As I've mentioned before, I don't really like marches. They tend to jumble up messages and become nothing more than incoherent imagery. They raise tempers without raising the level of debate. As I've been watching Chris take on Irishlaw bicker over an image from the "March for Women's Lives" in Washington, it's merely strengthened my general distaste for such 'action.'

I've only linked to the image here because (a) it's almost certainly subject to Reuter's copyright, and (b) it's somewhat distasteful. To describe it briefly, a man stands defiant in the midst of the march, holding up an image of a bloody fetus on a poster with the hyperbolic "ABORTION IS GENOCIDE." Around him, three women appear to be taunting him or dancing around him, holding posters of their own or showing off their t-shirts. The photographer captures a sense of antipathy and confrontation that evokes a sense of reasoned horribleness.

It's images like that which make me waver in my politically pro-choice stance. Unlike IrishLaw, I can see practical policy reasons for leaving the choice to carry a life to pregnancy in the hands of a woman. But at the end of every abortion, there's something that ends up in the bucket. We can bicker about whether that something is a 'human life' before or after a viable birth, but it's a potential, a something different from a tumor or a rotted tooth. Under different circumstances, it might be a subject of love and warmth, intelligence and kindness. And there it is, bloody.

I'm pro-choice, and I'm willing to accept that fact. I have no respect for those who picket abortion clinics or harass frail and nervous women after they've made or are making their choices. But there is also a cost to this policy--that something in the bucket--and I don't ever want to forget that fact.

I'm sure the counterdemonstrator is there to cause a disturbance: that's his intended role. Doubtless he's done his share of aggravation, and kicked up what trouble he can. Put him in front of a clinic, and I'm not likely to love an image of what he'd be doing. But his other purpose is to remind those of us who are pro-choice exactly what it is we're choosing: that we're making decisons about life and liberty, freedom and responsiblity. I can see ignoring him. I can even see pausing respectfully to observe him. What I can't condone is the taunting, the amusement, the confrontation, the dancing apparent in the picture. Because that image he's holding is what's being chosen by those marchers as a matter of policy: that is their end. Whatever rational reasons we may give ourselves to allow it, it's a horror not to be celebrated.

In the comments section of Chris's post, he takes me to task for describing the women as filled with "Distasteful hysteria, the triumph of identity politics over any reasonable moral principle." But really, I'm granting them the benefit of the doubt: that they're inspired by the heat of the conflict, women embroiled in a 'women's rights' march, and not by a genuine conviction that the image before them is forceless, costless or even laudable. Otherwise the marchers face that picture shouting, "Look upon our works, ye mighty, and rejoice!"

I'll stand by that statement of hysteria as one of hope, simply because if the women in that image are not hysterical, then they are horrifying.