I'll tell you the truth and it's up to you to live with it

When I was young, I read Robert K. Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra. Then, partly because I wanted to know more about Tsarist Russia and partly because I liked Massie's writing, I read Peter the Great. I spent a good part of a summer on those two books.

Both books are filled with examples of horrific cruelty and indifference to human suffering, but Peter the Great was especially hair-raising. In the introduction (or maybe the epilogue), Massie wrote something about how 17th century Russia was a time and place of hideous cruelty, exactly like every other time and place before or since. This made a deep impression on me, and I think about it every time I read or hear or see stories of unimaginable human suffering here or anywhere in the world. It's a fallen world. Most of us here in the 21st century industrialized West have escaped the worst of it, but no one gets out of this world without some suffering.

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I read Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns when it was published, in 2007. I'd read The Kite Runner, like everyone else in the world, and I wondered if Hosseini's second novel would be as good as his first. And it was. It was better, actually. Maybe I like it better because it's a story about women, and because I find it moving that a man can imagine such a true and beautiful female friendship. But it's also just a really good book. It's filled with lovely writing and believable characters, and it uses but does not exploit the horror of life under Taliban rule--especially for women--to great effect. The reader--or at least this reader--comes away knowing that there but for the grace of God go any of us.

2007 was kind of a long time ago. A lot has changed since then. A lot has happened. Last week, I was looking for something to read, and I found A Thousand Splendid Suns sitting in my Kindle library, just waiting for me, so I read it again. I remembered the basic outline of the story, but I had forgotten a lot of detail and I had actually forgotten how it ended (tragic but happy) so I tore through it pretty quickly--it is a page-turner.

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A Thousand Splendid Suns is not as well-known as The Handmaid's Tale, another story about women suffering under a harsh theocracy. I didn't mention to anyone I know that I had been reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, because I was sure that someone would connect the theme of women's suffering and oppression at the hands of authoritarian, religious men to what is happening right now in Missouri and Alabama, and I just can't.

I am a pro-life person. But I don't believe--not for one hot second--that the Alabama legislature has ANY INTEREST AT ALL in protecting life. If they did, the abortion bill that they just passed would be accompanied by legislation ending the death penalty, and welcoming refugees and migrants, and strengthening social service supports for poor families so that women in crisis pregnancies will have reason to hope that bringing their babies into the world is a viable option over aborting them. This latest round of abortion bills has nothing to do with the sanctity of life and everything to do with reinforcing the divisions between right and left. They don't want to end legalized abortion, because then there's nothing left to fight about.

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On the other hand (yes, the other hand once again), let's discuss the current Handmaid hysteria over these ridiculous new laws. When I see long Facebook posts about back alleys and coat hangers, with invitations to our desperate sisters in Alabama and Louisiana and Missouri to join us in the civilized blue state world where abortion is still legal and "safe," hashtagged #undergroundrailroad2019, I'm frankly a little embarrassed to be a middle-aged college-educated white lady.

Underground railroad?

REALLY?

It's funny, feminist friends, how you should connect abortion to slavery in this manner. Funny, because the comparison is apt, though not, I suspect, in the way that you intended. Slavery and abortion do, in fact, have something in common--both represent the ultimate triumph of the strong over the weak. After all, what is weaker than an unborn child?

In every society in human history in which the weak are not acknowledged to possess human rights, slavery has been the result. Slavery and genocide. And abortion, like it or not, is genocide.

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A Thousand Splendid Suns is a story about a society--Afghanistan under the Taliban--in which the weak are not acknowledged as possessing human rights. The weak, of course, are the women. Lots of feminists would read this book and see parallels to the United States in 2019. And so would I, though not, I suspect, in the way they intended.

You should read the book, so I won't give away too much of the story. Just this part. One of the two female protagonists has two children, a girl and a boy. The woman's husband adores the boy, and he barely tolerates the girl. When food becomes scarce in war-torn Kabul, he forces his wife to place the girl in an orphanage. The woman has absolutely no right to protest or to protect her daughter, and she endures beatings and harassment when she goes to visit the child, because her husband refuses to accompany her, and unaccompanied women are fair game for Taliban thugs.

In a society that valued women, a little girl would be of equal value to a little boy, and a mother would have equal parenting rights with her husband.

Of course, in a society that valued women, a woman who actually wanted--really wanted--to destroy her own child would be a rare and hideously tragic figure, pitied as mentally ill or otherwise terribly damaged. In a society that really treasured life, draconian abortion statutes would not be necessary, because the great majority of women would naturally choose to give birth to their babies, and would naturally expect that their jobs and their families and their schools and their communities would do whatever was necessary to make that choice possible. In a society that really respected women, unwanted and unexpected pregnancy would be rare, because men who had sex with women would understand that sex often results in babies and they would either accept the responsibility that this implies, or they'd keep their pants zipped. In a society that really valued women and their awesome reproductive capacity, rape and incest would be rare, because every boy would be taught from childhood to treat girls with respect, and girls would never see their fathers leering at NFL cheerleaders or Hooters waitresses or Sports Illustrated swimsuit models or Playboy centerfolds and would thus never internalize the idea that girls are supposed to grow up and become sexual playthings for men and boys.

That's a long paragraph, right?

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Abortion is an appalling offense against the dignity of women and the dignity of all human life. But it's not the only one. So you know what, Alabama? And Georgia and Louisiana and Missouri and all of you other states that are so eager to establish a new vanguard of pro-life extremism? Figure out how to fix all of that. Figure out how to make it so that unwanted pregnancy is rare, and that families and children are so valued that women won't think twice about bringing life into the world. Because unless your proclaimed commitment to the sanctity of life is backed up by something other than take-that-Planned-Parenthood abortion laws, then all of the women wearing pussy hats and Handmaid garb and "Keep Your Laws off My Body" t-shirts will keep calling you woman-haters and tyrants and a new American Taliban. And you know what else? They won't be wrong.

And I will scoff--SCOFF, I tell you--every time you proclaim yourselves to be "pro-life."

You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

*Title and last paragraph: William Goldman, "The Princess Bride"