A Slanted Lens

Deciding on a topic for this week’s post was incredibly difficult for me.  I feel like I am so far removed from this issue that I didn’t have just one concept that stuck out to me—the entire discussion, as a whole, was eye-opening.  We are at a time in western culture where gay people are allowed to get married in some states, but the rights of a woman over her own body are becoming more limited in some states.  Our social structure in the United States puts women into the role of mother and tells women how to be mothers.   Men are at the top of the social structure in that they have the most political control over the situation as governing bodies are still majority male; they can decide whether or not each state will have abortion as a legal option.  This power sitting in the hands of men seems to be—to me—a way of enforcing one’s views onto other people in a way that has a rippling effect that spouts into political protests outside of abortion clinics.  The constitution gives Americans the right to choose their religion and a freedom of speech, but in many places, women cannot make the decision as to whether or not they give birth to a child.   To me, this becomes a way of forcing one’s belief system onto other people. 

This issue of reproductive rights and abortion are so controversial that many of the clinics that women go to for the procedure are in awful conditions.  In our reading “My Abortion,” which gave an account of twenty-six women and their experience with abortion, the women talked a little bit about the conditions they were in.  Specifically, one woman in the article said, “the doctor was grotesque. He whistled show tunes. I could hear the vacuum sucking out the fetus alongside his whistling”(Heather).  The media often represents abortion through a biased anti abortion lens—presumably because these large companies are run by religious men—and makes it seem like the women who go through with the procedure are terrible people.  I found a rather long video on YouTube that is heavily biased against abortion.  It is fifteen minutes long, but I encourage you to mute it and just skim through and watch it with your own lens uninfluenced by the opinions of the hosts (no need to watch the whole thing, just randomly scrolling through the video gives you perspective on the interior of an abortion clinic) and then shuffle through it randomly again, this time unmuted.  An uneducated person seeing this video might be easily coerced into an anti-abortion stance through the depiction of their perspective.  While one stance on this debate is not more valuable than the other, how each side is depicted through the media largely impacts how individuals form their own opinions.