You know the "what if your mother had aborted you...!!" anti-choice argument?

[la_vie_noire]

Uppity Brown Woman: My mother did not have a choice in having me

As my mother explained to me, I felt a familiar sadness inside of me. She told me that she eventually decided she couldn’t go through with it because it would be too big of a shame on her, and she didn’t want to commit a sin, even though giving birth meant gambling with financial ruin. She had internalized the shaming of women who had abortions that it impeded her own decision-making process. Certainly, she wasn’t forcefully coerced into having an abortion (or coerced out of having one), which I find dominates discussions about abortions, and for good reason. But, the culture of shaming matters too. I don’t want to live in a world like this. If it did not break several laws of the universe, I wish I could have been there to support my mother, comfort her, and tell her that whatever decision she made, to terminate or not to terminate, had to be made for what was best for her, not for what other people thought of her.

Often, you see anti-choicers relaying stories from ‘abortion survivors’, or those whose mothers made the decision to not abort (therefore everyone should). Do they want to hear my story? Unlikely. They don’t want to accept that they forgot about my rights after I was born. Every day, I have to live with the fact that my mother felt shamed out of getting an abortion. This was not a choice. The option was there for her, but she did not take it, even though she wanted to, because of the rhetoric and stigma surrounding abortion – sinful, devilish, shameful. While she says now that she doesn’t regret having me, I cannot be anything but pro-choice. I do not take pride in being the product of a forced pregnancy.

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In other issues, wonderful Deepa as always: An Open Letter to Charles Tan

But transcultural traffic is hardly such an egalitarian affair. You say: "That there is a small but growing awareness of the literature of other cultures is, in my opinion, a liberty that only occurred because of humanity's continued struggle for "enlightenment" but this flies in the face of a vast body of historical evidence that cultural currency has been a tool of capitalist trade and colonial enterprise. Furthermore, by whose standards are you defining awareness of such literature "small"? There are many Indians who will tell you about Rustam and Sohrab, about Laila and Majnu--stories not actually from our subcontinent. And as Fatemeh Keshavarz points out, Iran has a long history of translating books into Persian.

[...] I do not understand how you can consider writers to be a proletariat worthy of defending against the elite excesses of their readers. Racefail was primarily about the impact of books on readers and how we saw the world, whether we aspired to write ourselves or not. Critiquing a book's faults because we find it hurtful, offensive, unresearched or otherwise lacking in craftsmanship is something we do in our free time, without payment, out of a sense of community with others who may have struggled against the same issues. To demand that such criticism place the needs of supporting authors above our own needs as readers devalues us.

One last thing - you say in the beginning of your essay that ethnocentrism is "a flaw that a lot of cultures fall prey to (Germany being the primary culprit during World War II)".

I strongly urge you to reconsider this statement. Germany was certainly not the primary culprit of ethnocentrism during World War II, given the glorification of the British Empire and the neo-colonial national pride of the U.S., or indeed, any of the ethnocentric strains within the patriotic anti-colonial movements in large swathes of Asia and Africa. If Germany is to be accused of being the primary culprit of practising anything, it is Anti-Semitism and genocide on an industrialised scale never seen before, though both have happened before and since in many other nations and cultures.