:: The S.I.C.L.E. Cell ::

:: Friday, March 21, 2003 ::

I was going to write about Melissa Etheridge (adoptive parent) and her major support of abortion , but she and Rosie are in roughly the same category, so what more can I say than "ditto" for Etheridge. Thinking about the two I have to wonder: what is it with the gay thing and abortion?

My gramma taught me how to work with glass. I've always been kind of "no-nonsense", so initially she didn't think I would like the craft since it took a lot of patience and often involved burning yourself and bleeding. But I so enjoyed the satisfaction of the finished work that I plainly took to the art and in no time had amassed several beautiful panes. Every now and again I would pay for studio time so I could go and learn a new technique, and I got rather chummy with staff, one of whom is a lesbian/adoptive mother.

One day as I was deliberating over particular shades of glass, somehow the subject of abortion came up. My friend was talking about so-and-so's crisis pregnancy and she basically said, "I don't know what her problem is. I mean, she can always just 'take care of it', right!" I paused in shock, looked her dead in the eye and said, "Yeah, she can make an adoption plan, so someone else can become a parent like you did." Needless to say, the subject was never broached again.

I'm always completely flabbergasted when people who struggle with equality and civil rights issues turn around and practice the same hated discrimination on someone else. The victim becomes the victimizer; hypocrisy abounds. The abusive cycle is perpetuated instead of broken by people who should know better. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a forerunner in the suffrage movement and no stranger to blatant discrimination, recognized that none are liberated until all are liberated: "When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit." Gays, blacks, women, the differently-abled and anyone who typically suffers disenfranchisement should make a mental note and fall in step with the cause of refusing to accept abortion as the best anyone can do.

In my experience, the vast majority of lesbians I have known have supported abortion. Gay men usually support abortion as well, because I think they think it's expected of them. If you're straight and oppose abortion, you're going to catch flak from your gay friends. But if you're gay and and oppose abortion you're going to have your card revoked. Thank God for groups like PLAGAL who seek to educate their peers.

I think I've talked before about my best friend who happens to be gay. We met in detention in 7th grade. I don't have one surviving note from any of my boyfriends, but somewhere in a box in the attic, I have a stack of letters between he and I. They normally start out with something profound like: "Ms. Aller wears combat boots and so does yo mammy." And the reply: "Aller's got nothin' on 'Bland'ton's Napoleon complex, and you can eat hot death for that comment about my mama, hunbun." Back and forth they flew. Years of this. We were even band geeks together. And throughout the phases and cycles of our lives we've always had the requisite 7th grade detention bond that is not always tangible yet somehow ends in lasting friendship.

He got on a plane one day and moved as far away from me as he could possibly go while still technically remaining in the country. But before he left, the happiest surprise in my life fell my world apart.

I don't think he could ever really relate to what I went through, what with him being a single gay male with no desire ever to parent a child, but he was there for me. He never bugged me with platitudes or personal philosophies; he just mostly hated it for me, and we went out to eat a lot. Occasionally (or perhaps more than occasionally) our conversation would turn towards my SICLE-related epiphanies, and when I really started to understand the "Gestaltic" synergy of humanity, the whole "Lion King" circle of life thing and how abortion fit in (or DIDN'T fit in), he was the first to hear about it.

Initially, he was a good gay and didn't agree with me, but I had gained enough perspective from the PLAGAL site that I could talk to him on a personalized level. In the midst of our discussions, news broke that someone in England had come close to identifying the fat gene. A poll was taken and a few ethically devoid characters opined that they would indeed abort a child who tested positive for a propensity towards obesity. This was the perfect conversational "in". I asked my equally Southern friend what he thought would happen when the male fetus of "Bubba" and "Lurleen" tested positive for the gay gene down in Hillbilly, Florida. Suddenly something that he insisted really wasn't his issue aimed its sparkling lance at the abortionless bubble of his world. It was grease for the cog; he really began to think about abortion and the proliferation of its reaching tendrils.

That's what I wish Etheridge and O'Donnell and all the double-whammy, gay adoptive parents would do: stop spouting the "required" abortion rhetoric long enough to fully consider how abortion deeply and soulfully conflicts with their other precious causes and how it threatens and robs the rest of the world.


"Broken Woman"
One of my windows (preexisting pattern) that represents my husband and I after the loss of our child through abortion.

SICLECell@hotmail.com

:: ashli 10:14 AM # ::
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