Driving across North Dakota this summer on my way from what had been my exceptionally liberal home for two years, Olympia, Washington, I started to notice anti-choice signs for the first time since leaving the South two years before. I noticed an increase as we drove into the desert, but didn’t pay a lot of attention until a particularly brightly colored (think baby nursery pastels) billboard on the side of the highway. It said “What? Embryos are TINY BABIES!” The lettering was written as though by a child or, perhaps, whoever designed the billboard only recently had learned to read. There were several pictures of babies (embryos?) dancing (or something) beside the statement.
It was a revelation, you guys. Embryos ARE tiny babies, I thought to myself. An acorn is a giant oak tree, a cup of flour is a birthday cake, and a cow is a McDonald’s hamburger. Why don’t we just face the fact that something not only is what it actually is, but it is everything that it ever has the possibility of being!? The world is so much more exciting now. I often think of going to law or medical school, so I am now a doctor and an attorney. I have a dozen chickens in my refrigerator (in a egg carton! get it?) and the twelve dollars in my savings account is really a million! I can already retire from my exhausting career performing surgery and then suing myself for malpractice. Whew!
What I'm getting at, ladies, is that you shouldn't let a stupid thing like logic get in the way of your potentially amazing new life, living according to the anti-choice line of thinking. If an embryo is a tiny baby, anything can happen. I probably saw a hundred anti-choice billboards while driving from the West coast to the East Coast this summer, and on almost every single one there was a fetus that seemed to be floating in outer-space. There wasn’t a single woman pictured on any of them, for gosh-sakes! Why do we insist on making those fetuses into issues about women's bodies? Why can’t we all just forget the fact that a baby lives in a woman, and pretend, like Evangelicals do, that they are independent life forms, hardly a bother to anyone in their baby-cocoon which might as well be on the moon?
I also really appreciated the “choose life, your mom did!” signs along the roadway. Existing, really, is it’s own reward, no matter who you are or who your mom is, trust me. How pissed would I be if I wasn’t ever born and didn’t ever get to see Fargo, North Dakota? Life is so great, what if I never got to live it, or even KNOW that I never got to get born and go to Fargo? Trying to imagine what I’d be thinking if I didn’t exist really blew my mind. Whoever painted that sign and made me think so hard must have an advanced degree in philosophy or something..
Now I’m back in a sleepy little pocket of logical semi-liberalism in the North Carolina mountains. I want to hike to the top of a hillside and shout out the new truth, that if something exists in the hearts and minds of people, or in heaven, or on a billboard, it is the truth.
The truth is anything anybody says it is, not what actually happens in this disgusting, ugly quagmire we know as “reality.” John McCain knows it, Sarah Palin knows it, and darn it, they’re going to make up so much new truth it’s going to make your head spin. In the new conservative reality, we’re all just delicate lilly-blossoms, opening up, waiting to be pollenated by a handsome bumblebee so we can bring more beautiful baby-bumblebees into this wonderful world. Unless you’re poor. Or gay. Or you’re trying to go to college or even high school. Or you’ve been raped. Or it’s just not the right time for you to have a baby. Too bad for you guys, because the new reality is just going to be magical.
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I lol'd
Apparently you don't have to do anything to get one of those tiny babies - you're already packing a couple million around with you every day. Congratulations!
...Someone needs to make a fake-Ikea thing with an embryo. Like this, but with an embryo.
I also link you to this.