The Cotton Badge of Courage Date Wednesday, April 24, 2024 - 11:50 PM PST Topic Politics The girl ahead of me in line at the restaurant was about 20, short, pretty, with long brown hair and a couple of earrings in each ear. She looked like a thousand other college students in my town who frequent this place because the food and coffee are cheap and the staff won't throw you out quickly. Of course, the staff there never does anything quickly. As the line at the cash register grew longer, we all muttered impatiently, hoping to attract an employee's attention. Finally, the cashier noticed the growing line of customers trying to pay for breakfast, and approached the register with the halfhearted "service smile" that all restaurant employees seem to have on Sunday mornings. As she reached for the brown-haired girl's check, she began, "And how was..." and her face suddenly froze into a shocked, hateful expression. She rang up the girl's meal in total silence. As she turned to leave, I saw what made the cashier cringe. The girl was wearing a T-shirt that said in large plain letters, "I had an abortion." I have seen people do genuinely daring things, and I have seen a lot more make cheap "statements" that cost them nothing and accomplish as much (like covering their cars with bumper stickers), but that girl's T-shirt was in its own league. By wearing it publicly, she was throwing her image, her reputation, and her face and body, like gasoline, onto one of the hottest cultural fires of our time. On a Sunday morning, no less, right in the middle of the post-church breakfast rush. I have an opinion about abortion - most people do - but what struck me at that moment was not "The Abortion Debate." It was this girl's courage in lending her face to such an explosive issue. Look at me, she seemed to be saying. I am the person that Operation Save America has declared war on. I am the person that Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women claim to serve. I could be your sister, your roommate, your girlfriend, or the sorority girl you screwed at last month's frat party. This issue affects real people. Look at me; I'm one of them. I wanted to ask her about the shirt. Certainly she expected some attention - why else would she have worn it? - but the line was moving, and the customers behind me were grumbling. As she left I said a quick prayer for her safety. That slogan looked rather like a target. Back home, I did some research. Apparently, the shirts are being sold by Planned Parenthood to humanize the abortion debate. They are intended as a way for women who have had abortions to send the message that pregnancy termination is not shameful. By putting real womens' faces on the issue, they hope to raise public consciousness of just how common abortion really is. They want the public to understand that women who choose this option are not lowlife baby-killing scum: they are mothers, students, professionals, and even churchgoers, who faced a hard decision and made the choice they deemed best. The first shirts appeared at pro-choice rallies and protests. Recently, a few pro-life women have begun wearing them to initiate conversations about how they regret their abortions, and why they now feel that the procedure should be outlawed. You can read more about the shirts here. Declaring a side in a raging culture-war battle is never easy. Ask an out-of-the-closet gay person, or a medical marijuana advocate, or anyone fighting a school board over a controversial curriculum. You don't usually get to calmly explain your opinions. You get insulted, threatened, and possibly fired. Your tires get slashed. Your family gets harassed. Your parents and your community often shun you because they can't handle the embarassment. This is hard enough with a host of fellow believers backing you up, but this girl was alone, going about her business in a town full of strangers. Whatever one thinks of abortion, that takes guts. Why she was doing this? I knew nothing about her, or the reasons for her abortion, or even if she really had an abortion. Maybe she wore the shirt as a psychology class experiment. Maybe it was purely for shock value. Maybe she lost a bet. Maybe it was a sorority hazing ritual. Who knows. But taking her statement at face value - that she did, in fact, have an abortion - I still knew nothing. How did she feel about it? Her shirt didn't say, "I had an abortion and I regret it," or "I had an abortion and I'd do it again." It simply put a face - her face - on an issue that most people think of only in the abstract. It's easy to wave crusading flags when you aren't looking at the all-too-human faces of those you crusade against. Perhaps that was her real statement. There's a dangerous trend in this country of reducing every nuanced social issue to black-and-white, for-or-against, right-and-wrong sparring. There are people who feel that abortion is never wrong or always wrong, and they are entitled to their opinions. But there are many more who haven't truly considered how they feel because society forces them to pick a side. If that was what this girl was protesting, she picked a noble battle indeed. I once worked with a man who announced his intention to vote for a political candidate who stood for everything I thought he opposed. I asked him why. "He's pro-choice," my co-worker explained, and went on to clarify. His wife once had an abortion. After a life-threatening first pregnancy during which she and her baby almost died, her doctor cautioned her against getting pregnant again. Shortly afterward, she developed more health problems. When their method of birth control failed and their Catholic health insurer would not cover abortion services, they headed to Planned Parenthood. My co-worker walked his wife through the protesters, and after the first God-fearing Christian father threw fake blood at the mother of his son and called her a baby-killing whore, he started voting pro-choice. One can hardly blame him. I will never know the story behind this girl's abortion. Did her birth control fail? Was she raped? Is she too selfish to deal with the inconvenience of a child? Does she have a hereditary disease that she refused to inflict on a baby? Is she an incest victim? Does she already have two children and can't afford any more? I don't know. Nobody ever truly knows. That's what makes us-versus-them, lines-in-the-sand reasoning so dangerous. I was reminded of this last year during the gay marriage debate. I live in a state that recently passed a ban on same-sex unions. The proposal was sold with romantic commercials featuring brides and grooms and churches, suggesting that this referendum was merely a way to tell our lawmakers that we want a wholesome, family-friendly state, with no moral depravity. Don't worry, they all said; it's purely symbolic. It doesn't affect real lives. Well, actually, it does. The house I rent is owned by a lesbian couple. Thanks to this law, it can only be owned by one-half of that couple, and the woman who holds the deed is very sick. If she dies, her relatives will inherit the property, not her partner. Those relatives could give us 30 days to pack up and move out. I am completely heterosexual and this law directly affects me. I did not vote on a symbolic line in the sand. I voted against a law that screws with real human lives. But the values crowd is still waving their victory flags. They must not know any real live gay people. That girl in the abortion T-shirt was an inspiration. Not to "pro-choice Americans," but to anyone who is sick to death of having to wear metaphorical team jerseys to discuss important issues. When we reduce complex problems to dueling abstractions, we callously throw away our ability to think for ourselves. That girl was not "The Abortion Debate." She was not "the culture wars." She was a person who made a hard choice and wanted the world to know about it. Perhaps she will inspire a few people to examine their opinions about abortion. Perhaps those same people will go on to examine their opinions on gay marriage, the Iraq war, welfare reform, sex education, and the environment - and ask themselves how they formed those opinions, whether by conscious belief or because someone forced them to pick a side and told them what to think. One would hope. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=747