Solidarity & Sexual Shalom
THE TALE OF A FEMINIST "FREAK"
I was 21 years old in 1972. By that time, a year before Roe v. Wade, I was aware that practically all my female friends — at least those whom I knew well enough to know intimate details about — had already aborted a first baby. Some, a second.
I had not. But this was not because my sexual behavior was any different or better than theirs: The late 1960s and early 1970s were the heyday of lifestyle experimentation and the sexual revolution, and I was out there skirmishing like much of the rest of my generation. It’s just that I never became pregnant.
I also knew that we were all good women, caring and sensitive, in fact quite biophilic, pacifists or near-pacifists mostly. (“Make Love, Not War.”) We did not act out of malice. And such good women do not commit murder. Therefore abortion could not be murder.
The church of my childhood, the Catholic Church, I had left behind several years before. It seemed to me that the Church had rules for sexuality that bound like iron bands, and rules for war and the military that were more like rubber bands. This apparent inconsistency robbed the Church’s “Sanctity of Life” arguments of moral legitimacy in my eyes. I also sided with the secular feminist movement against my Church on virtually every disputed question.
You May Also Enjoy
In the heyday of psychoanalytic reductionism, we were entranced with our ability to use psychiatric labels, to explain everything as the result of certain somethings.
Perhaps there was KGB manipulation of some indigenous cults such as the White Brotherhood, but the cult phenomenon in the former Soviet Union was wider.
Any approach to teaching science must begin with certain attitudes and assumptions about the nature of the world around us.