sound and fury (signifying nothing)

“I think that when we say that teenagers are like small adults, we too easily dismiss the fact that they’re also large children.”

Life is a prison sentence. That sounds bleak, I know, and what else could you expect from the World’s Greatest Pessimist. I think it can actually be pretty great sometimes, but as it relates to procreation, it’s like being locked up.

Childlessness is like being paroled. Actually, it’s childfreeness (having no children by choice rather than by chance) that’s like being paroled – there are still all these rules you have to follow, but you get to have some measure of ownership over your own time, and you can take a shower in peace without being violated.

Many people, by choice or by chance, do have children, and are currently serving an 18-to-24. And some of them really hate to see someone else get off so lightly. This is my theory as to why, when I tell someone I don’t want kids, they say, “Oh, you’ll change your mind. It’ll happen.” It’s a scene that’s replayed for the past dozen years at least. I wonder what the mandatory minimum sentence is before you can be taken seriously and even surgically sterilized.

To be fair, I suppose it could be a little insulting to be told that your decision not to procreate is a positive. Not that I think anyone would see it that way, even someone as notorious for overthinking shit as I am. In fact, one guy actually said “good for you!” when I told him I didn’t want kids. He didn’t mean it as an insult (“thank God there aren’t going to be more of you!“), and I didn’t take it as one, and I take everything in the worst possible light.

To everyone else, it’s that I’m too silly and young to know what I really want for the rest of my life. Which is interesting, because if I got knocked up tomorrow – a circumstance that would most likely also affect me for the rest of my life – it would be nothing but a chorus of congratulations and well-wishes. The same people who claim I’m too young to really know that I don’t want kids would most assuredly not turn around and tell me that I’m also too young to know that I do want them.

No. They’d just be glad I was finally starting my sentence.

Here I thought my political blogging career was over. Ah, well, it wasn’t I who made a political martyr out of Dr. George Tiller. Nor was I the one who made the abortion debate political in the first place.

I’ve already explained my position and counted to ten. While I’m open to the opinions of others, I’m not going to change my mind, nor am I going to sway anyone else. The kind of people who think that his death is good, or just okay, or say “well what about the babies he murdered?” are not ones to listen to reason or respond with anything other than rhetoric.

I know that this debate isn’t really solvable. The solution I, and many other pro-choice people would prefer, is for there to be fewer unwanted pregnancies in the first place, owing to comprehensive sex education and widely available contraception. The people on the far right side of this ideological rift insist that humans (well, women) should only ever have sex if they are completely prepared to bear a child, which sounds nice but doesn’t take into account anything about human nature.

What I hope is this: that if a rabidly pro-life person should find his or her friend, sister, wife, mother, cousin, or any other woman they care about facing a decision about a pregnancy that isn’t wanted, safe, or viable, they are able to put aside their differences, turn down their shouting, and offer support to their loved one during a decision that is never easy or lightly made.