I go to my work email, and what do I discover? A few colleagues noticed a goose with a broken wing on campus and decided to help it. Other colleagues asked for advice on how to protect a goose nest that they saw around campus. All was well and good until a couple of people decided to pollute the discussion with moaning about immoral women destroying “unborn life in the womb” and asking if this is what American soldiers have been dying for overseas. No, I don’t see the connection either.
This is work email, mind you. It’s one thing to discuss working conditions on campus (of which conditions geese are a huge part, as you know from my previous posts). But I would be pilloried if I sent out any pro-abortion messages to the university community (and rightfully so because the work email exists for other purposes). In the meanwhile, we have to sit by quietly as we are publicly berated for being immoral women and for supposedly disrespecting soldiers because we believe we have the right to decide what occurs inside our own bodies. For fuck’s sake, is that the liberal academia I’m hearing so much about?
Of course, I sent out an email in response insisting that I not be exposed to this sort of propaganda in the workplace. I’m very angry right now.
Clarissa's Blog 
That’s absolutely horrible and I’m glad you said something. I agree with you that the campus e-mail listserv is no place for pro-choice rhetoric either but to me the “unborn baby” discussion is worse promoting the pro-choice position. Antiabortion politics are inherently anti woman and shouldn’t be anywhere near a work place or a college campus.
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Do you know what the male colleague who started the conversation about wombs responded to my email?
“You were a baby, too, once!”
These emails go out to everybody who works for the university. He must have thought this crucial insight was valuable enough to share with the entire school. Priceless.
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What you actually wrote was. . . harsher. Totally deserved, in my opinion.
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Yes, it was. I don’t believe I have a contractual obligation to put up with this sort of thing.
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I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am.
Why are all these committees of religious zealots, pious purity panty sniffers, and secular sad sacks, so terrified of autonomous women?
Why do they insist on turning it into some weird test of praxis for whatever stupid ideology they want to push? If I have a kid or don’t have one it’s for deeply personal reasons, not because of God/community/nation state/the planet/whatever. For all of the rhetoric about larger groups, those groups aren’t there in a meaningful way when it comes to child-raising. Sure, my great-grandmother had 10 children; but she also lived in a joint family and had a large extended family around her.
The moment in which large numbers of people are able to reliably separate the desire to have children from the desire to copulate is so recent and so short that I think societies haven’t even integrated it yet in any meaningful way.
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I will never understand the hubris and the absolutely deranged sense of self-importance that could motivate a person to try to force a woman into a pregnancy she doesn’t want. I’d collapse under the enormous weight of responsibility if I did something like that. What if she suffers pregnancy complications? Has pre-eclampsia? Diabetes? PUPPPS? A rupture? What if the baby is sick, premature, what if they fail to bond, what if they end up miserable? What if she attempts an unsafe abortion and hurts herself or dies?
Why would I want to intrude upon the lives of complete strangers and cause all this to them against their will? I’d have to be a monster. It’s monstrous. And these people claim to be religious when they have appointed themselves gods over the lives of others?
As my mother’s priest always says whenever people start complaining about sinners, “Just concentrate on yourself and on trying to be as good as you can. Leave others be. It’s not up to you to judge or to manage their lives.”
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