I was going to write a journal entry about how Orestes Brownson’s “The Reconciliation of God, Humanity, State, and Church” reminds me of “Footnote to Howl” by Allen Ginsberg. Then I read an article online saying that House Speaker John Boehner and some other Congressional Republicans are trying to pass a bill that would only allow women who had been “forcibly raped” to receive government money for abortions.
I think this bill is disgusting. On more than one level, it tells people that their bodies are not their own, that they have no right to control what happens to them. It tells them that they are worth nothing—what they experience, feel, and want is worth nothing. Regardless of your opinion of abortion, you should write your congressman or congresswoman and tell him or her to oppose this bill. Here’s why: this bill not only attempts to limit a woman’s right to end a pregnancy she does not want, it attacks the definition of rape, which is already vastly misunderstood.
All rape is forcible rape. It doesn’t matter if someone jumps out at you or if the rapist is someone you know well (which is far more common). It doesn’t matter if the weapon is a gun, a knife, a pill, alcohol, a verbal threat, or implied threat. Coercion is coercion. Anytime someone performs a sex act on someone who has not consented or cannot consent, it’s rape. And all rape is violence. Someone doesn’t have to hit you or draw blood to do violence. Making someone have sex when they don’t want to is a form of violence.
Rape takes away the victim’s right to control his or her body and his or her life. Too often, our legal system does exactly the same thing. That’s why only one in four women and one in seven men report, because it’s so unlikely that they will be believed or that the attacker will be adequately punished. With sex crimes, blame is too often placed on the victim: s/he shouldn’t have been wearing that outfit, s/he shouldn’t have been walking alone in that neighborhood, s/he shouldn’t have been drinking, s/he’s had sex before so s/he is a slut and should not be believed now, s/he just regretted it, s/he’s out for money/revenge/attention, s/he knew his/her attacker, they went on a date, so it must have been consensual. This bill attempts to limit the definition of rape even further, to perpetuate already dangerous myths about it: that rape is only committed by strangers at night, in bad neighborhoods. This type of rape is undeniably horrible, and it does occur, but to deny that the other forms of rape also occur and that they are also horrible to is to tell an entire segment of the population that their experience does not count, that what they experienced is not real, that their pain is not real.
Enough violence has already been done to rape victims. This bill attempts to do even more violence by telling a woman who has already lost control of her body that she is going to lose that control again. This in turn tells her that she is a nonentity—she exists to satisfy the agendas of other people, what she wants is completely beside the point. This is why, whether or not you believe abortion should be legal, you should write your congressman or woman and say that this bill cannot pass, because it perpetrates violence where terrible violence has already been done.
What does this have to do with Orestes Browning? In his essay, he envisions a world inwhich “man will be sacred in the eyes of man…[where] it will be every where felt that one man has no right over another which the other has not over him…[where] man’s body will be deemed holy.” Right now, bodies are not always deemed holy, rights are not distributed equally, man is not always sacred in the eyes of man. Boehner’s bill just makes these terrible truths even more true.
If you want to read more about this issue, you can go here:
http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/republican-plan-redefine-rape-abortion
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