It's really none of your business what emotional reaction I have to my abortion, but ideology tells you that, unless a woman feels sad about her abortion, she is repulsive, because it is not acceptable that a woman simply does not want a child, period -- she needs to plead that she is a victim to rape, incest, poverty, ill health, or something like that.
Emotional reactions, too, undergo historical transformations, as public opinions change. The proper emotional reaction to miscegenation, prostitution, homosexuality, etc. dictated by the dominant ideology was a feeling of tragedy. When offsprings of interracial relations, prostitutes, promiscuous women, homosexuals, etc. were portrayed at all, they were represented as "tragic mulattoes," "fallen women," "neurotic, unhappy, and suicidal homosexuals," etc. (Death often awaited biracial, promiscuous, and/or homosexual characters in cinema and literature.) Even gay men and lesbians themselves once felt compelled to represent themselves in the generally tragic vein: e.g., The Well of Loneliness (Radclyffe Hall, 1928), Suddenly, Last Summer (Tennessee Williams, 1958), Boys in the Band (Mart Crowley, 1968), etc.
Today, representations of persons of biracial backgrounds, gay men, lesbians, etc. have diversified greatly, because of successes of political activism for liberty and equality, and the dominant ideology about them doesn't dictate the feeling of tragedy any longer.
Feelings about abortion, too, have and will continue to change, and whether they will change better or worse from now depend on results of feminist activism. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>