Your Body Is Worth Less Than A Fetus
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Politics and Activism

Your Body Is Worth Less Than A Fetus

Or at least, that's what politicians in Oklahoma seem to think.

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Your Body Is Worth Less Than A Fetus
Carolmooredc

You borrow the money from your friend, since you don't have any yourself. She understands, offers to go with you maybe, but you decline. This is the kind of thing you're pretty sure you have to do alone. When you get to the appointment, it's in a dirty home in a bad part of town, and you wish that you had any other option, but you don't. The first thing you're asked is if you have the money, and then after that the procedure is impersonal. You're hacked up with probably unsterilized equipment, and there's nothing for the pain that comes with it. When it's over, the guy (he's not a doctor, you're pretty sure, because there's no way he can be), tells you that there's gauze there, that you can expect some cramping.

But you get an infection, and you end up having to go to the hospital anyway, even though what you did, what you had done to you, was illegal—there's no way you could have supported a child. Now, you find out that you can't even have children. You almost died. And that's getting off lucky, all things considered.

That's the story of a woman named Polly Bergen, whose illegal abortion in the 1940's almost killed her and left her infertile.

There are other stories too, about women with coat hangers, so desperate to be rid of a fetus that they do not want, that they cannot support, that cannot be had. There are stories about women dying in alleys from illegal abortions. There are stories of women (and in some cases, young girls) who have had to carry the offspring of their rapists, even in cases of incest. There are stories of women and girls being rushed to emergency rooms because they did not have legal access to abortion.

We can pretend in the United States that those days are long behind us, but they're not: Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that legalized abortion in the U.S. was only 43 years ago—and people have been fighting to keep it that way since then.

Oklahoma is trying to bring us back to when it wasn't legal. Senator Nathan Dahm is one of the men who voted in favor of SB 1552, which would make it illegal to perform an abortion, and would call for the arrest of the doctors who did perform them. He claims that he believes life starts at conception, that it's a requirement of the government to protect all life—but what about the lives of the women carrying those fetuses? What about the lives of women threatened by ectopic pregnancies, where the egg is fertilized in the fallopian tube? What about the lives of women who suffer from preeclampsia, when blood pressure rises during pregnancies cause damage to internal organs? Senator Dahm and people who think like him don't care about the sanctity of life at all; they care about fetuses without heartbeats more than they care about actual, breathing people. He didn't vote for the Affordable Care Act, which would have maybe lessened the medical burden faced by those who cannot afford to have a child, but rather voted to penalize anyone who tried to enact it.

But maybe he's just ignorant (his history is as an engineer), which is no better if it's to the same effect. The one member of the Senate who is a physician—and does actually know at least something about women's bodies—voted against the bill, calling it “insane.” People who don't know how bodies work have no right to try to legislate them, but that goes back to the argument that one politician had about how if you get pregnant from being raped, there's no way you were actually raped, because if it were legitimate, the “body has ways of shutting it down.” Those aren't the kind of people you should want making laws about anyone's body or the medical procedures they decide to have.

It's amazing that some people hate women so much that they'd rather see them die than allow them body autonomy.

There's evidence—decades worth, in fact—that shows that making abortions illegal never lowers the actual rate of abortions that happen: it just makes it more unsafe for everyone involved. The only thing that is guaranteed to lower the amount of abortions that occur is easy and affordable access to contraception. Unfortunately, these arguments aren't really about abortion; they're about control. These same people argue for smaller government, not realizing how hypocritical they're being—or maybe realizing and hoping that nobody else notices that by demanding legislation over the actions of people with uteri, they're doing the thing they claim to not want government to do in the first place. The majority of the people who are passing laws that restrict access to abortion (and contraception) are old enough to know better. They're old enough to have heard stories about what happens when people can't get safe medical care. They don't care. They're not the ones being affected by it.

But there's the possibility that you could be. Contact your elected officials and tell them how you feel about them trying to control your body.

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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