I feel pretty much the same way. My husband has a U.S. Marine sticker and a POW sticker on our truck. I don’t feel the need to blab it to the world, but he does, so there it sticks. I much prefer supporting through means that actually count…like money.
Or maternity sizes?
Well, except that she may have - probably has - had an abortion, herself. If she’s wearing that shirt, and at a rally or protest, it’s a pretty good bet that she knows a lot of OTHER women who have had abortions. There is the teeniest, tiniest chance that these women have discussed their feelings with her at some point. I think the people who are foremost in her mind are the women who have had abortions.
If you’re a Right-to-Life activist, you obviously feel no shame…and the t-shirt makes you feel bad. Isn’t that, in the context of a protest or rally, the point? It’s obviously supposed to be provocative. To the person wearing it, it’s a screaming shame that it IS provocative.
You know, I’m overly-familiar with the issue of abortion, and I can’t claim any “the condom broke” or “it was only once”…it was my own extreme neligence and youth and stupidity and sheer fuckheadedness. However, you can be damned sure that I will firmly and solidly bludgeon my children with “BE SAFE BE SAFE BE SAFE.” When they’re adults, I could be the person wearing that shirt at a rally or protest, and I would definitely not be treating the issue “flippantly.” I’d be putting a human face to a clinical procedure and a very difficult decision. I’d be one of the folks trying to pass down extreme discipline in family planning, and hopefully making fewer abortions necessary.
I think that in assuming that the woman in question hasn’t given the matter much thought, you may be doing her - and her motives - a disservice.
What makes the woman “mostly” respectable is that the woman I was referring to in that particular example is me, and I refuse to consider myself completely respectable. If it were anyone else, I’d say I’d give her the benefit of the doubt, if any, and drop the word mostly. Like “moral”, I consider “respectable” to be in the eye of the beholder and not really my place to judge in others.
CJ
Maybe. But they’re not as dumb as people who pay for the privilege of wearing advertising logos and slogans around on their clothing.
For example, i’m not a conservative, but i have more respect for someone who wears a pro-Bush t-shirt than for someone who proudly parades around displaying the Nike swoosh or the Hilfiger flag.
You are a bad person.
Um.
cough
FUCKING EWWWWW!
I only sleep with humans, not alien replicants from beyond the grave.
In that case, shouldn’t the t-shirt read: 'This little bastard evaded the coathanger!"
Yeah, yeah, yeah… it’s gross and wrong, makes the Baby Ashcroft cry, and will bring the 12 Plagues of Pat Robertson upon the Earth.
Perhaps a good analogy would be divorce.
Almost no one thinks divorce in and of itself is a wonderful experience that everyone should seek out and indulge in, but most of us see its continued legal existence as an important and necessary component of our freedom. Those who have been divorced are probably very glad there’s far less stigma attached to getting a divorce than there used to be.
If some oddball flavor of religious fundamentalist folks started making serious political headway towards making it increasingly difficult to get a divorce, with the openly stated goal of eventually making it illegal; if they’d tracked down divorce attorneys and picketed outside of courtrooms known to grant divorces and harassed people thought to be seeking divorces, and this had an intimidating effect on divorced people to the point that lots of them were wary of letting anyone know they’d had a divorce…
could you see the rationale for wearing a shirt unapologetically declaring that you were divorced?
Puts an entirely new spin on ‘Hit me with your best shot.’
Yup…
I can see the shirt now: “I got a divorce and all I walked away with is this lousy t-shirt and my remaining shards of dignity.”
Or: “I got a divorce and all I got was the house, the car, alimony, the summer house, his left nut, and his immortal soul. I’d have gotten his dignity too if he had ever had any.”
Actually, in the context of this discussion, I’d say it’s in remarkably poor taste.
In the context of the discussion I think it’s exactly on topic.
Whatever happened to the mantra, “Safe, legal and rare?”
That’s what I always heard from the “pro-choice” side, “Safe, legal and rare.” The t-shirt makes it appear that “rare” has gone by the wayside, and the mantra is now, “safe, legal and any time, any place, for any reason,” which is exactly the “slippery slope” that the “pro-life” side claimed they were trying to avoid.
As a man, I don’t really have a dog in this hunt, but my personal opinion is “selective reduction” for convenience, etc. is WAAAAY over the line, though it seems to be becoming a more common practice these days…and I’m opposed to anything that takes away from the gravity of the decision, which this t-shirt does, unless it’s worn exclusively at rallies, etc., as mentioned before.
My son/daughter was killed in the War in Iraq…and all I got was a lousy $300 tax refund.
When I first read the thread I was too lazy to click on the link in the OP, and thought the T-shirts actually had the text “I had an abortion and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”. With that in mind, I could more or less see where the “tacky” and “flippant” comments were coming from. It seemed an unneccessarily provocative way to treat a serious subject.
But when I got around to look at the T-shirt, I saw that it only says “I had an abortion”. What on earth is tacky or flippant about that?
Bolding mine.
Like the OP, who asked that this not turn into a debate about abortion, your comment is another disingenuous attempt to appear “neutral.”
You claim you have no “dog in this hunt,” but then provide an argument that makes it very clear that you do, in fact, have such a dog. Your use of the term “convenience,” and your (so-far unsubstantiated) belief that this is a common reason for abortion, place you firmly within abortion politics. The fact that you are a man is completely irrelevent. Plenty of men line up on both sides of the abortion debate, and implying that they are somehow more neutral or rational simply because men don’t undergo abortions themselves is silly and counterproductive.
I’m a guy too. But i very much consider myself to have a stake in the abortion issue. My belief that women should have a choice is firmly rooted in my broader ideas of what constitutes a good and just society. And part of that, for me, is the idea that women (like men) should be in control of what happens to their own bodies.
I’m not saying that you aren’t entitled to your position. You most certainly are. What i’m saying is that it is more than a little disingenuous for you to take that position, and at the same time try to convince us that it is not borne of politics or partisanship in the abortion debate.
Why does everyone forget that the $300 refund was an idea that came entirely from the Democrats? Admitedly, Bush did co-opt it, but it was proposed by the Democrats after complaints that only the rich got anything out of the tax cuts.
I don’t understand why, if it’s legal, anyone would have a problem with “any time, any place, for any reason”. Does that make it worse if a woman has more than one procedure? I don’t understand that logic.