yonmei

09:53 am: A letter to someone I thought I knew
Dear Ode,

I have known you for years. Not well: but well enough to invite you and your wife to my birthday. I don't feel we've been friends (the birthday invite was based on my friendship with your wife, I fear) but I liked what I knew of you. I admired you. I respected you: your fearsome intelligence and verbal acuity.

Now I find you are taking the side of the Catholic Church against Amnesty International, because of Amnesty's decision that a woman who has been raped - especially in a war zone, or when raped by her father - ought to be able to terminate a pregnancy that results from this, without fear of prosecution, and that a doctor who helps her ought to be able to do so without fear of prosecution.

I do not like to think that you are stupid, or a hypocrite, or a monster. But I cannot see how you can support forcing a raped woman through pregnancy and childbirth against her will without being one or all of the three.

If you really believe that a fertilized egg is ensouled at the moment chromosomes join, and that when a woman terminates (or has a miscarriage) and the zygote or fetus dies, the soul, unbaptised, goes to hell for an eternity of torment, I can see where you're coming from: you are consciously forcing a woman to suffer for 40 weeks in order, you hope, to spare an immortal soul an eternity of hell.

Of course I still wouldn't think it was right to force a woman through nine months of real suffering, real damage to her body, real risk of death, because of a religious hypothesis that inducing a miscarriage may mean an eternity of suffering for the soul of the aborted fetus - not least because if God is that evil, we're all doomed anyway.

We have never discussed religion: I have no notion whether or not you are that kind of believer, certain God will damn to hell every soul whose body was not formally baptised, for the sin of being conceived. But that would at least be logical: I would think you were still a monster for forcing your religion on others to their suffering, a woman-sacrifice rather than a child-sacrifice, but it would be a sad kind of a monster.

Stupid, hypocritical, monstrous? I have been having imaginary dialogues with you - with a person I didn't know existed, with your voice and face! - in which this imagined you attempts to defend your decision to support forced pregnancy for rape victims, prosecution and persecution for those who succeed in aborting and the doctors who help them. In my mind you keep turning away from these raped women, putting your hands over your ears not to hear them, saying "I want to save the lives of the babies", saying "I'm thinking of their souls, they shouldn't kill their babies", talking in your rich and pleasant voice of your feeling that every human life matters.

I hear you as a hypocrite: I don't know whether I'm right in that judgement. But I know you're not stupid. Therefore I cannot forgive you because you don't know what you're doing: you are an intelligent and well-informed man, and so I must assume - even for the imagined-you - that you know that Amnesty International has come to this conclusion, that it must support women who are victims of rape, after years of working with rape victims in war zones. That Amnesty is not - contrary to the claims of Pope and cardinals and monsignors - arguing a general pro-choice position such as applies in this country, the right to choose to terminate for any reason at all. You know, not being stupid, not being ignorant, that this decision is a decision to support the right of a woman who has been raped to choose to abort. Your opposition to it is in support of legislators and judges who have determined that a raped woman shall be forced to continue the pregnancy and go through childbirth. And I could not believe in a conversation with you in which you were ignorant of this.

Yet I cannot hear you speaking as a monster, saying outright that you think raped women should be forced through nine months of pregnancy, permanent changes to their body, real risk to their health (a raped woman in the Congo, pregnant and rejected by her family, is more likely than most to die in childbirth or suffer permanent damage: and it was Amnesty's experience with the rape victims of the Congo war that, as you know, led to their decision to support the right of such women to seek abortion if they want it, and the right of doctors to help them without fear of prosecution). I cannot believe you would outright say that you want women who have been raped to be made to keep suffering, to prolong the experience of having been forced against their will, to maximise the violation and damage of rape.

When I hear you defend your decision to support forced pregnancy of rape victims, I hear you do it in the smooth and hypocritical language of the other male Catholics who have also supported it: talk of "the right to life", refusal to mention the suffering women. You will not use the word "rape", nor talk of the women at all, nor, I think, consider the suffering of a pregnant woman, nor refer to the labour involved in creating a human being from conception through childbirth. There will be talk of your conscience, and talk of your faith. At no point will you admit that what you are arguing is that you are saying your faith requires you to force other people to suffer, do hard labour, and risk death. What I will not know is whether this hypocritical language masks a monster who is wise enough not to say these things out loud, or whether you have genuinely managed to convince yourself that these suffering human beings do not really exist.

I doubt I will ever get the chance to say this to you. We meet on social occasions where it would be very rude and disruptive to say anything like this. I do not know you well enough to send this letter. It is even possible that you are genuinely ignorant, and have merely been informed via Catholic authorities that Amnesty now "supports abortion" and therefore ought to be opposed. (I doubt it: I cannot quite believe you are the sort of person who would take this instruction and never look at the background, but perhaps you keep your religion in a different area from the rest of your mind.) It is also possible that you are yourself working through this issue, and that it is taking some time, and will - I hope you will! - finally come to the conclusion that Amnesty International is right, and the Pope is wrong.

But when I hear simply that you are meeting with the pro-choice members of that organisation for lefties who are into worldwide peace and justice, because you and a couple of others are on "the Catholic side" and want to divest from Amnesty, I am fearfully concerned that, having thought about it, and looked up the background issues, and worked through all that it involves, in your mind - you have decided to be a monster.

Sincerely,

Yonmei