An Opinion Piece from the Stanford Daily
Op-Ed: Using Abortion
January 22, 2008
By John and Mary Felstiner
If the well-tended patch of grass opposite the Stanford Bookstore is pierced with white crosses today, we once again find ourselves treated to a misuse of history and analogy. For several years, on the Jan. 22 anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case on abortion rights, a group called Stanford Students for Life (SSFL) has shown itself profoundly aware that their display of crosses connoted a literal graveyard. This awareness made their display all the more dismaying.
In anyone conscious of wars past and present, a peaceful bright green field studded with lines of crosses must evoke military cemeteries harboring soldiers actually killed while serving their countries - like the 3,929 Americans killed so far in Iraq. SSFL has exploited this tragic reality to shock us with what they consider a simple absolute: the killing of human beings.
Of course anyone has the right to organize a demonstration on the question of abortion. The Daily has correctly referred to “fetuses...legally aborted” since 1973, but debate will go on endlessly about both elements in that phrase: the status of fetuses, especially for months before the “quickening,” and the legality of what opponents label a moral evil.
What we deplore is the use of false and sensational analogies, which are a poor way to “educate people,” as Students for Life claim to be doing in simulating a military cemetery. Ken Burns’ recent documentary should provide enough detail to see an absolute difference between the deaths of soldiers or the slaughter of Jewish babies, on the one hand, and on the other hand, mothers, parents and families, often making vital choices to complete an education or care for their children or their health - choices supported by a democratic majority standing for the privacy of women’s rights. By the same right, women may choose to entrust a newborn to adoption.
Analogy-mongering often drives together opposites. Entering “abortion” and “Holocaust” on Google turns up countless sites that flaunt this dubious connection. An active organization called “Survivors” appeals to “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust,” and elsewhere online you can buy your “Abortion Holocaust Baseball Jersey.” We also find deplorable, for that matter, the term “Silent Holocaust” applied by some voices in Orthodox Judaism to intermarriage - or any misuse of the massive organized murder of one group by another to condemn personal choices.
Both of us signing this opinion piece grew up during the war - and as it happens, both of us are teaching courses on the Holocaust at Stanford this year. SSFL claims that its cemetery is for “victims of Roe,” but as we know from the Nazis and other totalitarian tyrants, victims have perpetrators.
Do so-called “pro-life” advocates mean to brand women, who have various life-cherishing reasons to undertake a legal abortion, as killers?
At last Saturday’s “Walk for Life” in San Francisco, where SSFL was represented, posters announced “Peace / Life / Love / Babies” - as if these were not core concerns of the pro-choice majority. Surely many if not most Christians would deplore the contempt for pregnant women implied by tying them to crosses in a cemetery. One year, with irony, we asked someone staffing the display table whether fetuses aborted by Jewish women, for instance, were considered equally lamentable, and were told, “Oh, I think we didn’t have enough wood.” At the same time, SSFL insists their crosses have no “religious significance,” which makes no sense.
In an effort to bolster its cause, SSFL and a group called “Feminists for Life” summon up early American activists for women’s rights, who spoke against abortion. But this too betrays a misguided historical viewpoint. Those late 19th century judgments reflected a sense that “abortion symbolized an undue burden on women, who alone paid the price of unwanted pregnancies,” according to Professor Estelle Freedman in “Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics.” To understand modern feminism, she points to “historical changes in the nature of work and family,” such as the 1960s’ “growth of dual-wage-earning families who desired to limit and space births.”
The debate will go on. But as long as one side insists on a moral absolute of “killing,” for which they alone possess the one true definition; as long as their movement tries to seize and co-opt that word “life”; as long as they would totally dictate the rights of others - well, we’re still in trouble. Do we want, by making abortion illegal, girls and women once again bending metal hangers, or undergoing sometimes fatal backdoor measures?
Any equating of legally terminated pregnancies with tragic loss of life, at the hands of soldiers or murderers, brings tears of anger and desperation. Let us hope this has come to an end.
John and Mary Felstiner co-authored this piece. John Felstiner is an English professor at Stanford, and Mary Felstiner is an emerita history professor at the San Francisco State University and a visiting history professor at Stanford.
January 22, 2008
By John and Mary Felstiner
If the well-tended patch of grass opposite the Stanford Bookstore is pierced with white crosses today, we once again find ourselves treated to a misuse of history and analogy. For several years, on the Jan. 22 anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case on abortion rights, a group called Stanford Students for Life (SSFL) has shown itself profoundly aware that their display of crosses connoted a literal graveyard. This awareness made their display all the more dismaying.
In anyone conscious of wars past and present, a peaceful bright green field studded with lines of crosses must evoke military cemeteries harboring soldiers actually killed while serving their countries - like the 3,929 Americans killed so far in Iraq. SSFL has exploited this tragic reality to shock us with what they consider a simple absolute: the killing of human beings.
Of course anyone has the right to organize a demonstration on the question of abortion. The Daily has correctly referred to “fetuses...legally aborted” since 1973, but debate will go on endlessly about both elements in that phrase: the status of fetuses, especially for months before the “quickening,” and the legality of what opponents label a moral evil.
What we deplore is the use of false and sensational analogies, which are a poor way to “educate people,” as Students for Life claim to be doing in simulating a military cemetery. Ken Burns’ recent documentary should provide enough detail to see an absolute difference between the deaths of soldiers or the slaughter of Jewish babies, on the one hand, and on the other hand, mothers, parents and families, often making vital choices to complete an education or care for their children or their health - choices supported by a democratic majority standing for the privacy of women’s rights. By the same right, women may choose to entrust a newborn to adoption.
Analogy-mongering often drives together opposites. Entering “abortion” and “Holocaust” on Google turns up countless sites that flaunt this dubious connection. An active organization called “Survivors” appeals to “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust,” and elsewhere online you can buy your “Abortion Holocaust Baseball Jersey.” We also find deplorable, for that matter, the term “Silent Holocaust” applied by some voices in Orthodox Judaism to intermarriage - or any misuse of the massive organized murder of one group by another to condemn personal choices.
Both of us signing this opinion piece grew up during the war - and as it happens, both of us are teaching courses on the Holocaust at Stanford this year. SSFL claims that its cemetery is for “victims of Roe,” but as we know from the Nazis and other totalitarian tyrants, victims have perpetrators.
Do so-called “pro-life” advocates mean to brand women, who have various life-cherishing reasons to undertake a legal abortion, as killers?
At last Saturday’s “Walk for Life” in San Francisco, where SSFL was represented, posters announced “Peace / Life / Love / Babies” - as if these were not core concerns of the pro-choice majority. Surely many if not most Christians would deplore the contempt for pregnant women implied by tying them to crosses in a cemetery. One year, with irony, we asked someone staffing the display table whether fetuses aborted by Jewish women, for instance, were considered equally lamentable, and were told, “Oh, I think we didn’t have enough wood.” At the same time, SSFL insists their crosses have no “religious significance,” which makes no sense.
In an effort to bolster its cause, SSFL and a group called “Feminists for Life” summon up early American activists for women’s rights, who spoke against abortion. But this too betrays a misguided historical viewpoint. Those late 19th century judgments reflected a sense that “abortion symbolized an undue burden on women, who alone paid the price of unwanted pregnancies,” according to Professor Estelle Freedman in “Feminism, Sexuality, and Politics.” To understand modern feminism, she points to “historical changes in the nature of work and family,” such as the 1960s’ “growth of dual-wage-earning families who desired to limit and space births.”
The debate will go on. But as long as one side insists on a moral absolute of “killing,” for which they alone possess the one true definition; as long as their movement tries to seize and co-opt that word “life”; as long as they would totally dictate the rights of others - well, we’re still in trouble. Do we want, by making abortion illegal, girls and women once again bending metal hangers, or undergoing sometimes fatal backdoor measures?
Any equating of legally terminated pregnancies with tragic loss of life, at the hands of soldiers or murderers, brings tears of anger and desperation. Let us hope this has come to an end.
John and Mary Felstiner co-authored this piece. John Felstiner is an English professor at Stanford, and Mary Felstiner is an emerita history professor at the San Francisco State University and a visiting history professor at Stanford.