Posted on 09/25/2002 7:54:13 AM PDT by victim soul
Nowadays when one woman in three undergoes a therapeutic abortion, the event seems almost like an initiatory rite into the mysteries of adult womanhood, essential to exploring one’s feminine rights to the full.
It is always assumed that a woman modern enough to exercise this choice has full command over her body, and enjoys unfettered powers of judgment, free of external pressures.
There is an aura of complacency about the feminist achievement of abortion availability, and a creeping belief that there is no danger or serious complication to termination; that an abortion almost amounts to an alternative form of contraception; that the procedure leaves no scars, physical or mental.
Now a book has appeared to challenge that comfortable notion, and from a surprising quarter. Nicole Appleton, former singer with all-girl group All Saints, has co-authored a book with her sister Natalie, in which she deals in some detail with the events surrounding her own abortion.
The story comes across with a passion and intensity not disguised by the unsophisticated language and tabloid tempo, yet perhaps the most encouraging message is that Appleton was prepared to tell it at all, in all its gory detail. Society may be more relaxed about mothers of illegitimate children these days, but having an abortion and talking publicly about it remains one of the great taboos.
Besides the personal assuaging of grief this afforded Appleton, there is clearly a desire to send messages to other girls similarly placed. The woeful tale has elements that could have come straight from a pro-lifer’s case-book, with pressures and manipulations imposed on a vulnerable girl, propelling her into a decision that was emphatically not her own.
Appleton found herself pregnant by her boyfriend, the singer Robbie Williams, with whom she had been in a relationship for only three months. She had conceived on Valentine’s Day, "an amazing omen", by her reckoning, reinforced by a further augury that a close friend became pregnant at exactly the same time. The two were so close that their periods were synchronised. The girls were ecstatically happy with their discovery, as also were their respective partners. Delightful plans forged a head for buying a flat, preparing the nest, commemorating the coming child in song.
‘Appleton miserably caved in. This was before the tradition of feisty, she- powered, royal pop- princesses flaunting their pregnant tummies’
But other issues and other interests were at stake, notably the future of the band and the financial well-being of the record company. The (male ) manager tried on a display of shock-horror and verbal put-downs, resorted to divide-and-rule by persuading mum and sister to pile on the pressure, waxing big on moral responsibility - "Not about sentiment, it’s what’s best for the band".
The confused and distraught girl was dragged before a company meeting and offered an abortion - clearly in such a way she found it impossible to refuse. It takes a strong will, experience and supreme self-confidence to resist such an onslaught, and poor Appleton had none of these resources. Miserably she caved in. There was then no tradition of feisty, she-powered, royal pop-princesses flaunting their pregnant tummies as Scary and Posh Spice were to do with such aplomb some time in the future. To be pregnant at that time in Appleton’s gig-world was just "not cool".
Appleton’s problems were seriously compounded by being referred to a private New York clinic where her treatment was as perfunctory and shifty as any back-street abortionist’s. Even the doctor had been engaged in the league against her, emphasising the advanced stage of her pregnancy and the need for instant action. As it turned out, the treatment was reprehensibly faulty, with no counselling about depression and guilt, no protection against rhesus isoimmunisation, no check on retained tissue or blood loss, no advice on travel and return to work. Back on the circuit, Appleton comments that she was treated with a noisy silence, as if the whole episode had been airbrushed out of reality.
Appleton admits that she was "bottom of the hierarchy" in her band-world, a dangerous place to be when it comes to sexual exploitation. Her dearest concerns were trampled underfoot when they ran counter to those of her colleagues - both male and female.
It has ever been thus with vulnerable and insecure women. Before the era of therapeutic abortion, such women were forced into giving up their babies at birth. It seems unlikely that Appleton is alone in being pressured into having an abortion, when clearly she wanted with all her heart to keep her baby.
Yet, though the present day gives no grounds for complacency over society’s care of women in their breeding years, it should not be forgotten that we have made some progress since certain black episodes in the past.
Time was when a census of the countryside showed a surprising dearth of women, simply because they had been sucked into the manors, the castles, the baronial halls and even the monasteries - ostensibly as domestics, in practice as serving wenches for their lordly masters’ comfort. Presumably the monks got away with it because the church believed at the time that women had no souls.
Within living memory, illegitimacy was a terrible stigma both for mother and child to carry through life, worn like a visible badge. Such non-persons would, if they were lucky, find a protective haven, shielded from notice, but more commonly they were excluded from society, possibly forced onto the streets with no alternative to prostitution for a living.
The most shocking aspect of all this tale of inhumanity is the engagement of women to the ranks of those who enslave other women through their sexual vulnerability; the Sisters of Mercy and nuns who ran the Magdalene Homes for unmarried mothers. Condemned to a life of drudgery and harshness, imprisoned without hope, among such women suicide was common. Their children were lucky if they were adopted, for the church regarded them as permanently stamped with the devil’s brand. Ironically enough, such girls would and did risk all to have abortions to escape such a fate. Driven by terrible fear of the consequences, their choice of termination was only the lesser of two dire evils.
Anecdote is not evidence, but this story of Appleton does point out how perilously fragile are the minor triumphs we females win for ourselves, and how readily such win situations can turn into disasters.
One may speculate as to whether this particular event was the main emotional driving force which caused the book to be written; such catharsis, reaching thousands of readers, is more likely to apply balm to wounded feelings than any brisk and sensible counselling. There would be reason to suppose that, with everyone clamming up around her, left alone with managing her grief and loss, sinking into the slough of despondency amid the subsiding hormones, Appleton would have been supremely vulnerable to protracted guilt and clinical depression.
Everything stacked up towards that outcome. She tried not to picture her four-month old baby, calling it a "foetus", a clinical and non-emotional term. "This was not a baby yet, this was an OK thing to do." She watched her child "like a small kidney bean" on the scanner, and then, horror of horrors, heard the suction of the machine and watched it - him, her - vanish into oblivion. This doctor must have been permanently anaesthetised to all feelings of sensitivity and tenderness, to put this on display. And after, Appleton had no insight as to how Robbie Williams felt about the loss of his baby, having been peripheral to the decision-making. It cannot have helped the relationship, and she would carry the burden of his share of guilt along with her own, perhaps for ever.
I do not wish to align with those who would deny the opportunity for abortion to women who require it. It should be a choice available for women to take if a pregnancy or a child puts an intolerable burden on her now or later. In an overcrowded world it is essential that this option is available. But like all complex medical issues, especially those to do with sex and reproduction, it is vital that women are empowered as far as possible to take the decision that is right for them, free of both male medical prejudice, female emancipated political correctness and non-specific social interference.
Much of the complexity arises because of the conflict between primeval urges and more cerebral ones. Nowadays we are bombarded by rationalisations for women to "have it all" - "give it all" is more apt - by juggling a career as well as a family. For some of us it is right, but it demands a stupendous drive and toughness. There are plenty of women whose main talents are for home-making, with all that entails, and who should expect to have that option available. Our privileges should not become self-imposed burdens, demanding that careers are a holy grail, placed on a higher altar than family.
All of poor Appleton’s attackers, including her own sister, had their own agendas; and all views were presented as disinterested. Perhaps a more mature person could have made her way through the maze of motives. In her account, undoubtedly the worst offender was the New York doctor. Anxious, perhaps, to pocket his fee with the least trouble and risk to himself, his input was minimal; and when she looked like complaining, even her records were conveniently lost. He was a technician - and incompetent at that - who had no intention of examining anything other than the purely practical issues. And this is not a new theme, nor is it peculiar to private medicine. I remember a time when breasts were removed as cavalierly as toenails, consigned to the incinerator along with a woman’s self-esteem with contemptuous remarks such as "outmoded appendage".
Nowadays, trying to understand their patients, male gynaecologists tend to take out uteruses on demand, fearful of being labelled non-compassionate and sexist. Few explore the reasons why some women, perhaps temporarily destabilised by personal traumas, ask for such a mutilating operation. And women assume the willingness to operate signifies that the surgeon concurs with the need. Such a canyon of incomprehension exists between the sexes!
Similarly, Caesarean sections are not always done according to the best dictates of care for the mother and child, but for social convenience and other peripheral reasons. There are whole avenues of unexplored territory in the field of psychosexual medicine - a field almost incomprehensible to the male mind - and until female medics get their act together it will remain an uncharted outback, leaving people like Appleton to continue to suffer from neglect and ignorance, and their fall-out.
Many women will testify to the intoxicating delight they feel when they first know they are pregnant. Of course it is primeval, but that makes it no less wonderful and precious. It seems only too logical that destroying such a natural gift will be visited by adverse consequences. Sometimes they must be borne, but they should not be trivialised. Women should understand the magnitude of what they are giving up.
Together, by Nicole and Natalie Appleton, is published 1 October by Michael Joseph, £16.99
Slanderous. No Christian denomination has ever taught this.
Source? Twenty bucks to FR says you can't document that.
Maybe not official doctrine, but parcticed and proselytized nonetheless.
See above.
Modern feminism is a sick religion that requires child sacrifices for initiation into the inner circle. It isn't about women's rights or well being. After all feminists gathered in China of all places, where baby girls are routinely aborted and thrown into rivers, to celebrate the very population control that is killing these girls.
It never occured to the useful idiots of these diseased harpies that if women were forced into marriage and motherhood, they are much more easily forced into abortion.
Presumably the monks got away with it because the church believed at the time that women had no souls.
Here's an interesting article regarding the often-heard claim that at one time the Church taught this. First Things to the rescue:
Opinion: The Myth of Soulless Women
And there are those who know that an early council of bishops, held at Macon in Burgundy, France in a.d. 585 decreed that women do not have a soul. The bishops of course decreed no such thing, for if women do not have a soul how could they be baptized, how receive the Eucharist, how be venerated as martyrs in heaven? Yet it may be worthwhile to look at the story of this alleged decree, for one can see a myth in the making.
The story begins, innocently enough, in the late sixteenth century. A young scholar, Valentius Acidalius, was working as a teacher in Silesia, and, like many young scholars, he was short of money. He thought to turn an honest penny by publishing a "diverting" pamphlet. In Latin the word homo, like the word man in English, primarily means "a human being, male or female, young or old," but has the secondary meaning of "adult male." Valentius thought it would be fun to use this ambiguity to "show" that in the Bible only adult males have souls. If he thought the pamphlet would amuse, he was grievously wrong. Simon Geddicus, a Lutheran scholar, launched a mighty counter-pamphlet entitled A Defense of the Female Sex, in which he proposed "manfully" (he actually uses the word viriliter) to "destroy each and every one of the arguments put forward by Valentius," who, the reader will learn with regret or satisfaction as the case may be, took a seizure and died.
The pamphlet, however, often bound with the refutation by Simon Geddicus, survived, and it appears that it was published at Lyons in France in 1647. It was now in Italian, and was entitled Women do not have a soul and do not belong to the human race, as is shown by many passages of Holy Scripture. One gathers from a commentator that "the ladies of Italy took this system very differently. Some were vexed to have no souls. Others were pretty indifferent about the matter, and looking on themselves as mere machines, hoped to set their springs so well agoing as to make the men stark mad." Not all the ladies were silent, and the splendidly named Archangela Tarabotti wrote A Defense of Women. One way or another, the offending book caught the attention of Pope Innocent X, who put it on the Index of Prohibited Books (Decree of June 18, 1651). So much for the allegation that the Church holds that women do not have souls.
But the suggestion that women do not have souls was obviously in the air. It apparently came to the ears of Johannes Leyser, a Lutheran pastor from the region of Frankfurt in Germany, for he took up the idea and then sought confirmation for it in the doings of the Council of Macon, a small council of some forty-three bishops held in Burgundy in the year 585. Leyser had become a chaplain in the Danish army. The excitements, and no doubt opportunities, of military life seem to have sharpened his zest for feminine variety, for in 1676 he published a volume called The Triumph of Polygamy, in which he proclaimed the merits of a plurality of wives. Seeking support for his view that women are inferior, he decided to misquote the decrees of the Council of Macon. Leyser wrote: "Among the holy fathers [at the Council] there was one who insisted that women cannot, and should not, be called 'human beings' (homines). The matter was thought so important that it was discussed publicly and in the fear of God. Finally, after many arguments on this question, [the bishops] concluded that women are human after all."
Now this is wholly untrue. The acts of the Council of Macon contain no such discussion. They contain neither the word "woman" nor the word "soul." What Leyser did was to misinterpret a story told in The History of the Franks by St. Gregory of Tours. Gregory was bishop of that city in the sixth century and wrote a splendid history of the region. At one point he tells of a council that may, or may not, have been the Council of Macon. Gregory writes:
There came forward at this Council a certain bishop who maintained that woman could not be included under the term "man." However, he accepted the reasoning of the other bishops and did not press his case for the holy book of the Old Testament tells us that in the beginning, when God created man, "Male and female he created them and called their name Adam," which means earthly man; even so, he called the woman Eve, yet of both he used the word "man."
So what the bishops discussed was the meaning of a word, not the substantial issue of whether women have souls.
Leyser was inventing stories. His untruths were taken up by Pierre Bayle, a Dutch Calvinist with a marked distaste for the Catholicism to which he had once adhered. Bayle brought the matter further by writing in his Dictionnaire: "What I think yet more strange is to find that in a Council it has been gravely proposed as a question whether women were human creatures, and that it was determined affirmatively [only] after a long debate." Early in the nineteenth century a certain M. Aime-Martin wrote a touching book on The Education of Mothers in which he recorded sorrowfully that "people had gone so far as to doubt the existence of their souls." Politicians, as is their way, saw an opportunity, and the French National Assembly, no less, deplored the Church's insult to women. Later still the myth appeared in English in a journal titled John Bull, published by Horatio Bottomley, a fraudster Member of the British Parliament who would soon end in jail.
The myth was by now securely established, and will no doubt be retailed as confidently in the future as it has been in the past. If the first casualty of war is the unwelcome truth, the first weapon of the discontented is the welcome lie.
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