Why I Didn't Attend the Woman's March

The following was presented as part of "A Call to Action," a salon series of short political pieces from The Skeleton Rep.  It was directed by Ria DiLullo and written and performed by me.  Because I occasionally do perform things. 

I want to make one thing clear: I would have gone to D.C.  I would have stood up against the casual acceptance of sexual violence, the condescension, the inferiority woman are facing in the near future.  But when the leaders of the Woman’s March said pro-life woman need not apply, I stopped myself, and I did a double-take.  They didn’t say, come, but know we will have pro-choice speakers.  They didn’t say come, but please be respectful of the general view.  They said don’t come.  Now, the name of this march was not March for Choice.  It was the Women’s March.  For women. I basically had my vagina card rejected by the organizers of this protest.

I am a pro-life moderate.  I oppose overturning Roe v. Wade and defunding Planned Parenthood as tactics.  I oppose most legal measures to stop abortion because they are ineffective to the larger goal of ending abortion.  I am a Catholic, but my objections are not religious.  They are based on principles of human rights and social justice.  Moderates like me have no voice on either side of this increasingly dogmatic debate. 

And I think that’s bullshit.  Do you believe there weren’t disagreements within the suffrage movement?  Those bitches fought each other like crazy.  Alice Paul and Carrie Chappman Catt hated each other.  And let’s not forget other movements. Malcom X and Martin Luther King- diametric opposition of tactics. Think how shitty a musical Hamilton would be if the founding fathers agreed about everything.  By laying out a specific doctrine and declaring it the official stance of “women,” you are limiting yourself and robbing yourself of allies. I know some kick-ass pro-life women, way more radical than me, who would be invaluable assets to what you are doing.  But you don’t know them.  Because you told them not to show up.

Yesterday, a friend posted an article about how progressives should no longer use the term “pro-life,” because pro-life people don’t really care about life. My friend pledges to only call people like me anti-choice from now on. This is not discourse. This is re-framing an argument so you are guaranteed to win.

 Let me break down something for any of you who think this is a good idea.  I have a degree in philosophy, with a focus on the Jewish Enlightenment thinker Baruch Spinoza.  He wrote about democracy before John Locke.  From his example, I’ve extracted two basic rules for effective discourse. First, always assume your opponents value what they say they value. In other words, don’t assume your opponent is lying or trying to trick you. Second, you must choose the strongest and most convincing of your opponent’s arguments and engage directly with that argument.

When you reframe the prolife- prochoice debate into a pro-choice-anti-choice debate, you are committing two philosophical fallacies.  You are assuming your opponent is lying about her values, and you are insisting that her weakest argument is her only true argument. You require less of your intellectual power to beat a less powerful premise, bringing the entire conversation down.  You weaken the level of discourse and that’s bad for me and it’s bad for you.

Listen, clearly I’m not stupid.  I know you have reasons to believe that pro-life people are contributing to more abortions.  I’m aware of those arguments and I have counter-arguments.  Give other people the benefit of the doubt.  Why do you assume people are dumb?  Or is it just because you know the real discussion, the hard discussion that we might have will be painful for you? I’m in pain too.  It’s okay, we can get through that together. And with that pain, we can find common ground.  We can ask- where and how can we work together? 

By excluding me from the Woman’s March you have also excluded my ideas, my values, and my dreams.  You’ve devalued me as a woman.   If, on the other hand, you’re open to pro-life women in general being part of the conversation, then pro-life moderates will most likely side with you in elections and in policy.  We will join you in the fight for equality in the workplace, for an end to sexual violence, for more support for single mothers and increased resources for children in foster-care and for families.  We’ll ally with you in the fight for diversity and inclusiveness and a strong thriving democracy.  I’ll ally with you on so many things. And I’ll fight with you about the other thing. I think that’s okay.  But it’s up to progressives to decide whether one more person marching makes a difference. If not, I’ll sit the next one out too.