Why anti-choice people enrage me--Part 1

Aside from their obvious desire to control women's bodies (and in the case of the women, their willingness to give up control of their own bodies and the bodies of their daughters)...

I am a psychotherapist. Almost every day of my life, I talk with people whose parents neglected them, beat them, slapped them around, put them down, played head games with them, humiliated them, or sexually abused them. The parents may have been ignorant, they may have been alcoholic, they may have been filled with rage. It doesn't matter. They took on the responsibility of being parents and they failed miserably. They did not cherish their children, but rather, used them as outlets for their own feelings of insecurity, bitterness, narcissism, and anger.

Children who are not cherished grow up to be adults who are depressed, frightened, confused, characterologically impaired, addicted, and/or antisocial. They often abuse or neglect their own children.

Hopeless teenage mothers who are not cherished by their own families frequently become pregnant so that "someone will love me." This narcissistic " mothering" is a terrible type of child abuse, in which the child exists only to make the mother feel less empty inside. Once the baby shows signs of being a separate human being, the mother generally begins taking her rage and disappointment out on her or him, and sets up a competition between herself and her helpless offspring.

The notion that America cares about its children is pure nonsense. Child protection services are terribly understaffed, most types of child abuse cannot even be reported, and intervention programs are few and far between. As fundamentalist churches become more powerful, the idea of abusing children, a la James Dobson, becomes more the norm. Every week, someone says to me, "I was whipped really hard with a belt (or an extension cord, or a stick), but that was the way they did things then." Then I have to tell that person, "Well, that's the way they do things now, too."

To encourage people with no parenting skills to have children, and then to discourage the provision of those skills--either out of lack of interest or fundamentalist Christian belief--is to guarantee the continuation of violence in America.