A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
It's rather difficult to properly denigrate Richard Mourdock's ridiculous conception-via-rape comments when his congregation thinks he was directly quoting a Commandment, which is to say, one more time with feeling: GOP stalwarts like Mourdock don’t have a platform problem. Rather, they have a supporter problem.
And so the usual talking point screaming lines are drawn, and I am struck, though not surprised, that as “traditional” white bread America inexorably diminishes in demographic terms, marginalizing the rural areas that are its last bastions, the need for its cohorts to define themselves according to increasingly narrow ideological parameters and to aggressively inflict these cultural boundary markers on the rest of us becomes ever more pronounced – and expressed through a dialect of sheer intolerance that seems to date from antebellum times.
Thus, when it comes to my own support for enlightened self-determination in the area of reproductive choice, it isn’t any longer the case that I’m merely a dastardly secular humanist, or a garden-variety, wicked atheist, or even a dreaded Obama-ite. These days, I’m also certifiably, indisputably un-American.
Unfortunately for them, this is badge of honor territory for me.
It’s also the perfect example of the tactics of fanatics unable to successfully foist their personalized God on a nation presumably founded (albeit seldom consistently administered) according to religious diversity in a secular framework. Instead, they seek to exalt the secular American framework alongside their own specific religious worldview, fuse them into a theocratic duality, and ceremoniously drum those like me straight out of it, too.
I used to advocate that they take their zillionaires’ financial backing and use it to buy me out. Hell, it’d be a good deal for them; for the money required to buy an evening’s worth of GOP-cum-Nurnberg television ads, they could have the Confidentials flying to exile amid Europe’s civilized glories.
However, lately I’m finding merit in the pleasurable idea of waiting them out, because the irony of the white fundamentalist’s lament is that apart from Mormonism, there are too few of them, birthing far too seldom, to reverse demography’s future verdict. It couldn’t be that Republican women have abortions, too?
Back in July of 2009, one of my newspaper columns was taken up by Romanian film reviews: “The Way I Spent the End of the World,” “12:08 East of Bucharest,” “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days,” the latter a gritty, harrowing and compelling account of a Romanian university student’s illegal abortion in 1987. This is what I had to say about it.
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Romania became Communist shortly after the conclusion of World War II, and during these years of postwar economic and political dislocation, reliable contraceptives generally were unobtainable. However, owing perhaps to the custom followed by Romania’s overlord, the USSR, abortions were readily available and absurdly cheap, and it is suggested that there were four abortions for every live birth by 1966.
Around this time (Nicolae) Ceausescu, who dubbed himself the "Genius of the Carpathians" in spite (or perhaps because) of his background as a semi-literate, peasant cobbler, came to power and commenced grafting the personality cult of North Korea’s Kim Il Sung onto the pathetically grandiose public theatrics of Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy, creating a stunted and strangulated fiefdom in one of the continent’s least equipped socio-economic milieus. The result was a tragic quarter century.
In 1967, concluding that his impoverished country needed more citizens, Ceausescu decreed abortion illegal overnight, bringing the full powers of Romania’s police state to bear in enforcing the ban. The immediate effect of the decree was an abrupt doubling of the birth rate. This bulge was followed by a fast and steady decline in births, and by 1987, the country’s population had ceased to grow at all, but Ceausescu had already moved on to other, equally catastrophic projects, including the systematic bulldozing of countryside villages and the transfer of their inhabitants to virtual enslavement within “agro-industrial” complexes.
Significantly, one Romanian population statistic steadily increased during the years following the abortion ban: The maternal mortality rate tripled. Demographers have since learned that in terms of statistics, the deaths of women succumbing to botched illegal abortions in Romania were included with those of women dying during childbirth.
At the time documented by “Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days,” all parties involved in transacting an illegal abortion faced lengthy jail terms if caught. In addition to the threat of maiming and even death, and in the continuing enforced absence of legal contraceptives (a ubiquitous black market notwithstanding), a Romanian woman who sought to terminate a pregnancy could be arrested, convicted, imprisoned and her career left in ruins.
Taking all these dire factors into consideration, the film serves as a chilling case study of what happens when a government bureaucracy denies women control over their bodies, their destinies and their very lives. In Romania, the interference stemmed from a psychotic dictator’s whim, and his motivations were purely secular. Far more often in places like America, they are religious in nature.
Reproductive decision-making in many locales tends to reflect the patriarchal concerns of men rather than those of women, even as females remain responsible for bearing the children. It is a regrettable state of affairs that cuts across religious and secular concerns.
Oddly, when I heard the news of Dr. George Tiller’s (2009) murder by a terrorist during a church service in Wichita, it made me think of gray, desperate, soot-stained blocks of flats in Bucharest, along with legalities, illegalities, ideologies and the universality of human suffering.
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