If you've been on social media lately, you have likely seen an influx in posts regarding abortion since New York's new abortion law. Everyone seems to be outraged, thinking women are going to be going to the doctor to abort 9-month-old infants.
Posts about abortion are such a struggle for me. As a woman with a complex set of medical issues that could prevent me from ever having children, I am sad about even the idea of abortions. But as a feminist and social worker, I can also recognize that forcing someone to go through a pregnancy is not the answer everyone is looking for.
I work in foster care, so I have seen the ugliness of drug-addicted infants and watched children go through the system, without ever being adopted. There have been times when a client would become pregnant and would want to abort it to avoid it being born with a deformity or serious health issues related to their addiction, and in those hard moments, I stood by and supported those decisions.
Some people genuinely do not have the money to take care of the baby, let alone the insane medical expenses that it is to carry out a pregnancy in the first place. Having said that, New York's new law on abortions is not what people think it is.
What people have failed to recognize is that it was set in motion to allow women the legal right to abort a child when keeping it presented the woman with serious, life-threatening risks. If a woman's child died in her womb at eight months old, she was not permitted to surgically remove it, based on the previous New York law. The previous laws forced women to carry out pregnancies of dead children, putting women's lives at risk and has even resulted in the death of the women in some cases.
No one is carrying a pregnancy out to term and then randomly choosing to abort it. No woman is waiting until the 8-month mark to say they don't want a baby, nor is any doctor advocating for that. You would also be VERY hard pressed to find a doctor willing to abort a healthy baby that late. That's not why the law was created.
What frustrates me is that people are very quick to speak on things they have not researched. Speak your mind if you must, but please do the research FIRST.
It is not fair to place judgment out into the world, without considering all of the facts. Laws are made to PROTECT people. That was the ultimate reason for our country's legal system in the first place. Protecting a woman's right to take care of her own body is just as important as having food and shelter. You really don't have a right to tell a woman that she must risk death to bring a dead child to full term. You don't have the right to tell a woman she must risk her own death to bring an unhealthy child that is likely to die at birth. You don't have a right to tell women they must put their body through an unwanted pregnancy.
You may advocate for women to choose childbirth. You may offer money and to adopt the child yourself. You may voice your concerns, but not without doing the research.
Speak your mind, but do it mindfully.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
