binaries of choice

[rkt]

Have I ever mentioned that I so don't like binaries?

the recent murder of Kansas City (USA) Dr. Tiller has me re-pondering.

How binaried is choice?

I was thinking about this for awhile, and recent discussions in that one community have restarted the musings.

I'm very much in the Choice=Choiceⁿ camp. Abortion on request,without apology for any who requests it and without financial barriers.

I get annoyed by the "I'm pro choice BUT____" because, to me, you either believe in a person's right to make choices about their bodies according to their beliefs or you believe in a person's right to make choices about their bodies according to your beliefs. so while it may not make you "pro life", it establishes a limited definition of choice.

But, then, for the longest,I was in that "I'd never have an abortion/abortion is wrong BUT i think women should be able to have a safe abortion" camp.
and, really, isn't that still pro-choice in a way?

and, how many people who ID as "pro-life" fit into in this quasi-pro-choice camp? which would then actually make the significant majority of USians "prochoice" - sort of?

oh, frames and semantics. how funny you are.

++
as long as we're on the topic - it's been awhile since i've plugged for donations, so:
in the meantime:

national network of abortion funds
medical students for choice
Abortion care network which is linked with men and abortion.

or volunteer

quasi-x-posted

Comments

[kaygigi.livejournal.com]

I can't find the cite, but that Gallup poll was eviscerated on the liberal academe blogs for one reason: it was only of people with landlines. Whereas surveying only people with landlines twenty years ago meant you didn't get older people, you didn't get poor people, and you didn't get people of color, these days only doing landlines means you only get old people, you only get people who can't afford/don't want/don't live in a place with cell phones, you over-represent people of color. Which basically means that for a lot of social policy opinion polling, you're getting a lot more people who actively identify as "very religious", people with fewer years of schooling, people of lower SES, rural folks, etc. So while landlines used to skew liberal, they now skew conservative. Were Gallop to do a simple re-sampling to control for year-to-year population swings by variables like urban vs. rural or age, the poll would actually show that Americans are just as likely to identify as pro-choice as before... but fewer people are relying on landlines for phone service, especially the young, the college educated, and the urban.

Oh statistics!

[rkt.livejournal.com]

oh, statistics, indeed!

[cos]

Polls for the 2008 presidential election had to face this landlines vs. cell phones issue a lot, and for the first time we got some real research into the differences. It turns out that, at least as preferences in presidential elections go, cell phone users are only about 1%-3% more liberal than landline people.

[amyannosu.livejournal.com]

I am like you. Choice is choice is choice. I am for abortion that is accessible, affordable and safe, for all women, regardless of how they landed in the position to make the decision. No limits. Etc.

I do get annoyed a little at the "I'm pro-choice BUT ____" because it implies that there still something wrong with making that choice to have an abortion. But most of those people end that sentence with "I would never have one myself" which is fine because, well, they are just limiting choice for themselves, and I'm okay with that. That's on them.

But still. It's annoying like the "I'm not a racist BUT ____" comments. Or saying "Being gay is not a choice," like even if someone did make that choice, it would be a bad one to make. Some word argue that bisexuals, do, kind of, sometimes, make a choice.

[rkt.livejournal.com]

:) the whole "pro choice but" is so tricky.

an yes. the whole "being gay is not a choice" mantra grates me greatly!

terminology

[cos]

Both "choice" and "life" are terms selected because people like them. Who wants to deny supporting "life"?

To muddy the waters, I've been IDing as "pro-life" for a while, without changing my pro-choice views at all. Pro-life should mean support for people in poverty, health care for everyone, preventing wars, good stewardship of natural ecosystems - the really big things that support life. It should not mean "forcing women to use their bodies as personal life-support systems for fetuses." There's no other context where we *force* someone to use their body for someone else, no matter how good the cause. We don't compel organ donations even if the result is people dying who could've been saved by those organs.

This "make the woman stay pregnant and give birth, she has no choice in the matter" position isn't "pro-life"; it's actually "forced labor".

Re: terminology

[rkt.livejournal.com]

i like the way you frame this all, particularly the organ donation aspect....
thank you!