Yeah, I know. Abortion is that hot button, trigger issue for many folks.
It's so polarizing and gets people so passionate that many refuse to discuss it. But we have to discuss it. We have to have hard conversations about it. Pregnancy and resulting birth are intense, life changing, potentially fatal medical events. To ignore them in our politics would be to ignore every uterus bearing individual in our nation.
I'm tired of limiting the discussion to life and choice. Life is a label that makes people who believe abortion should be legal look like baby killers. Choice is a label to spit in the face of usually conservative abortion haters who preach freedom in other aspects of the political realm. But many women "choose" to have babies despite hardship and many women find "life" in choosing abortion to prevent hardship. The core of the issue is abandoned in favor of the fight.
The truth is, decent humans want one thing: the health and well being of women, others bearing a uterus, and their offspring.
I am pro-choice, and probably as pro-life as you are, too. They are not mutually exclusive. So forget those labels.
I am not pro-abortion, pro-irresponsibility, pro-abortion as birth control, or anything of the sort. I think abortion is sad. Awful. If by some strange act of the universe I ended up pregnant, I would never be able to choose abortion for myself. I still want that choice to be available to me and to other women.
Here are my two cents on some arguments I often hear for restricting abortion.
It's not just your body. Someone else's life is at stake.
Yes, and I agree with you. I agree that a fetus has the potential to be a human life. Is a human life, even. There's something more important. Bodily autonomy. When someone dies, we can't harvest their organs without their permission prior to their death. Even if those organs would save another human life.
We are in control of our bodies, what we do with them, and what is inside of them and outside of them. We can't give pregnant women less bodily autonomy than we afford corpses. Pregnancy is a huge risk. It can lead to fatality. It's hard, expensive and unpleasant. Asking someone to do it against their will, life at stake or not, is not ethical.
Adoption fixes everything.
No, no it doesn't.
Adoption is not abortion's bandage for so many reasons. Many people want to claim that abortion is never needed because adoption is always an option, but child raising is not the only thing people want to avoid.
Less than 2 percent of unwanted pregnancies turn into newborn adoptions. If there were suddenly a lot more, resources would be exhausted with haste. Adoption is expensive. So is pregnancy. Lost wages, lost education and health risks are all possible. Pregnancy can cause anemia, UTI, hypertension, diabetes, morning sickness, yeast infections, preeclampsia, depression and death due to the danger inherent in childbirth.
Mothers who choose to place their children up for adoption suffer guilt and loss. Adoption can be a beautiful choice, but it doesn't change the unwanted status of a pregnancy.
You shouldn't have had sex. You knew what was coming.
A child is a new human. It is very important. It is not a punishment for sex. It is not some fear mongering technique to keep people from being intimate.
I am not ready to have a child, but don't sit here and tell me, a twenty one year old who is happy and healthy, that I'm not ready to have sex. Sex is short and doesn't have eighteen years of financial and health consequences (assuming you do it with protection). Sex is not a lifelong commitment.
Protection fails, even when you think it can't. Worse yet, rape exists. Girls who aren't even in the double digits are capable of becoming pregnant. We believe in protecting the innocent, so why force a nine year old to have a baby? How is that protecting a child?
End the "us" and "them" talk surrounding this issue. This is important. It's lives we're talking about.
