I normally avoid the abortion topic on this site because it’s a great big DUH that Childfree people are also pro-choice, and so the topic isn’t necessary to discuss. But in honor of Blog For Choice Day, I dug up the old essay I wrote years ago telling why I am pro-choice. Sit down and get comfortable, this is going to take a while.

Reasons I’m pro-choice:

What is Life?

Who defines what life is? When does life begin and when does it end? If you and I disagree on when life begins and when it ends, who is right? It’s not like we can really compromise.

If you believe life starts at conception, then what are you going to do about all these women who miscarry along the way? Are you going to charge them with murder or manslaughter? Apparently they caused a person to die, even if it wasn’t intentional! You’ll have to charge all women who miscarry with at least some form of manslaughter! After all, you can’t just pick and choose who the rules apply to! If it’s a life — someone must answer for their death.

If a woman smokes or drinks during pregnancy, are you going to arrest her? It wouldn’t be legal for a woman to feed her three-month-old infant alcohol or let it smoke her cigarette. So are you going to police pregnant women from now on, and charge them with crimes against their unborn babies?

Seriously, I don’t believe life starts at conception. I don’t believe the lawmakers think so, either, or they would be passing laws to protect fetuses from things like alcohol, cigarette smoke and any “dangerous” activity (like drinking coffee!) a woman might engage in that would cause her to miscarry.

If life started at conception, our age would not be based on the day we were born, but on the day we were conceived! Notice how legally, five minutes after you are born, you are considered 5 minutes old — not 9 months and 5 minutes. If you are pro-life, you better start adding a few months on to your age or else you are admitting you weren’t alive those first 9 months.

I don’t think “pro-life” is an appropriate name for the movement that only cares about FETUS life. In my book, they are anti-choice not to mention anti-women.

Religious Views

I’m not a big fan of religion, but let’s just get this out of the way, shall we? Exodus 21:22-25. I won’t quote the whole thing here and waste space. Click or go read your bible if you want to read the actual passage. Basically it says if someone accidentally causes a woman to miscarry, then her husband shall determine how much the person will have to pay him to compensate him for the loss of what is essentially thought of as property. BUT if the man accidentally hurts or kills the woman, then he shall endure the same punishment: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for a life.

In other words, if the woman loses her eye, the attacker loses his. If the woman dies, the attacker also dies. If the woman MISCARRIES, well, the husband can demand repayment if he so chooses. IF they thought of the fetus as a life, they would have said, “If he kills the baby, he dies, too”.

The bible does not recognize the fetus as a person.

Even if we have no bible passages to condemn abortion, people will still try to say it’s against God’s will, or it’s not “natural”. Well gee, most medical procedures in this day and age aren’t very natural. Infertility treatment sure as heck isn’t natural, so no “True Christian” would do be allowed to do that, right? And hooking people up to life support, even premature babies, isn’t natural, so they can’t be doing that, either. And I hope you never need any medication if you ever get sick, because that isn’t “natural” either. If it was “God’s Will” you’d be miraculously cured without medication.

Let’s get real here. How many Christians bother to follow the whole Bible anyway? I mean, most Christians I know have had sex before marriage. I’ve known plenty of Christians who cheated on their spouses. I know many, many, many Christians who are divorced, and many of them remarried, some of them divorced again… etc. etc. You can’t just pick and choose what passages of the bible you like and throw the rest out! He who is without sin, cast the first stone, and all that.

Meanwhile, religion is all about numbers, and it’s turning into big business. Religious leaders want to discourage (even outlaw) abortions because abortion is not good business. Think of all those children who should have been born, and raised in the church, and they would bring more money into the church when they get old enough. Yes, churches want more members because more members means more money and more prestige.

And finally, if you believe abortion is wrong, don’t have one. That is YOUR belief and YOUR religion, not mine. But I have no such belief and I have no such religion, I’ll go ahead and have my abortion, okay? You are morally wrong to try and force YOUR beliefs on me. You’d be shitting a brick if I was trying to outlaw churches just because *I* don’t believe in going to church, wouldn’t you? So how is it any different that you are trying to outlaw my freedoms? My definition of evil is people like you who try to control other people. Yea, that makes you EVIL.

If you still want some more guidance on religion and abortion, check out this site.

Birth Control

Many will argue that in this day and age, there should be no unplanned pregnancies because of birth control. But have you looked around lately? People are dumb! You can’t expect they are using birth control correctly and consistently!

My mother always claimed to use birth control, and that it wasn’t her fault it kept failing! (She had a lot of kids.) I love my mother, but she is also a flake who would forget her head if it wasn’t attached. She’d forget her groceries at the grocery store, or drive through the fast food window, pay and drive off without her order. Now after reading that, tell me, do you think my mom’s birth control failed, or do you think she forgot to take her pill every morning? Yea, me too.

I don’t have any statistics on birth control failures, but even if I did, someone would claim my stats were biased. I HAVE read that many failures are the result of improperly using birth control. Take condoms — if you get one that’s too small, it’s more likely to break. If you get one too big, it’s more likely to fall off. If you use one that’s too old, it’s likely to fall apart. Sure, sometimes a brand-new, right size condom can break, BUT it’s much more likely to not break if you have the right size and use it correctly. I’ve heard rumors there are some folks who “put it on wrong” and I have no idea HOW that is possible, but you know, I’m sure someone out there has figured out a way to put it on wrong. It only takes one fool to foil a fool proof plan.

Everyone should know at this point that antibiotics will counteract the effects of the pill. Yet there are still women who say, “I didn’t know!” How?! How can you not know? Are you mentally challenged?! Heck, I knew this before I was even old enough to be ON the pill (but that’s probably because I had older sisters). I KNOW doctors explain this, because they’ve always given me the lecture when I’ve needed antibiotics or pills. TV ads explain it. Women talk about this issue a lot. With that many warning signals, how can anyone miss them all?!

Regardless, now you know. So don’t screw it up.

And yes, there are some genuine accidents. Still, if people were to use multiple forms of birth control, they’d have an even smaller chance of failure. And then there are those folks who claim to have some reason they have allergies to every possible form of birth control which I find extremely hard to believe. But whatever.

My point is, I agree that birth control should prevent most unwanted pregnancies, but it obviously doesn’t. Apparently we are over-estimating the general public. The only way to solve this is to find some safe, reversible way to sterilize everyone at the age of 12, and then, when they are ready to have a child, un-sterilize them. But of course, the bleeding hearts will say you can’t do that for some lame-ass reason. I think it’s a genius of an idea and I think it would solve so many of the world’s problems, but what do I know?

The bottom line is: people are always going to get pregnant accidentally or stupidly. So birth control helps, but not enough.

Sexism

Biology has cursed women so that we have all the unpleasant facets of biology and sexuality, while men have none. Not only do we have our normal monthly fun, but we’re the ones who deal with pregnancy, child birth and breastfeeding. Women are also (in most cases) not as strong, so we are more easily attacked and raped. And what side effects of biology and sexuality do men have to deal with? Um, balding? Yea, that’s almost as bad. /sarcasm

The worst part about wanting to outlaw abortions is that it’s inherently sexist. Women are supposed to be punished for being “bad” and having sex without using proper birth control. But why aren’t men being punished for their “bad” behavior? As it is, women are still called “sluts,” and “hos” (or “whores” depending on your educational level), while men are thought to be MANLY when they behave in this way.

If women should be punished for their “bad” behavior, what punishment are we going to inflict on men for getting the women pregnant? Shall we force them to have vasectomies? Nah, that’s not nearly as painful as nine-months of pregnancy. We’ll have to come up with an appropriate punishment and start enacting that before we get around to outlawing abortion.

Sure, many anti-choicers will swear it’s NOT about punishing the woman, but let’s face it — it is. If it weren’t, then men who get women pregnant would be treated just as badly. But when was the last time you saw that? Probably around the last time you saw hell freeze over, right? It’s all about punishing women for daring to enjoy sex. And you know, if a woman enjoys sex, she might cheat, and that would threaten men. Especially the ones that are horrible lovers.

We women don’t exist just to be incubators of men’s seeds, but many men would like us to be treated just that way. This is why these same men want to cut off our access to not just abortion, but birth control as well. They think if they keep us home, barefoot and pregnant, we are less of a threat. If a woman has a hard time keeping her career, she can’t threaten a man by making more money. And if she’s home all day long busy with kids, she’s less likely to meet another man or have the opportunity to cheat or leave. Forcing women into motherhood is a way for men to “control” them.

I will never be able to take any man who is anti-abortion seriously. Why should he care if women are forced to bear children — it doesn’t hurt him in the least. It’s easy for him to be anti-choice because he has nothing to lose.

Pain and Suffering

One of the tactics anti-choicers use is to complain about how much pain and suffering the fetus feels during abortion. Let me counter that with how long the average abortion lasts. Not that I’ve had one, but I’ve read that an abortion takes about 5-7 minutes, give or take a few. So to be generous, this fetus might be in pain for a total of 15 minutes before it’s all over. Now, how long does the average childbirth take? I’ve read the average is 12 hours.

That’s 12 hours of pain and suffering. I’m supposed to suffer for 12 hours because some fetus might otherwise be in pain for 15 minutes? Oh, really?

There is pain and suffering all over the world, every day. Children already born are being beaten by their parents or molested by relatives right this very minute, and I don’t see the anti-choicers complaining about that pain and suffering. I don’t see anti-choicers picketing outside a courthouse when a parent isn’t charged with murder after letting their child roast to death in a hot car! This is why I refuse to call them “pro-lifers”. They don’t care about life, they don’t care about abused children or the lives of women — they just want women to be forced into motherhood and pregnancy.

Do you have any idea how much women suffered before abortion was legal? Either through painful, botched illegal abortions, through pregnancies their bodies couldn’t handle, or through the shame people put them through for daring to have a child out of wedlock. The anti-choice movement has nothing to do with pain and suffering, because if they did, they’d be worried about ALL PEOPLE’S pain and suffering, not just potential people.

One could argue that the child is innocent, and the mother is not — after all, the mother had sex. Okay, but why isn’t the father, who is also not innocent, not put through 12 hours of pain and suffering to pay for his sins, too? Hmmm?

How many anti-choicers do you know who are vegetarians? How many of them care about the pain and suffering agricultural animals go through so they can have food in their stomachs? How many anti-choicers do you know who have diamonds? Do they care about the pain and suffering of workers in diamond mines? How many anti-choicers do you know who shop at Wal-Mart? Don’t they care about the children being forced to labor in overseas factories to make those goods Wal-Mart sells? I bet they don’t.

For the record, I haven’t had an abortion, but I have seen one. Twelfth Grade Religion Class, Catholic High School. I saw it. Didn’t change my mind.

But on that note, are we going to force everyone who gets pregnant to watch a video of childbirth to see if that changes their minds? I’m all for it!! I can just imagine how many caffeine binges that would inspire.

The world is full of pain and suffering. The fact that anti-choicer only care about one kind of pain and suffering shows how little they care about pain and suffering,
and life in general.

The Costs

Okay, for the sake of argument, “Jane Doe” is pregnant. She’s 17. Her church, family and/or the women outside the abortion clinic convinced her not to have the abortion. So now she’s 17, has no medical insurance and she’s going to have a baby. Yay, right? First she’s got to get on Medicaid, and get the tax payers to pay for her medical costs. Wait a minute… why should the taxpayers be paying for her medical costs?! Since the anti-choice movement wants her to have the baby, they should be paying her medical costs!

After the baby’s born, who is going to help her raise it? What if she can’t get a good job that helps her afford daycare – is the anti-choice movement going to be paying her daycare costs? They should be! If the anti-choice movement wants her to have that baby, they’d better keep her off welfare.

I know a lot of people don’t want to admit there is an overpopulation problem, so just for the moment, let’s say I agree with you. But then think of how many abortions have been performed throughout the world and through the years. How many more people do you think would be alive? And how many of them would have had children by now? And how many children do you think they would have had? Don’t you realize that there really WOULD be an overpopulation problem if no one was allowed to abort? Are YOU going to start limiting YOUR family size to two or fewer children if everyone else on the planet agrees to give up abortions? Somehow I doubt it.

Abuse

So what happens to all these women like Jane Doe who are bullied into giving birth to their children and then scared into keeping their children? And yes, many women are. I have a friend who was guilted by her family and her (Catholic) church into not only having the baby, but keeping it. After all, they wouldn’t want that baby raised in some other church! By the time they were done with her, she was convinced all adoptive families were abusive!

In a best case scenario, Jane does her best and raises a good kid. But a lot of these women end up angry, resentful, and totally on their own with no support. Sooner or later the frustration builds and they take it out on their child. Soon they are beating their child, verbally abusing him, or neglecting him. Where are all those abortion clinic picketers now? Are they helping Jane at all? Are they saving this child from years of abuse and neglect, or worse? Probably not. Because they don’t give a damn about how much suffering the child has to live through, as long as the mother has given birth.

Shouldn’t there be such a thing as *quality* of life? If the child is suffering from abuse and neglect for 10 years, how is that an improvement over the suffering he might have had during a 7 minute abortion? Who are you really punishing here — the mother, or the child? Okay, so you can call social services and have the child taken away from Jane because she’s an unfit mother. But now what? He ends up in the foster care system. Is that really an improvement? If he’s lucky, yes. But I don’t think many kids in the foster care system are lucky.

Adoption & Foster Care

Anti-choicers think it’s just SO easy to run out and give those unwanted babies up for adoption. But that is extremely naïve. If adoption were so darn easy, why are there so many children languishing in the foster care system?! Until every single kid in the foster care system is adopted, there shouldn’t be more children shoved into the system. If the child is a white, healthy baby, the odds are she’ll get adopted. But what about minority babies, or babies with health problems, or children with emotional problems? Where are all these so called pro-lifers now? Are they standing in line to adopt? Probably not. I’m not saying no anti-choicers ever adopt, but how many do you know who do? And the ones that do, are they doing it for financial gain, or because they really want to give a child a good home?

I can count on one hand the number of anti-choicers I’ve personally known who have adopted or fostered children. Three fingers, actually: two were infertile couples, and the other couple did it for financial gain and crammed as many kids into their home as possible. Most fertile anti-choice couples wouldn’t lift a finger to help any child that wasn’t related to them. At least, that’s my personal experience, but I have a sneaking suspicion that’s the norm. Meanwhile, I know a huge number (I’m related to most of them) anti-choice fundies with three or more children who have never even considered adopting or fostering children. They just keep breeding like bunnies, never giving ONE SINGLE THOUGHT about children already alive and well in foster care system and desperate for a home. These selfish fundies don’t want anyone to be allowed to abort, but don’t want to be burdened with dealing with any of those unwanted children. How incredibly heartless and selfish of them!

I can not take any anti-choice folks seriously until they start taking in some of those children who need homes!

Exceptions

Some anti-choices want to make exceptions to the rule: Women who should be allowed to abort for certain reasons. You can’t list all your reasons why abortion is wrong, but then say there are exceptions to it being wrong. It’s either all wrong, or it’s not all wrong.

Exception 1: Health of the mother. Okay, in this case, if a pregnancy would kill the mother, suddenly it’s okay to abort. IF they are so against abortion, they should believe it’s god’s will that the woman die and if her fetus dies, too, then it’s god’s will. They can’t just say god is against abortion… except this one!

Exception 2: Rape and Incest. Okay, and why is it okay to abort the “innocent” fetus just because the mother didn’t consent to the sex act? Would it be because pregnancy is really just a way to punish a woman for consenting to sex?

Do you realize that if there was a law saying, “Abortion is illegal, unless you were raped” every woman who wanted an abortion would claim she was raped? Is that a GOOD thing? If that was the only way I could get my abortion, damn right I’d lie and say I was raped. What other choice are you giving me? To be sentenced to nine months of slavery to a fetus? Are you kidding me? I’d get a wire coat-hanger first. Or I’d fall down some stairs. Or get hit by a car. ANYTHING that might save me from that misery. And I’ve got a husband, health care and the money to support the little parasite. Just think of how much MORE desperate I’d be if I was broke, and alone, and couldn’t even feed myself! THINK about it.

And think for second about the impact this would have on women who really were raped! Suddenly no one will take them seriously anymore, since everyone is crying rape. What a mess you’ve now created with your cute little loophole!

Exception #3: Extreme Deformity. Apparently, most parents want a healthy baby, but a lot of babies aren’t healthy. So some people would like to make exceptions for unhealthy fetuses. Who is to say what is “extreme” enough to qualify? Most of us would agree that this case would qualify as “extreme” enough. In that case, I can’t imagine how any anti-choicer could think it was right to force her to go through with the pregnancy. But apparently some think it IS okay to force her. I’d really like to sentence them to having to carry a child like that to term.

Some people might think severe retardation would be enough to make the exception. But who really determines where the line is drawn? I certainly don’t want that power, and I’m sure the bleeding hearts will go ape shit saying we’re turning into Nazis who just want a blonde-haired and blue-eyed master race or some such nonsense.

In Conclusion

I guess my bottom line is about compassion. If we’re such an evolved species, we should be more compassionate. There is no compromise in abortion, and there is nothing compassionate about forcing women to have children they don’t want. The women suffer, the children suffer and sometimes the whole community suffers. No one with a soul could think that is right.

Maybe my fault is that I care about quality of life, not quantity. Give fewer people GOOD lives, not more people just any old life you can throw them at.

Keep your beliefs off my body, and I’ll keep mine off yours.