The James Website

I’m Pro-Life & Pro-Choice, and “Panetti” was Made-Up

First, to the few of you actually reading this thing, my apologies for the extended lull in posting. I’m working on multiple projects at the moment, for which blogging has temporarily taken a back seat.

Today, though, I want to present to you my take on a topic because of how it hits particularly close to home for me.  It is not an I’m-write-and-they’re-wrong stance, but rather an invitation to deeper reflection and discussion of the topic.  For the sake of ethos, I want to open this with a personal anecdote.  It’s probably going to feel a bit off-the-rails going in, but bear with me — this will culminate to my point regarding the topic at hand.

My mother was pressured to abort me.

During the ’70s, my teenage mother was a bit, shall we say, promiscuous, for lack of a better word. (To be a teenager is to be riddled with impulses, regardless.) One such fling resulted in my fetus announcing its arrival early in the year of 1979.

Now, an important side note: Be aware of the the culture of the ’70s, even the early ’80s that followed. To be a single unwed mother back then was to be more of a pariah than even today. It was even more so of a scarlet letter on the forehead that what we’re accustomed to.

With that in mind: My arrival was not just a damning visible scar on my mother’s reputation, but it was a disgrace to my entire family’s honor (again, seen via their cultural moral filter of the day).

My grandmother, a highly-revered matriarch in my family, wanted none of this and pressured my mother to abort me.  My mother — all her other faults notwithstanding — refused.

There was a whole chain of shame-driven events that followed like dominoes, none of this which I’d learn about until my mid-20’s.  This progression of bad decision followed by worse decision culminated into a deceitful narrative I grew up my entire youth believing that all revolved around a fictional, murdered father figure who never existed.  This whimsical narrative (a topic for another day) to cover up a past they were collectively ashamed of went so far as to provide me with a fictional legal last name.  (Yes — “Panetti” is made up.  Were convention followed, my last name would be “Barton”, after my actual father, who is in fact still alive, though denies relation.) 2022 Update: Haha just kidding on that whole “Barton” thing — Years of detective work since this post fully disproved that previous lead (insert facepalm).

Where am I going with this?  Two personal conclusions:

One – I enjoy being alive.  I am not a fan of the idea of having been aborted.

Two – The dominant norms of fundamentalist evangelical Christian conservatism leaned in favor of my abortion.  I understand my anecdotal experience to be a microcosm of the culture of the day.  Before you rise to debate that conclusion, consider: were fundigelical conservatism not driving societal morals, there would have been no shame in being a single mother to begin with.  That much is undeniable.  Catalyst.  Reaction.

If you doubt the influence of conservative fundigelicalism even still, then I present anecdotal Exhibit B: when I finally learned of this in my mid-20s, that truth was accompanied by a rather cutting claim from another paving-hell-with-good-intentions family member that the “sins of the father” (in this case sex outside of marriage) are a curse carried by the son, and that I myself, by extension, was ripe for sexual sin because of theirs.  This was in the early 2000’s, not the ’70s.

Now only was it their shame then, it was my shame now.  What?

My story is not unique (save the over-the-top fictional dad part).  My story is shared by countless others of my generation, else I wouldn’t dare suggest my anecdotal experience is adequately instructive.

Today, fundamentalist evangelical conservative Christians are insisting that abortion is murder and must be illegal.  Full stop.

Something doesn’t add up here.

To put it another way: the need for abortion to arbitrarily save face — a problem created by fundigelicalism — is a problem that must be solved by fundigelicalism.

We have a word for that in psychology when such a claim is made to an individual: gaslighting. “It’s your fault I made you do that, and only I can fix this by punishing you.”  This is gaslighting on a macro level, moving across multiple generations.

2022 Update: So, funny story — the entire 2nd half of this post vanished into thin air, never to be seen again. No idea what happened, though I suspect my recent WordPress migration might be to blame.

Anyway, the short-short-short version: “Pro-choice” doesn’t mean “pro-abortion”; no one actually wants more abortions. Abortions are always unfortunate, but (a) are sometimes medically necessary and (b) the abortions-for-birth-control archetype is a strawman. I’m pro-choice in that I support a mother’s choice based on her own best discernment and I’m pro-life in that I support building a community that provides access to women’s healthcare, including affordable-if-not-free after-birth childcare so, that they can make the best choice possible. 

The two are not at all mutually exclusive. The controversy was fabricated for political gain and nothing more. I’ll write a new piece on this to go into detail. (Mind you, what I’ve said here still paints this too simply, but it’s the short-short-short version.)