Big Brother

My father's late sister convinced my mother to abort her first child, a boy. She wanted my mother to have a girl first, to honor her own mother who had died prematurely. When my mother went into labor with me, my father was working, so she walked by herself three blocks to the University Hospital from student housing (which has since been demolished and is now a parking lot across the street from Agua Verde in Seattle). My mother had her abortion a few years earlier at the Planned Parenthood in the Central District (which has also since been demolished and is now, I think, a Safeway grocery store or something like that?). She didn't tell me about my potential older brother until I was in college; she says she deeply regrets it, and she blames my father's sister for convincing her.

Even though abortion is illegal in Iran, thousands of women have abortions every year. Often, you get special "abortion pills" in black market alleys (Nasser Khosrow is the one my cousins talk about most). According to Pardis Mahdavi's book, "Passionate Uprisings," sometimes, the "abortion pills" are fakes actually meant for animals, and the women go through severe pain and/or die. In 2005, the law was made more lenient.

I write all this to prelude the latest viral email in the Persian female circuit (mother included). The email is a video made by an Iranian Christian group called Elam, and more specifically by Dr. Mojdeh Shirvanian. It's called "Interview With An Unborn Child":

I'm posting the Farsi version with English subtitles (there's a Farsi-only version too)--don't worry; there are no shocking images or anything like that. I've gotten this video from three separate Persians over the past few days. I guess the crazy part for me is that it's not the Farsi version that has been getting the most traction--it's the English version! I'm really confused by this. I did a little Googling and found out that  American pro-lifers are forwarding links to this video too!

Talking with someone involved with the video I [National Right to Life] learned that “It was really designed originally for the Persian world but has spring-boarded from there and now the English website has taken off.”

I'm fascinated by the earnestness of the otherwise-progressive Persian women who forwarded this video to me. Born and raised in the U.S., I come to think of the topic of abortion as a very binary thing: either you're passionately pro-choice or passionately pro-life, but never have I seen someone be pro-choice and forward viral pro-life emails at the same time. So I guess this is a uniquely foreign approach? I guess what fascinates me more though is the embrace of this video by fundamental American groups like the one I linked above. I'm telling you, I'd LOVE to be a fly on the wall at a convention that united fundamentalists from every country. They'd have such a blast getting to know each other.