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Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Let us reason together. [UPDATED]

For this we are to sacrifice patient-physician privacy, privacy in general, because an old document never mentions "privacy" (while neither mentioning "the unborn").


Wishing I had the link to the original, the image got saved, the link - no.

__________UPDATE__________ 

Today, after writing this post, I read writing in Strib about abortion from a wholly separate dimension - one unique to women, a stand-up exegesis of self examination and explanation by one intent to talk about the experience of her having an abortion. As a comedy routine.

"In my mind, it's somebody saying, 'Omigod, how could that possibly be funny or enjoyable?'" she told me. "Like, who could possibly want an hour about that?"

The twist is that her show is about much more than the abortion Leiby had three years ago. It's a meditation on birth control, sex education, women's health care, periods and the stigma against women who are childless by choice. But it's light, observational comedy, with lots of jokes and laughs, intended to humanize the experience of abortion.

And what a moment in history to broaden the conversation. Weeks after she debuted her off-Broadway show in April, a Supreme Court leak foretold its decision overturning Roe vs. Wade.

Now, fresh on the heels of midterm elections shaped by women voters defending their right to abortion, [Alison] Leiby (LIE-bee) is bringing her show to the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis on Friday. When she talks about her abortion, she recalls that day vividly, including the panic that she felt over what to wear. These are the mundane details about abortion that you don't hear in today's supercharged political environment.

[...] Here's more from my talk with Leiby, edited for length and clarity.

Q: What about abortion is funny?

A: Nothing and everything. When it's just this vague concept of a right or a freedom, and one often associated with trauma, it gets hard to joke about abortion. I think it's much more challenging than speaking from personal experience and being authentic: Well, here's how I felt, and then this happened. That just makes it a lot easier for people to get out of their own way with what they think about the topic, and just kind of listen and enjoy.

Q: It sounds like what you're trying to do is normalize this procedure.

A: Absolutely. We hear a lot of the narratives that get the most amplification when we talk about abortion, rightfully. You hear about victims of assault, incest and rape. We need abortion for all those things. But we also need abortion rights for people who find out they're pregnant and don't want to be pregnant — and that's the end of the story. We don't talk about those stories as much, and we need to include them in the fight for reproductive freedom.

Q: Abortion is often discussed as something that's deeply traumatizing for the woman. Did you feel that way after the procedure?

A: I did not at all, which is another reason I wanted to start working on the show. I had no trauma around the way I got pregnant, nor around my decision to have an abortion, nor around my access to an ability to have one. So for me, it was this completely non-emotional journey. But we're taught that it is this heavy, dark thing. And then the only real emotions I had around my abortion were that I felt bad that I didn't feel bad enough.

Q: Is it scary to talk about something so polarizing and vulnerable while on stage?

A: It's easy to talk to a group of people who came to see someone talking about abortion. What's much harder to talk about is not wanting to have kids. There's my own emotional journey with finally accepting that. I talk a lot about the experience of being child-free, and how every part of our culture is pressuring women to have families and give birth, as if that is how you bring value to society.

[...] If you go

"Oh God, A Show About Abortion," 8 p.m. Fri., Parkway Theater, 4814 Chicago Av. S., Mpls. Tickets: $25-$35 at theparkwaytheater.com.

This is a fairly extended excerpt of Yuen's item, to capture much of the mood and content of the presentation, yet where much more original content holds Yuen's post together. Readers are urged to follow the link and read the entire Yuen post

A hope is that with the presentation detail - place, time and ticket - Crabgrass readers who might have missed the Strib item may be clued to attend if learning of it here and intrigued.

FURTHER: Childlessness: With birthrates down, the making of a decision to go childless needs discussion. When made, the Crabgrass opinion is that it should be a decision free of any grumbling about paying school taxes for the children of others because the financing and governing of public education is not primarily for us as individuals but for our society collectively needing a steady, educated populace to make representative democracy work with continuity and without co-option by despotically inclined people or factions. 

Long sentence, but that's okay. At least the sentence states a hope.