Kind of Pissed Again

Okay, I am kind of pissed again. Just when I think that churches might possibly be of some help to me, they blow it. Honestly! I really don't know why I keep hoping.

What has set me off this time is a blog with a posting about IVF and morality. This woman, Perfect Work, is very critical of IVF and defending the Roman Catholic ban on IVF as "morally illicit". She is a fan of the former Pope's Theology of the Body and says:

... we always pose a great risk to ourself and our marriage when we bring sexual reproduction outside of the love act.

But, as seems to be the case with these kinds of commentators nowadays, she is not so much critical of the people who do IVF, as critical of the doctors and the industry:

I believe the practices of the extremely lucrative and corrupt IVF industry is very much like a rape. It takes the hopes and dreams of a couple and turns it into cash--with a very low success rate (less than 15% on any given cycle) and a whole host of emotional, spiritual, and physical risks.

Honestly! Does this woman truly believe that a couple doing IVF together, however horrible it may be, is not engaging in an act of love at least as profound as having sex?

I am thinking of the months that the Big Dude and I did fertility treatment.

Partly the sheer awfulness of it. Waking up each morning before 5am to needles in the stomach. Catching the bus in the cold and the dark of winter 30 minutes later so that we could make the hour and a half journey to the clinic and still get me back in time to start work. The discomfort and indignity of the procedures themselves. Being a physically shy women enduring regular penetration, not with the warm penis of the man I love, but by a stranger with a camera. The shock to my body of being catapulted into an imitation of menopause, hot flushes and all, and then into intense stimulation. My incredulous laughter when I was offered panadol for the pain after the transfer. The intense sadness when cycles failed.

But I am also thinking of how much it drew us together. We always caught that bus together. The Big Dude never made me go alone, and I truly pitied the women who sat in that clinic by themselves. The way he practised with the needles until he was so expert that I could hardly feel them. The way we joked about the bruises that covered my stomach as if I had been kicked in the guts by a thug. The way he nearly fainted when we looked at that last, giant needle that triggers ovulation and we both had to close our eyes so we couldn't see it. The way this former soldier gritted his teeth and forced himself to get over thoughts of bayonets and thrusting people in the stomach and told me I was his new hero. The way he held me when I cried. The way he comforted me when the cycles failed.

And our intense joy when it succeeded. Our joy in our beautiful boy.

I am also thinking of the kindness of our clinic. The way their expertise, their dedication, their years of study, their professionalism, brought us such joy. Its true that I hated the clinic at the time. But really, I didn't hate them. I just hated the fact that I was having to do this.

And this is the trouble. She sees IVF as similar to rape and the expense as exploitation by a corrupt cash-making machine. I see it as an act of love, a sacrifice I willingly made as an expression of my love for my partner and our baby. She sees the pain and the risk and says it is exploitation. I remember the pain and the risk and I feel like a soldier who proudly remembers what he chose to endure for a great cause.

We are never going to agree. We see the same things, but we see them with a totally different gaze. She seems like a nice lady and I respect her right to outline her opinons. What I hate is the way some of her readers immediately leap to what should be done to enforce their opinions. One of them opines that, while she wouldn't want to take IVF babies away from their parents (that's big of her!), IVF should be illegal. She doesn't want to take the Little Dude away from me, but she thinks that he should never have been born and she wants to take away the possibility of another little dude or little dudette from me. I am a grown woman, and I don't want to be protected by her or her church. I don't want her and her readers to take my choices away. Does she really think that IVF is more traumatic that infertility?

The reason this stuff is bothering me so much is that our fertility clinic, the Canberra Fertility Center, has just been booted out of the hospital that housed it. The hospital has been taken over by a Catholic organisation that doesn't want to provide IVF services.

This limits the availability of IVF services in Canberra, which is a small town in numbers despite its status as Australia's capital city. It means that people are going to have to turn to private theatres. This won't stop people doing IVF. It will just raise the costs, which are already prohibitive, and reduce access and increase the difficulty of the process for low income people like ourselves. Rich people won't suffer much. But poorer people will.

And the reason I am pissed is that the way churches go about imposing their views really shits me. Its not just the Catholic Church. I have no problem at all with churches and individual Christians advocating a "high" view of moral issues. I can be inspired by those views at times and by the goodness of the people who follow them. But I hate the use of politics and cash to impose them on people who don't accept their views and on a supposedly secular society. And the fake-compassion the churches show to people who for whatever reason don't fit into their teachings.

I am thinking of the way the churches of many denominations have banded together in Australia to restrict access to abortion. Now, I have strong feelings about abortion. Having tried so hard for a child, I flinch away from the concept of the destruction of a fetus. I am horrified by the number of abortions in Australia. But I believe it should be legal. I do not want to see desperate women using coathangers and knitting needles. I want abortion to be safe, legal and rare. And my friend Judy had a termination. She didn't want to. But she did not believe that she should bring another child into her situation with her husband, she had discovered the Huntington's Disease issue, and she was thinking about the welfare of the children she already had.

And you know what? She is still the best person I know, and I don't believe that she was wrong to do it. When I am looking for a moral example of a selfless life, I always think of her. But she was told that women like her are "selfish". They tried to block her access to the service by talking about how abortion exploits and hurts women. They should know about selfishness and exploitation of women, the smug bastards.

Churches, frankly are going to run into trouble when they start ranting about exploitation and harming of women. Because many of us have seen a lot of this in churches. I am thinking about a friend of mine who was told by her pastor that she had to stay in an abusive marriage, because marriage was indissoluble. She was actually told that she had "made her bed" and now she had to lie in it. She did.

I am also thinking about the way the churches lobbied to block my gay friend David from teaching jobs, feeding into completely unfounded beliefs about a link between homosexuality and pedophilia. Jeez. I could talk here about the scandals around churches and pedophilia, but I will refrain.

I do not believe that my experience of churches and the experiences of my friends are all that unusual. They are surprisingly common.

And I am thinking about my last attempt to go back to church. I wanted to go. I wanted to open myself more to experiences of God. I wanted that experience of Christian community and of group worshop. I went for a few weeks.

But you know why I left? Because I knew that if they realized who I was and what I thought and how I lived my life, they would not be able to accept me. They would demand that I change. They would not be able to accept that a de facto relationship might be, in its way, just as sacred to me as marriage was to them. That it might arise out of a philosophical and moral objection to the institution of marriage as founded on the subordination of women that was at least as concerned about the "dignity of the person" as they were. That I might have thought about that position pretty long and hard. That I might still be striving towards the ideals of marriage that I do agree with and find inspiring and that there might be something good and worthwhile in that attempt.

I did not believe that they would be able to support me in having a child in a de facto relationship and via a sperm donor and IVF. And I was too vulnerable during that process, too dependant on my sense of God and my hope of his mercy, to expose myself to people who could not support me and who would feel compelled to persuade me that God thought I was wrong.

It was clear to me that, while they might try to soften what they would say, the most sacred aspects of my life would not be respected, but would be labelled their equivalent of "morally illicit".

My friends and I have been hurt many times by churches and, even though at times we hunger after the things that churches could offer, we don't go. Because our guards are up.

I hate the abuse of power by the churches in our society. But at a more personal level, its the lack of respect that really pisses me off.

My thanks to people like Desmond and Molly and others for showing me that there can be good things about Catholic and other Christian and church teachings. And no, I don't need you to agree with me about IVF, abortion, homosexuality, etc. I can accept and respect who you are and what you believe in, if you can accept and respect me for who I am.