A few days ago, on the radio of my dad's car, I heard about Donald Trump's stance on abortion. He suggested that women who receive these sorts of procedures should be punished. Of course, his views have changed back and forth dramatically within these past few days, but honestly, I suppose I couldn't expect anything less from him. Anyway, at the time, my family and I had been having debates on political issues quite a bit already. A few different opinions were heard—and quite a bit of yelling too, but that's to be expected. The way I saw it, there was nothing stopping us from having another argument.
But when we heard the announcement about Trump, we didn't talk about it. Quite frankly, I don't think my family and I had ever had an explicit conversation about abortion. I admit that abortion can be a sensitive topic, but it is one that needs to be thoroughly addressed before a handful of political representatives make the decision for women everywhere. So in that regard, I'll be using this article to make the case for my stance on abortion and for what I understand is at stake in this debate.
However, I don't want to reduce this issue to a matter of whether life starts at conception or birth, or to a question of religious rights. These are the debates that I hear most often, but personally, I'm tired of hearing them. Both of these perspectives seem to be the rationality of individuals in understanding an incredibly woman-involved topic, all the while ignoring the fact that it is a woman involved topic. When we only discuss the pure politics behind abortion legislation, we completely ignore the mother's experience during this sensitive time. A mother's decision to terminate a pregnancy is not an act of a murderer to a victim, it is an act of control over her body and her livelihood. These situations are far from black and white, so what's the point in debating black and white answers? What we should be doing is making our decisions and forming our opinions based on the ever important gray—that is, women's rights.
When women receive abortions, what we see are mothers concerned for their possible future with their baby. Some women feel that they could not afford to take care of a child, and others have obligations like work, schooling, or other dependents; and feel that they have wouldn't have the time to properly raise the child—which wouldn't be fair to the mother or the child. Many choose to have an abortion because they don't want to raise the child alone, or in a household where the mother is having issues with her partner.
Understand that these reasons are not simply excuses made by individuals who want to escape from their responsibilities. There's a claim that I see quite a bit on social media – people say disturbing things along the lines of "it's your fault you got knocked up, now you have to pay the price". There are so many things wrong with that mindset, such as the implication that it is purely the woman's fault for getting impregnated when it is literally biologically impossible for a woman to do so by herself, or that the child should be viewed as some kind of punishment for being irresponsible because that's how we should be raising our children, but I won't go into them. Rather, choosing to have an abortion is the rationale of individuals who understand what real responsibility is, to weigh their options and see which would be right given their situation. According to the Guttmacher Institute, of the women receiving abortions:
42 percent were under the poverty level.
61 percent had at least one other child to take care of.
45 percent had never married or do not cohabit.
18 percent are aged 19 and under.
What do all these statistics mean? They mean that women don't want to be forced to raise a child in poverty. Women don't want to be forced to split their attention and resources between the children they already have. Women don't want to be forced to take on the challenge of parenthood alone. And women don't want to be forced to be parents when they themselves are still children.
Also, in response to the argument made by those who say that these women were all put into this situation by their own irresponsibility, more than half of these women used contraceptive when they were impregnated. Because if you didn't already know, there is no contraceptive that is 100% effective, other than abstinence—but that is another women's rights discussion in and of itself.
Some people might look at these statistics and notice that none of them indicate a vast majority, and that most of them represent less than half the women who undergo these procedures. But I can't see how that matters. It seems to me that these numbers are large enough to definitively say that that not all women believe that they are in a proper situation to parent a child. That should be enough to make the case that all women should have the ability to at least weigh their options and decide for themselves what to do with their bodies without being forced into anything. Believing in the right to choose is literally just that—the belief that women shouldn't have to carry a pregnancy to term if they don't want to. You can be pro-choice and still believe that some women shouldn't have abortions, but you wouldn't be saying that universally, all women must give birth, regardless of their situation, their resources, their age, or even their health or mental state.
Now let's talk about what happens then. Though rape survivors do not make up a large percentage of women who choose to abort, mandatory birthing laws would mean that women who were impregnated without their consent, would be forced to endure a traumatic and triggering pregnancy against their will, during a highly sensitive time when they should be focused on the state of their physical and mental health, rather than on a pregnancy that they did not want to have, from sex that they did not consent to. And perhaps on the other side of the spectrum of women who abort, think of mothers who did want their child and looked forward to having another member added to their family, only to find out that due to neurological formation that was completely out of anyone's control, life for that child would mean constant seizures. The excited, loving mother would have to give life to a child who would feel only pain. Women with mental illnesses would have to finish pregnancies that they might not be able to handle. Women who develop certain health complications would be forced to sacrifice their own life for the birth of their child. Everyone has their story. It shouldn't matter that these are the outliers and the minority; these women would be a minority without legal options.
Legality will not stop women from doing what they feel they need to do. In the past year, there were 700,000 online searches for home abortions. Women have been poisoning themselves and harming their bodies, putting their physical health at risk because they know that the safe procedures they need will not be made available to them, or that getting these procedures could mean risking their lives in a crowd of violent anti-abortion protesters. The anti-abortion movement has made it difficult for women to get safe procedures from professionals, and anti-abortion hospitals only harshen the stigma and judgement against women who want to have them done.
To think about it, none of these practices have to happen, but they do anyway. There is nothing wrong in believing that abortion is bad decision. But it's wrong to remove a women's right to question otherwise. A decision to terminate affects no one, if anyone, more than the mother, so it only seems right that she make the decision herself.
If a woman chooses to have her baby, that is her decision. So why isn't she allowed to choose and no one else?
