We've long accepted that human beings are searching for something. We're searching for truth, meaning, and love, amongst other things. Google Trends, however, allows us to see precisely what people all over the world are searching for. In Egypt they're searching for sex. In fact, the most searches globally for sex are conducted in Arabic. In Salt Lake City, there are the highest searches in the world for pornography. And in the Philippines, a country whose population is eighty-five percent Roman Catholic, there's the highest search rate by region for information about abortions. The more you look, the more hypocrisy you see. It begs the question: does indoctrination ever really work?
I was raised Catholic. My parents, although born in Italy, didn't force me to attend mass. They sent me to catechism and expected me to make the sacraments, but more for the cultural reason of wanting me to wear the silly white dress and take communion than out of real belief. The spiritual practices I adopted came from an internal desire to be close to God. My family didn't understand me, or my religious fervor, when I was growing up. My brother called me Sister Mary Snowflake as I left the house at eight-years-old to walk three blocks alone to St. Luke's Church in Queens, New York.
In high school, I pushed off boyfriends who tried to cajole me into having sex by saying that no form of birth control was absolute and I was not going to have an abortion. No one ever taught me that abortion was wrong in the eyes of the Church; it just provided me with a good excuse because I just wasn't ready to have sex. In college, when I finally did have sex, my boyfriend and I used two condoms, spermicidal foam, and the pill. Phone sex would have been riskier.
I never expected that I would be someone who would get pregnant without being married. When I was twenty-six, I discovered that I was pregnant. I had been dating the man for three months. Everyone in my life counseled me to have an abortion, my Catholic parents included. I'll admit I considered the option. I had no real home, no real job, and no certainty that the man I was with would stick around. After some thought, I knew that having an abortion just wasn't an option for me. No one could understand that while I had never been able to commit to a pro-life or pro-choice political standpoint, the idea of having my unborn child extracted from my body was the same as asking me to consent to the removal of, say, my heart or liver or stomach or any other vital organ. It wasn't a political choice and it wasn't a religious choice. In all honesty, it was a selfish choice. I was terrified to have a child alone but I was more terrified of having an abortion. In fact, upon closer analysis, I don't believe it had anything to do with choice at all.
If a woman's right to have an abortion is a choice, it's a choice she never wanted to have to make. It's more a surrender, a ceasefire. She is tired of the fighting in her head between herself and God and her unborn child. And pro-life -- I wonder if people think I'm pro-life because, when faced with an unplanned pregnancy, I kept it. Pro-life, but in favor of whose life? I chose to keep my pregnancy because I was in favor of my life -- of my psychological well-being. I couldn't weather an abortion. I love my son. The world, my world, would be imperfect without him. But being a single parent has been a six-year struggle, financially and emotionally. There are nights I go to sleep feeling defeated. But in the morning, I recommit to being my son's mother. If raising a child has been so difficult for me, a person who has the support of friends and family along with a great deal of inner resources, I'm not sure how some other people do it. I never regret having my son, but having a child alone has made me pro-choice. If it takes a village to raise a child, then one person is without a doubt, inadequate.
Neither the government nor the church was there to help me with my son. If people are going to rally for choice then they should spend equal amounts of time understanding the psychological ramifications of abortion and counseling women who have had abortions. And if people are going to rally for life then they should spend equal amounts of time helping the women that bring children into the world under less than ideal circumstances. We need a new word: neither "pro-choice," nor "pro-life" really apply to anything.
The fact that I was taught to avoid sex until marriage didn't work. The fact that people tried to convince me to have an abortion didn't work, either. I made my own choices, based on my truth and what I could live with, and the rest I will deal with God about directly.
We're indoctrinating people, but what we're teaching isn't working. Teaching Muslims to be chaste doesn't stop them from looking for sex. Teaching Mormons to be completely faithful in marriage and to avoid masturbation doesn't stop them from looking at pornography. And teaching Catholics from the Philippines that abortion is wrong doesn't stop them from seeking information about abortions and, let's face it, having them.
Having a child has taught me one of the simple facts about human nature: deny someone of something, impose a rule or regulation, and you're bound to witness rebellion. Perhaps it's a defect in our design as human beings. We're oppositional. We're defiant. We may talk the talk but we're almost physically incapable of walking the walk indefinitely. Put something just out of our reach and our natural curiosity is transformed into obsession. In all of my years of religious education, in many different religions, I've found a loving God, a God that's a good parent, patient and kind, who tells me, "be not afraid." Couldn't we find a way to teach people to love, to accept, and to help so that perhaps they would seek out goodness and integrity on their own?
As Oscar Hammerstein wrote, "You've got to be carefully taught, you've got to be taught to be afraid." When I went back to Google Trends, searches for fear, afraid, phobia and terrorism, while understandably less concrete than searching for sex, pornography or abortion, are conducted most in the English Language. Here's one sad instance where indoctrination has worked. Despite our country's motto being, "In God We Trust," we, the American people, are being successfully taught to fear. Perhaps we could remember, especially during the holiday season, that there is still so much to have faith in.