Democracy's Dharma

Mizuko kuyō, the popular Japanese Buddhist memorial service for aborted fetuses, has been increasingly appropriated by both sides of the contentious American abortion debate. In the wake of exposure to the idea of mizuko kuyō, both pro-life and pro-choice Buddhist appropriators resort to discussions of the ritual because they feel it helps them strengthen the weaknesses of their own sides and undermine the positions of their opponents. Pro-life Americans use mizuko kuyō to prove that they care about women, not just fetuses, and that their convictions do not arise simply out of private religious feelings but objective psychological and medical facts. Pro-choice Americans, on the other hand, use mizuko kuyō to demonstrate that they care about families and children, not just women, and that they are sensitive not only to the secular but also the religious aspects of life and abortion. In the process, pro-life Christians, who seem to be primarily motivated by their exclusivist and authoritarian Biblical convictions, turn for support to a non-theistic religion they otherwise oppose; pro-choice feminists, who seem to have chiefly secular reasons for supporting abortion rights, turn for support to a supernatural entity and his retinue of angry fetal ghosts

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