who want to do the right thing in the world finding themselves paralyzed and unable to choose a side, while the women they know and love are shamed into silence. It's the scraping sound of the graves of women being dug by smug and hateful fascists, theocrats, and ruling class demagogues while too many people with so much potential are rendered helpless. Marx said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses" and he was fucking right on.
It is imperative, now more than ever, that everyone who believes women must have the right to abortion—with or without guilt, in some circumstances or in all of them— find ways right now to openly fight the powers that are working quickly to abolish the right altogether. But it is also imperative to still the nauseating hum of a people paralyzed by an illegitimate ideology, to openly challenge and struggle over religion as we fight this through. More Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Pagans, and other religious people should support women's liberation, and some do. But more oppressed people, as well as others, must cast off the chains on their minds and hearts that have been locked into place by religion. More atheists should openly challenge religion, in the spirit of shattering oppression with science, with a real urgency and understanding of the real potential of people to rise up and re-make the world, and in the spirit of love for humanity and intolerance of its incessantly brutal exploitation for the profit of the few, here and around the world. That static noise of tragedy and paralysis does not have to be the soundtrack to human existence.
We can understand reality! Not all of it, and not all at once, but collectively, and scientifically, there is the basis for humanity to advance in great leaps, as dynamic beings that create and discover for the common good of society, as responsible caretakers of the planet, as humans who argue and learn and produce for the needs of others as well as ourselves, and as lovers, fighters, and thinkers. In order to get to a place where that is the direction of things, we must make a revolution and free humanity from the cage-like network of exploitative production—from the sweatshops in China to the prisons in the U.S. to the garment factories in Bangladesh to the prostitution rings throughout Eastern Europe and South Asia to the mines in the Congo to the fields full of immigrants right in the backyard of middle class America—the very same network that justifies the destruction of the planet for profit, and the brutality and dehumanization of people through the cruel enforcement and grinding reinforcement of that network. And a real part of this process is to interrupt the religious static with the very real, very liberating, trumpeting call of a future unfettered from the past.
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