Trust Means Letting Go of Control Over the Outcome

Vigil for Dr. Tiller       Image via Wikipedia

What is Blog for Choice Day?

Each year, NARAL Pro-Choice America poses a question to pro-choice bloggers before the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and then asks them to blog their answer on January 22.

In honor of Dr. George Tiller, who often wore a button that simply read, "Trust Women," this year's Blog for Choice question is:

What does "Trust Women" mean to you?

Ironically, I was inspired to this post by another disabled feminist blogger's expressed opinion that abortion is just another way for upper-class Caucasians to get rid of  "bad babies", which is to say, fetuses who might already be defective in some way or who have the genetics for a future disability. 

The blogger is right when she points out that we have such a prejudice against the disabled in this country that we often disapprove of either disabled women having children, or women in general having disabled children. For example, she points out that we even frown on older women conceiving because of the mere risk of problems. The gist of her post is that no, she does not trust women: She thinks we are all out to kill her and her kind.

She notes that people who think that raising a disabled child is a terrible burden are making a basic logical mistake: It's not the child's disability that is the biggest problem. It's the lack of affordable health care, accessible child care, and so forth. In other words, that baby is facing all the societal prejudices against disability from day one. And by extension, the miserable lives that the able-bodied envision for those of us with disabilities is premised on the same logical error: It is often not our disabilities that are our biggest problem, but the attitudes of others (including the unwillingness to hire us at comparable pay), the lack of accessibility everywhere we wish we could go but can't get in, the lack of decent health care in this country, and the ignorance of our health care providers about our specific needs.

About all this my sister blogger and I are completely in agreement. But also, and unfortunately, there is little social support in the United States for any woman to raise any child. If she is a single, young, unemployed woman of color? Fuggedaboudit. No support. Indeed, she is likely to be punished in any number of ways, large and small but equally cruel, every day for the entire dependency of that child. And this, my dear readers, is why most women seek an abortion. Not because the child is going to be disabled but because the woman in question simply cannot have and raise a child. Any child. Maybe especially not a disabled child, and maybe especially not if the woman herself is disabled, but the bottom line is that any woman may find herself unable or unwilling to carry a fetus to term.

Find me one case of one of these mythical Caucasian upper-class women with, say, a hereditary crippling disease, selectively aborting pregnancies until she gets a "good" one, and I'll buy you dinner. I can safely make that bet because the fact is that "abnormalities in the fetus" is the least-frequent reason cited, world-wide, for seeking an abortion. 

The able-bodied aren't the only ones making logical errors here. Sometimes disability advocates and pro-lifers do, too:  pro-choice is not synonymous with pro-abortion, but some people have an annoying habit of conflating the two. I am not personally acquainted with any pro-choice folk who think that there is any circumstance in which a woman should have an abortion. What we want is for women to never again be forced to carry every pregnancy to term, irregardless of her personal circumstances.

Which brings us to what "Trust Women" means to me. The dictionary definition of trust is, "reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence." You will note that there's nothing in this definition about outcomes, only about process. We, as women, if we trust each other, must rely upon each other to make our own best, ethical decisions about our own bodies. Pro-lifers do not trust us: They have one specific outcome in mind and that's what they want come hail or high water, whereas people who are pro-choice by definition express confidence in each woman's strength and integrity, in her ability to make the right decision. Pro-life is a paternalistic approach that treats women as children; pro-choice respects us as the adults that we are.

To me, "Trust Women" means just that. Trust us. Trust each other.

Wood's Rules: #2

Rule 2: I never wait for anyone, not even God, for more than 20 minutes.

The Mister and I went to vote this morning. Lines have been long, but Mr. had called ahead and was told that we could go to the front of the line because of my disability. So we turned up promptly at opening time this morning (8 am). It was a madhouse. The parking lot was full and there were lines of cars snaking up and down the aisles looking for a spot. Which of course they weren't going to find because no one had voted yet and therefore no one was leaving. Ever the optimist, Mr. dropped me off at the front door and I went to the front of a very long, very fat line--only to find that handicap voting didn't 't start until 9:30!

But it all got me to thinking again about disability rights, which we talked about in Ethics class on Wednesday. Going to the front of the line is not a privilege. It merely evens up the playing field. I could wait in line all day, and have done (Jimmy Carter's election comes to mind) but a lot of handicapped people can't maintain for that long. So they could not vote the way things are this year. Point is, "privileges" like going to the head of the line enable us to do things we could not otherwise, things the able-bodied take for granted.

The dean of my graduate school told me once that my fellow students envied my special parking space. At the time we were moving through a buffet line: I picked up a carving knife and told him that anyone who wanted one could bend over and I'd qualify 'em for special parking right here, right now. He did not get the message that he had it all backwards. Curb cuts, special parking, wide doors, grab rails, ramps, all that stuff is not a privilege to be resented by TABs (Temporarily Able Bodied people) like him, but assists that we need so that we can attend graduate school, travel, get to a job, go to the store, stay in a hotel, see a movie, and partake in community life in general. His facial expression clearly said that he thought I was the one being inappropriate.

Anyway, to get back to Wood's Rule #2, which is where we started, I wasn't inclined to wait an hour and a half for special voting privileges. Why, if everyone else can start voting at 8, can't we? Mr. and I have things to do this morning, so we came back home. We will try again later. Maybe we will be able to get a parking place.

But it did occur to me that every rule has an exception, and this rule is no exception to that rule. I would wait in line ALL DAY to vote, if necessary. In fact, before I found out about my disability getting me to the head of the line, I had planned to take Tuesday off if standing in line all day today didn't get me to a voting machine before closing. It took all night to vote the year Jimmy won: I went to the polls after I got off work at 4:30, and they closed the doors at 7. There were so many people already inside that gym that it was after 10 before I finished. Boy was I bored! There's only so much you can chat about to the total strangers in line with you, and you can only study your ballot for so long. Somebody had a paper, and we read it about seven times each, then that got old, too. But voting is so important that it was ok. I would have still been standing there at daylight if that's what it took. I'm just glad the pollworkers were willing to keep at it until we had all voted.

Generally speaking, however, I consider my time valuable, and I hate late. If you are my last client of the day and you aren't there by 20 after, I'm gone. If you are meeting me for lunch and you aren't there within 20 minutes of the agreed-upon time, I'm ordering without you. If you're my doc and you aren't ready for me within 20 minutes of my appointment time, I'm leaving. And I tell my classes that if I'm not there within 20 minutes of the scheduled start time, I'm not coming and they are dismissed. I once had a professor whom I never actually met because he was late for every single class the first few weeks of the semester. The fourth time this happened I went to the Registrar's at 20 after and withdrew: I made them give me every penny back, too. No withdrawal fees, or late registration fees for the new class I signed up for either. I felt disrespected, and I worry that, when I'm late, no matter the reason, that I am communicating a disrespect that I don't feel to the person cooling their heels waiting on me.

Why is this such a big issue for me? Possibly because my mother was late everywhere she went. When I was a kid, I don't think I ever saw a movie from front to back. We would arrive late, stumble around in the dark looking for a place to sit, then climb over people in the middle of the movie. I was always so embarrassed! We'd watch the last half of the show, then sit through the previews and the newsreels and the cartoon and watch the first half of the movie. Mom would announce, "This is where we came in," and we would get up and leave, climbing over everybody again and stumbling out of the theatre in the dark. My mother-in-law was the same way: The Dad-in-Law used to always tell her things were starting 45 min. before they actually did in order to get her dressed and out of the house in time, and even that didn't always work. Mr. is prompt, thank heaven, or we never would have made it as a couple.

Part of promoting Rule #2 to patients is that so often they--especially the women--do not hold themselves in high enough esteem. They are willing to be kept waiting endlessly by people who obviously are disrespecting them by making them sit. One of the faculty at the Internship From Hell pulled that on me once, deliberately, and when I left after 20 minutes he went ballistic. (It turned out that he had not arrived for nearly two hours!). In business and politics, apparently, keeping people waiting like that is a deliberate ploy to establish dominance: What made the guy so mad was that I didn't demonstrate the expected subservience. I won't play that game, and don't encourage my patients to, either.

Anyways, that's Rule #2.

Postscript: The second time was the charm. There were no handicapped spaces available, so Mr. had to drop me off, take the car across the street to the drugstore, and walk back, then repeat the process in reverse afterwards to pick me up. But except for that we were in and out with no problems. The guy in front of us, who had come through the regular line, said he'd been there 4-1/4 hours. My hat's off to him and to every one of those other good people so determined to vote. You go, America!