I just read an article about anti-choice women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant and get abortions. I strongly recommend reading the article. It reinforced how incredibly loving and selfless so many abortion providers are (and how far I have still to go to be that loving). The article left me feeling so angry about how hypocritical and narrow-minded some anti-choicers can be. Yet I don’t fault them completely for feeling the way they do.
A few weeks ago I watched the documentary, “Jesus Camp.” The documentary follows several elementary and some middle school-aged children from Evangelical families as they attend “Jesus Camp.” At this camp, adults indoctrinate these children, lecturing to them about how morally depraved American society is, featuring kid preachers whose sermons are unsurprisingly similar to those of elder preachers and scaring them with graphic stories filled with fundamentalist Christian language condemning abortion. These adults convince the children that they need to speak for all the lives lost to abortion. At the end of the film, these young children march in Washington, DC to protest abortion, their small lips covered in red duct tape with LIFE scrawled across each piece.
It makes sense to me that some anti-choicers act the way they do if they were exposed to similar treatment as young children. If children have been inundated with anti-choice messages from a very young age, I can imagine that most of them would still hold very anti-choice views that would be extremely hard to reverse. So I don’t blame them. Instead I feel genuinely sorry for them. How long has this cycle been going on? Because I suppose that those who run these camps may have also had similar experiences as children, and now perpetuate the indoctrination. They are cogs in a bigger religious machine.
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