Choice

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Feb 1 03:29:05 PST 2003


On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, Dennis Perrin wrote:


> > To me, it's a bedrock issue. If women can't control reproduction,
> > they're not free, and structurally subordinated to men. I don't see
> > why I should let someone who thinks otherwise speak at my political
> > convention.
>
> Well then, you're not for "choice" -- you're for obedience to a line.
> Which is fine. Just dispense with the "choice" chat and say what you
> really mean.

Dennis, you seem to be willfully misunderstanding the nature of slogans. They are abbreviations for longer and more specific statements that don't fit on a button. They are not postulates that lie at the bottom of Euclidian systems.

Pro-choice is short for "pro a woman's right to make a choice of whether or not she wants to have an abortion." And against anyone who's against that. It's shortened to pro-choice to make a slogan out of it. It's an abbreviation for being passionately favor of one specific choice. It is not a philosophy about being in favor of choice in general.

So there is no contradiction at all in being pro-[this specific] choice and excluding people who are against it.

Similarly there is no contradiction in being "pro-life" and being for the death penalty or war. Because everyone knows pro-life is short for "pro protecting the life of the fetus." Pro-life is simply an abbreviation of it. In both cases of course the specific shortenings were picked to emphasize their most appealing aspects. That should surprise no one, and I can't see any inherent grounds for objecting to it. You don't advocate a cause by crying stinking fish.

You seem to be mistaking abbrevations for specific political demands for generalizations about all human activity. They're not.

Michael



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