No small hooray for the pope
Kate Smurthwaite has some thoughts on the pope’s “pardon” for abortions.
As I am the official representative of womb-operators (as well as being a comedian I’m also the Media Spokesperson for Abortion Rights UK – you’d be amazed how much overlap the roles have) every journalist and radio presenter has been tripping over themselves to ask me if I’m PLEASED. One even went so far as to ask whether I couldn’t manage a ‘small hooray’.
But any transitory modicum of elation I might have felt at the news that his Holiness has taken one tiny step away from the misogynist medieval attitude that my uterus is any of his damn business is more than swamped by the fury I’m feeling that anyone is still listening to the guy.
Right? The news media treat him with such tender care, such affection, such solemnity – but why? He’s not the boss of all of us. He’d like to be, but he’s not. He’s not, strictly speaking, the boss of anyone except the church hierarchy. He’s just a guy in fancy robes who’s at the top a particular church ladder, that’s all. There are a lot of Catholics, but they’re all free to ignore him if they decide to. He has no power over them.
He has as no democratic mandate. The Pope is ‘elected’ by a bunch of cardinals who in turn are appointed by the Pope. They’re not exactly a diverse bunch.
He doesn’t represent Catholics, thousands of whom have abortions every year and carry on calling themselves Catholics afterwards. Some have even organized to form a campaign group called Catholics For Choice.
He certainly doesn’t represent women. Everyone is entitled to a view on any subject they want, but seriously. Has he, or any of his cardinals, ever woken up and thought ‘still no period… oh shit, I really hope this isn’t… come on… start you stupid thing…’?
No, because for them it’s always someone else who does the baby-having. They make the rules, those inferior other people carry them out.
The only mandate he has is that, as several enthusiastic journalists couldn’t wait to advise me, ‘He’s God’s representative on earth.’
Draconian laws, the vast majority of them initially catapulted into force by the political influence of his predecessors, mean that every year over 20 million women have unsafe illegal abortions and thousands of them die. I’m sorry, but in 2015 I need a better justification for that than ‘He’s God’s representative on earth’.
Journalists told her that? Oy. No he’s not “God’s representative on earth” – because we don’t have any reliable knowledge that there is such a god, because even if we did we wouldn’t know how to contact it, because we have no reason at all to think any pope or any other human is that unavailable god’s “representative.” There’s no link between those four words and any kind of evidence or line of transmission.
And if there were we could still disobey it.
One thing that bothered me is that giving a “small hooray” to the pope is that would entail accepting his premise that having an abortion is something for which a woman would need forgiveness. Of course, for many of the religious leaders, if they were honest about it, being a woman is something for which a woman needs forgiveness. “Eve was weak” “Woman brought sin into the world” etc etc etc This is a disgusting, archaic, and hateful mythology.
I for one am not sorry, I do not need the forgiveness of an old man in a fancy robe, and I did nothing wrong. I have not regretted my decision, and I do not need someone else to tell me it was wrong, but it’s OK as long as I’m truly, truly sorry. If there is a God, and if he/she/it has a problem with that, well, I don’t care. I don’t want to worship any being who has that sort of an attitude toward humanity (or at least the female half of humanity).
Exactly. Let’s stop pretending that it’s a great thing that this pope doesn’t think you’ll burn in Hell for your abortion, so long as you’re sorry, confess your “sin” and do your penance.
1. Hell doesn’t exist.
2. Abortions are a medical procedure.
3. Some people have to abort pregnancies that were wanted. They are the only ones who are “sorry” and the only ones we should expect to regret needing the procedure.
4. Sin doesn’t exist.
5. Fuck off with your god.
These journalists who refer to the Pope as “God’s representative on Earth” — they wouldn’t be any of the same journalists who otherwise insist on views-differ-on-shape-of-the-earth faux objectivity?
Yes, this is like saying that homosexuals can stay in the church if they truly “repent” and promise never to do it again. It’s not reconciliation, it’s pulling the noose a bit tighter.
And this LIMITED TIME ONLY!!! move looks like a way to make a short small burst of returning Catholics look like a jumping statistical bandwagon.
And why does mainstream media report what he says? Let the church disseminate their own “news” and leave the rest of us out of it.
What I was going to write has already been written. My instant reaction was “Great. Now they’ll have a list, and who knows what they’re going to do with it?”
No. Just no.
Women do not need forgiveness for aborting unwanted pregnancies.
God, on the other hand, is guilty of aborting unimaginably huge numbers of wanted pregnancies.
The pope, as god’s representative on Earth, should be grovelling at the feet of women, begging for their forgiveness of god.
The text of the Pope’s magnanimous pronouncement is full of oblivious irony, such as “A widespread and insensitive mentality has led to the loss of the proper personal and social sensitivity to welcome new life” (insensitivity, anyone?), and “I have met so many women who bear in their heart the scar of this agonizing and painful decision” (made more agonizing and painful by…).
I’ve written more about this here.