This piece is originally published on Role/Reboot. Republished here with permission.

Lynn Beisner explains the difference between the two phrases “The best choice for both my mother and I would have been abortion” and “I wish I had never been born.”

If there is one thing that anti-choice activists do that makes me see red, it is when they parade out their poster children: men, women, and children who were “targeted for abortion.” They tell us “these people would not be alive today if abortion had been legal or if their mothers had made a different choice.”

In the past couple of months, I have read two of these abortion deliverance stories that have been particularly offensive. The first story is one propagated by Rebecca Kiessling, the poster child for the no exceptions in cases of rape or incest. On her website Kiessling says that every time we say that abortion should be allowed at least in the case of rape or incest we are saying to her: “If I had my way, you’d be dead right now.” She goes onto say, “I absolutely would have been aborted if it had been legal in Michigan when I was an unborn child, and I can tell you that it hurts [when people say that abortion should be legal.]”

The second story was on the Good Men Project this week. In an article entitled, “Delivered from Abortion: Healing a Forgotten Memory,” Gordon Dalbey tells a highly unlikely story about his mother’s decision to abort him and her eventual change of heart. I say that the story is highly unlikely because the type of abortion he says his mother was about to have was not available until 50 years later. However, Dalbey claims to have recovered a memory of being “delivered” from the abortion because as a fetus he cried out to God. He claims that the near-abortion experience had caused him psychological suffering throughout his life. Since recovering the memory, he has experienced survivor’s guilt because he was saved when so many other fetuses have been aborted. In explaining how he overcame this guilt, he quotes a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who says that the purpose of surviving is to testify to the experience.

What makes these stories so infuriating to me is that they are emotional blackmail. As readers or listeners, we are almost forced by these anti-choice versions of A Wonderful Life to say, “Oh, I am so glad you were born.” And then by extension, we are soon forced into saying, “Yes, of course, every blastula of cells should be allowed to develop into a human being.”

Stories like Mr. Dalbey’s are probably effective because they follow the same model. First there is a woman facing the unplanned pregnancy that poses severe problems. In Dalbey’s case, his family is suffering from extreme poverty, and in the case of Kiessling, her mother is dealing with the aftermath of rape. The story shifts so that the mother has a divine or moral enlightenment and knows that she must carry the baby to term. We are left with an adult praising the bravery of their mothers and testifying that their lives were saved for some higher purpose. But the story goes on to tell us how even the contemplation of abortion was horribly scarring for the person. The moral of these stories is clear: Considering abortion is like considering genocide.

Here is why it is so effective: People freak out when you tell an opposing story. I make even my most ardent pro-choice friends and colleagues very uncomfortable when I explain why my mother should have aborted me. Somehow they confuse the well-considered and rational: “The best choice for both my mother and I would have been abortion” with the infamous expression of depression and angst: “I wish I had never been born.” The two are really very different things, and we must draw that distinction clearly.

The narrative that anti-choice crusaders are telling is powerful, moving, and best of all, it has a happy ending. It makes the woman who carries to term a hero, and for narrative purposes, it hides her maternal failing. We cannot argue against heroic, redemptive happy-ending fairy tales using cold statistics. If we want to keep our reproductive rights, we must be willing to tell our stories, to be willing and able to say, “I love my life, but I wish my mother had aborted me.”

An abortion would have absolutely been better for my mother. An abortion made it more likely that she would finish high school and get a college education. At college in the late 1960s, it seems likely that she would have found feminism or psychology or something that would have helped her overcome her childhood trauma and pick better partners. She would have been better prepared when she had children. If nothing else, getting an abortion would have saved her from plunging into poverty. She likely would have stayed in the same socioeconomic strata as her parents and grandparents who were professors. I wish she had aborted me because I love her and want what is best for her.

Abortion would have been a better option for me. If you believe what reproductive scientists tell us, that I was nothing more than a conglomeration of cells, then there was nothing lost. I could have experienced no consciousness or pain. But even if you discount science and believe that I had consciousness and could experience pain at six gestational weeks, I would chose the brief pain or fear of an abortion over the decades of suffering I endured.

An abortion would have been best for me because there is no way that my love-starved trauma-addled mother could have ever put me up for adoption. It was either abortion or raising me herself, and she was in no position to raise a child. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury, witnessed and experienced severe domestic violence, and while she was in grade school she was raped by a stranger and her mother committed suicide. She was severely depressed and suicidal, had an extremely poor support system, was experiencing an unplanned pregnancy that resulted from coercive sex, and she was so young that her brain was still undeveloped.

With that constellation of factors, there was a very high statistical probability that my mother would be an abusive parent, that we would spend the rest of our lives in crushing poverty, and that we would both be highly vulnerable to predatory organizations and men. And that is exactly what happened. She abused me, beating me viciously and often. We lived in bone-crushing poverty, and our little family became a magnet for predatory men and organizations. My mother found minimal support in a small church, and became involved with the pastor who was undeniably schizophrenic, narcissistic, and sadistic. The abuse I endured was compounded by deprivation. Before the age of 14, I had never been to a sleep-over, been allowed to talk to a friend on the phone, eaten in a restaurant, watched a television show, listened to the radio, read a non-Christian book, or even worn a pair of jeans.

If this were an anti-choice story, this is the part where I would tell you how I overcame great odds and my life now has special meaning. I would ask you to affirm that, of course, you are happy I was born, and that the world would be a darker, poorer place without me.

It is true that in the past 12 years, I have been able to rise above the circumstances of my birth and build a life that I truly love. But no one should have to make such a Herculean struggle for simple normalcy. Even given the happiness and success I now enjoy, if I could go back in time and make the choice for my mother, it would be abortion.

The world would not be a darker or poorer place without me. Actually, in terms of contributions to the world, I am a net loss. Everything that I have done—including parenting, teaching, researching, and being a loving partner—could have been done as well if not better by other people. Any positive contributions that I have made are completely offset by what it has cost society to help me overcome the disadvantages and injuries of my childhood to become a functional and contributing member of society.

It is not easy to say, “I wish my mother would have aborted me.” The Right would have us see abortion as women acting out of cowardice, selfishness, or convenience. But for many women, like my mother, abortion would be an inconvenient act of courage and selflessness. I am sad for both of us that she could not find the courage and selflessness. But my attitude is that as long as I am already here, I might as well do all I can to make the world a better place, to ease the suffering of others, and to experience love and life to its fullest.

Lynn Beisner is the pseudonym for a mother, a writer, a feminist, and an academic living somewhere East of the Mississippi. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.

Photo Credit lunar caustic via the Creative Commons License.

Being a feminist mother means doing the hard shit. Lynn Beisner shares the harrowing incident that made her willing to do whatever it takes.

Trigger warning: Article includes descriptive scenes of an injured animal. If you’re an animal lover like us, just be prepared.

I became a feminist because God did not keep his end of a rather simple bargain I had made with him. I was willing to suffer the indignities and abuse of being less than a person, of being a will-free person, but God had to understand that I could not watch a child of mine go through the same thing. So we struck a deal. I would stay “complementarian” (the religious term for making women less than fully human), a sweetly submissive wife. But in return, all of my children would have to be sons.

So on the night that my first child, a daughter, was born, I gave up on godly womanhood. But becoming a feminist proved harder. I knew little about it, and what little I did know seemed to conflict with my role as mother. I struggled with the conflict for years until it was resolved by something horrible that happened to my daughter when she was in her early teens.

My daughter, Kassie, had spent the night at my mother and step-father’s home. They lived in the same rural county as we did, so she could catch the bus to her middle school just by standing at the end of the long lane that was my parent’s driveway. My daughter had no sooner gotten to the end of the long driveway that morning when she discovered that there right beside her bus stop was a deer who had been hit by a car. It was gravely injured and bellowing in pain. My daughter ran back to the house and begged her grandfather to come down and put the deer down to save it from an further suffering. But my step-father decided he couldn’t afford the cost of a shot-gun shell; he was saving all that he had in case a snake crossed his property, or a homosexual came sauntering by. My parents are not that poor, but my step-father simply could not be bothered.  My daughter cried and pleaded with him to please put the deer out of its misery. Instead, he ordered my daughter to go back out and stand at that bus stop, next to that deer dying in excruciating pain, and wait until the bus came. Twice she went back to plead for help, and each time she was turned away more harshly.

The bus was late that day, so my daughter endured more than 20 minutes of some of the worst psychological torture I could imagine for an empathic animal lover. The deer’s gut had taken most of the blow, so it was suffering the excruciating death of an abdominal injury. Its legs thrashed with pain, and its bowels and bladder would let loose as it lapsed into unconscious. Each time she would think it was dead, but it would quickly regain consciousness and the waves of agony would cause it to scream and claw at the ground mindlessly again. To this day, she cannot forget the eyes of that deer as he suffered a cruel and torturous death and they haunt her dreams. When the bus finally pulled up, the gruesome scene and my daughter’s hysterical grief traumatized an entire busload of children.

My step-father may have been the soulless bastard who refused to put a suffering animal out of its misery or spare his granddaughter and her schoolmates that trauma, but my mother is the person who stood by and let him do it. She would not defy him because she is not a feminist. And because she is not a feminist she has been unable to perform the most basic role of mothering: protecting children.

When my daughter told me what had happened to her that day, I was incredibly grieved and concerned for her. But in the days and weeks that followed, as I mulled it over, something inside of me shifted causing the tension between motherhood and feminism to vanish.

Why? Here is what a feminist mother would have done: She would have ignored her husband’s orders, made sure my daughter was somewhere safe and comforting, taken the shotgun and killed the deer herself. Had she been unable to get his firearm away from her husband, she would have collected the sledge hammer from the garden shed, hauled it down that very long driveway, and knelt beside that deer. She would have cried, looked him in the eye and told him how sorry she was for his suffering and that she was there to make his pain end. Then she would have raised that sledge hammer and used every ounce of strength in her body to bring it down on his skull. After making sure the animal was finally at peace, she would have made sure that her granddaughter had the kind of comfort and support she needed and covered the body with a tarp so that the kids on the bus would not have been traumatized.

We have told women that they can “have it all”—fulfillment in their work and home lives. I am here to say something different. I am here to tell you that being a feminist mother means doing the really hard shit. It means marching your ass down the driveway and delivering the mercy blow to an injured deer when that is what is needed. It also means that we march our asses into the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies and into the legislative and executive offices of government and we put this poor miserable patriarchy out of its misery. We do it not because we are power-hungry or money-hungry or man-haters. We do the really hard shit of bringing meaningful equality to our boardrooms and elected offices because we know that this is the way to make the world better for our children, and that is the “all” that feminists really want.

Note: Kassie, not her real name, gave her permission for me to tell her story. Readers should also know that in our rural, southern county, there is no one to call to care for injured wildlife. You either end the animal’s suffering yourself, or it dies horribly over a matter of hours.

Lynn Beisner is the pseudonym for a mother, a writer, a feminist, and an academic living somewhere East of the Mississippi. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter.  This article is originally published on Role/Reboot and is cross-posted with permission.

 Photo Credit dbaron via the Creative Commons License.

Lynn Beisner warns all women to always trust their gut, but sometimes the guys we label as “creepy” aren’t sexual predators, they’re just insecure. In her experience, it’s the charming, popular guys who can be the most dangerous.

The recent discussion about creeps has been both encouraging and concerning for me. I am encouraged because I believe that we as women should give ourselves permission to avoid any person or situation for no reason other than that it feels wrong. I also am of the strong opinion that we as women have a duty to warn each other about potentially dangerous situations, which is what we are trying to do when we label a man as a creep. But using the label of creep as a way of warning our fellow women also causes me concern. I worry that we are confusing or conflating creeps with sexual predators. They are two very different creatures and what protects us from one does not protect us from the other.

I can explain the difference best by telling you about two men I have dated. Let me start by telling you about the sexual predator; I call him Mr. Popularity because he was one of the most well-liked men that I have ever known. We worked in the same office high-rise, and it seemed like anywhere on those 32 floors that we went, people knew and liked Mr. Popularity.

When we started dating, I became instantly and bizarrely more popular; it was as if my geekiness was cancelled out by my association with Mr. Popularity. Women suddenly wanted to talk to me—mostly about Mr. Popularity. He had dated other women in our building, and some of them struck up conversations, telling me how much fun they had with Mr. Popularity. One comment that was repeated by every woman was how much he had expanded their sexual boundaries. I suddenly seemed to show up on men’s radar as well once I started dating Mr. Popularity. Many would tell me something along the lines of: “You’ll have a lot of fun dating Mr. Popularity. He is a great guy. But you know that he never gets serious about anyone, right?” Then they would give me their phone numbers for when Mr. Popularity and I stopped dating.

They were right: Mr. Popularity was a lot of fun. He made me laugh, made me feel special, and took joy in introducing me to new things—new music, new food, and new ways of having sex. He had a tried-and-true method for getting me to agree to something new. First, he would tell me how much he loved a certain activity. He would mention several times, seemingly in passing, how hot he thought it was. Then he would demonstrate how much it aroused him by showing me his physical response as he told me a fantasy of him and I doing whatever it was that he wanted. If I was still disinclined, he would let it drop for a couple of days. When he brought it up again, he would tell me a story about one of his previous lovers who had been similarly resistant. He would tell me about how he had helped her “get over her hang-ups” or “let go of her fear.” He would end the story by telling me how much she had enjoyed the experience.

During one of these campaigns, I happened to run into one of Mr. Popularity’s ex-girlfriends in the restroom. It was just the two of us, and she asked how things were going. So I asked her if Mr. Popularity had ever tried to convince her to do something adventurous. She sort of half-laughed before telling me that convincing her to do ever-more adventurous things had defined their relationship and caused it to end. One incident she described was an eerie match to a story he had told me just weeks before. That is when it dawned on me that the stories he told of convincing women to have types of sex that they were uncomfortable with were not just stories he had ripped off from “Letters to Penthouse.” These were things he had actually done.

So I had every reason to believe that he was telling me the truth when a few weeks later he casually confessed to having anally raped his 14-year-old niece. Of course, he didn’t use the word rape. His story followed the normal arc of his persuasive narratives: She had been resistant, he had coerced her, and she had enjoyed it so much she even had an orgasm. That was when the truth hit me like the proverbial bolt of lightning: I was dating a sexual predator. He wasn’t interested in the women he dated, or even in “scoring” consensual sex—he was into coercion. He was targeting women, coercing them as far as he thought he could get away with, and then moving on to the next victim.

The problem is that Mr. Popularity was not a creep. And that is something we need to remember: sexual predators—the truly dangerous kinds—are rarely creeps. They are sociopaths, and are therefore socially skilled, incapable of feeling shame and completely unlikely to set off the average woman’s alarm bells.

Conversely, creeps are rarely sexual predators. To put it bluntly, their social ineptness means that they don’t have the opportunity to develop the skill and cunning of a true predator. That was the case with Mr. Creep, probably the least popular man that I have ever known, and certainly the most socially inept person I have ever dated. What I still find fascinating is that dating Mr. Creep had an equally strong but inverse impact on my social status. I instantly became a pariah when I was with Mr. Creep.

Mr. Creep had severe anxiety and had been a life-long victim of bullying. He was desperate for companionship and sex, and he hated himself for his inability to get these needs met. As the self-loathing and un-met needs mounted, he came to despise himself for the needs themselves. In other words, he had come to the place where he judged sexual need as humbling personal failing. He reminded me of a shelter dog that a friend of mine had adopted. The dog, who had been beaten and starved by his previous owners, was used to having to be sneaky to get his basic needs met. The dog skulked rather than walked, he waited for my friend to turn her back so he could steal the food she had put in his bowl. It took years before the poor pooch came to understand that he did not need to sneak and skulk, that he was cared for and that his basic needs would be met. Mr. Creep skulked around women the same way that my friend’s dog had around food. There was this sense of furtiveness he exuded around women, especially those whom he found attractive. Above all, he oozed shame, coating even our incredibly wholesome and consensual sexual encounters with a smarmy slime that made me feel ashamed along with him.

During the months we dated, I tried to convince him that women and people in general would no longer respond to him as they did in high school. He did not need to skulk, sneak, or be ashamed. But eventually, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t stand feeling pity-fueled remorse when I declined one of his furtive offers for sex and contaminated by his shame when I consented. Sadly, the shame I contracted from him colored my memories of our time together, and that negative interpretation of our relationship was reinforced by friends who were convinced that he was a sexual predator based on the alarm bells that he set off in them.

Based on my time with Mr. Creep, I came to believe that what we call creepiness is likely a variant of an anxiety disorder. Hopefully, mental health professionals will be able to diagnose and treat the disorder some day. But for now, it seems important to realize the reason creeps set off our alarm bells is that they are surrounded by an aura of shame and sneakiness that is as visible and omnipresent as the cloud of dust that followed Pig-Pen in the Peanuts comic strips. It makes them unattractive and generally an unhealthy choice as a partner. It might predispose them to harassment, misogyny, or stalking. But it makes them unlikely to be sexual predators.

If we cast creeps as boogey men, we run two risks: The first is exacerbating and stigmatizing what is likely a psychobiological condition and turning potential allies into men’s right’s advocates. The second and vastly more important risk is that if we follow our instincts and teach younger women to do the same, we may focus on creeps and leave ourselves and them vulnerable to the far greater danger posed by ruthless, savage sexual predators who look and act nothing like them.

Lynn Biesner is the pseudonym for a mother, a writer, a feminist, and an academic living somewhere East of the Mississippi.

This article originally appeared on Role/Reboot and is cross-posted with permission.

Photo Credit Dennis From Atlanta via Creative Commons License.