Posted on 04/27/2015 8:02:51 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I believe that abortion care is a positive social good -- and I think it’s time people said so.
Recently, the Daily Kos published an article titled I Am Pro-Choice, Not Pro-Abortion. “Has anyone ever truly been pro-abortion?” one commenter asked.
Uh. Yes. Me. That would be me.
I am pro-abortion like I’m pro-knee-replacement and pro-chemotherapy and pro-cataract surgery. As the last protection against ill-conceived childbearing when all else fails, abortion is part of a set of tools that help women and men to form the families of their choosing. I believe that abortion care is a positive social good. I suspect that a lot of other people secretly believe the same thing. And I think it’s time we said so.
As an aside, I’m also pro-choice. Choice is about who gets to make the decision. The question of whether and when we bring a new life into the world is, to my mind, one of the most important decisions a person can make. It is too big a decision for us to make for each other, and especially for perfect strangers.
But independent of who owns the decision, I’m pro on the procedure, and I’ve decided that it’s time, for once and for all, to count it out on my 10 fingers.
1. I’m pro-abortion because being able to delay and limit childbearing is fundamental to female empowerment and equality. A woman who lacks the means to manage her fertility lacks the means to manage her life. Any plans, dreams, aspirations, responsibilities or commitments–no matter how important–have a great big contingency clause built: “until or unless I get pregnant, in which case all bets are off.”
Think of any professional woman you know. She wouldn’t be in that role if she hadn’t been able to time and limit her childbearing. Think of any girl you know who imagines becoming a professional woman. She won’t get there unless she has effective, reliable means to manage her fertility. In generations past, nursing care was provided by nuns and teachers were spinsters, because avoiding sexual intimacy was the only way women could avoid unpredictable childbearing and so be freed up to serve their communities in other capacities. But if you think that abstinence should be our model for modern fertility management, consider the mass graves that get found every so often under old nunneries.
2. I’m pro-abortion because well-timed pregnancies give children a healthier start in life. We now have ample evidence that babies do best when women are able to space their pregnancies and get both pre-natal and pre-conception care. The specific nutrients we ingest in the weeks before we get pregnant can have a lifelong effect on the wellbeing of our offspring. Rapid repeat pregnancies increase the risk of low birthweight babies and other complications. Wanted babies are more likely to get their toes kissed, to be welcomed into families that are financially and emotionally ready to receive them, to get preventive medical care during childhood and the kinds of loving engagement that helps young brains to develop.
3. I’m pro-abortion because I take motherhood seriously. Most female bodies can incubate a baby, and thanks to antibiotics, cesareans and anti-hemorrhage drugs, most of us are able to survive pushing a baby out into the world. But parenting is a lot of work, and doing it well takes twenty dedicated years of focus, attention, patience, persistence, social support, mental health, money, and a whole lot more. This is the biggest, most life-transforming thing most of us will ever do. The idea that women should simply go with it when they find themselves pregnant after a one-night-stand, or a rape, or a broken condom completely trivialized motherhood.
4. I’m pro-abortion because intentional childbearing helps couples, families and communities to get out of poverty. Decades of research in countries ranging from the U.S. to Bangladesh show that reproductive policy is economic policy. It is no coincidence that the American middle class rose along with the ability of couples to plan their families, starting at the beginning of the last century. Having two or three kids instead of eight or ten was critical to prospering in the modern industrial economy. Early unsought childbearing nukes economic opportunity and contributes to multi-generational poverty. Today in the U.S., unsought pregnancy and childbearing is declining for everyone but the poorest families and communities, contributing to what some call a growing “caste system” in America. Strong, determined girls and women sometimes beat the odds, but their stories inspire us precisely because they are the exception to the rule. Justice dictates that the full range of fertility management tools including the best state-of-the-art contraceptive technologies and, when that fails, abortion care be equally available to all, not just a privileged few.
5. I’m pro-abortion because reproduction is a highly imperfect process. Genetic recombination is a complicated progression with flaws and false starts at every step along the way. To compensate, in every known species including humans, reproduction operates as a big funnel. Many more eggs and sperm are produced than will ever meet; more combine into embryos than will ever implant; more implant than will grow into babies; and more babies are born than will grow up to have babies of their own. This systematic culling makes God or nature the world’s biggest abortion provider: Nature’s way of producing healthy kids essentially requires every woman to have an abortion mill built into her own body.
In humans, an estimated 60-80 percent of fertilized eggs self-destruct before becoming babies, which is why the people who kill the most embryos are those like the Duggars who try to maximize their number of pregnancies. But the weeding-out process is also highly imperfect. Sometimes perfectly viable combinations boot themselves out; sometimes horrible defects slip through. A woman’s body may be less fertile when she is stressed or ill or malnourished, but as pictures of skeletal moms and babies show, some women conceive even under devastating circumstances. Like any other medical procedure, therapeutic contraception and abortion complement natural processes designed to help us survive and thrive.
6. I’m pro-abortion because I think morality is about the well-being of sentient beings. I believe that morality is about the lived experience of sentient beings—beings who can feel pleasure and pain, preference and intention, who at their most complex can live in relation to other beings, love and be loved and value their own existence.
What are they capable of wanting? What are they capable of feeling? These are the questions my husband and I explored with our kids when they were figuring out their responsibility to their chickens and guinea pigs. It was a lesson that turned expensive, when the girls stopped drinking milk from cows that didn’t get to see the light of day or eat grass, but it’s not one I regret. Do unto others as they want you to do unto them. It’s called the Platinum Rule. In this moral universe, real people count more than potential people, hypothetical people or corporate people.
7. I’m pro-abortion because contraceptives are imperfect, and people are too. The Pill is 1960’s technology, now half a century old. For decades, women were told the Pill was 99 percent effective, and they blamed themselves when they got pregnant anyways. But that 99 percent is a “perfect use” statistics, and in the real world, where most of us live, people aren’t perfect. In the real world, 1 in 11 women relying on the Pill gets pregnant each year. For a couple relying on condoms, that’s 1 in 6. Young and poor women—those whose lives are least predictable and most vulnerable to being thrown off course—are also those who have the most difficulty taking pills consistently. Pill technology most fails those who need it most, which makes abortion access a matter not only of compassion but of justice.
State-of-the-art IUDs and Implants radically change this equation, largely because they take human error out of the picture for years on end, or until a woman wants a baby. And despite the deliberate misinformation being spread by opponents, these methods are genuine contraceptives, not abortifacients. Depending on the method chosen, they disable sperm or block their path, or prevent an egg from being released. Once settled into place, an IUD or implant drops the annual pregnancy rate below 1 in 500. And guess what. Teen pregnancies and abortions plummet—which makes me happy, because even though I’m pro-abortion, I’d love the need for abortion to go away. Why mitigate harm when you can prevent it?
8. I’m pro-abortion because I believe in mercy, grace, compassion, and the power of fresh starts. Many years ago, my friend Chip was driving his family on vacation when his kids started squabbling. His wife Marla undid her seatbelt to help them, and as Chip looked over at her their top-heavy minivan veered onto the shoulder and then rolled, and Marla died. Sometimes people make mistakes or have accidents that they pay for the rest of their lives. But I myself have swerved onto the shoulder and simply swerved back. The price we pay for a lapse in attention or judgment, or an accident of any kind isn’t proportional to the error we made.
Who among us hasn’t had unprotected sex when the time or situation or partnership wasn’t quite right for bringing a new life into the world? Most of the time we get lucky; sometimes we don’t. And in those situations we rely on the mercy, compassion, and generosity of others.
In this regard, an unsought pregnancy is like any other accident. I can walk today only because surgeons reassembled my lower leg after it was crushed between the front of a car and a bicycle frame when I was a teen. And I can walk today (and run and jump) because another team of surgeons re-assembled my knee-joint after I fell off a ladder. And I can walk today (and bicycle with my family) because a third team of surgeons repaired my other knee after I pulled a whirring brush mower onto myself, cutting clear through bone. Three accidents, all my own doing, and three knee surgeries. Some women have three abortions.
9. I’m pro-abortion because the future is always in motion, and we have the power and responsibility to shape it well. As a college student, I read a Ray Bradbury story about a man who travels back into prehistory on a “time safari.” The tourists have been coached about the importance of not disturbing anything lest they change the flow of history. When they return to the present, they realize that the outcome of an election has changed, and they discover that the protagonist who had gone off the trail, has a crushed butterfly on the bottom of his shoe.
In baby making, as in Bradbury’s story, the future is always in motion, and every little thing we do has consequences we have no way to predict. Any small change means a different child comes into the world. Which nights your mother had headaches, the sexual position of your parents when they conceived you, whether or not your mother rolled over in bed afterwards—if any of these things had been different, someone else would be here instead of you. Every day, men and women make small choices and potential people wink into and out of existence. We move, and our movements ripple through time in ways that are incomprehensible, and we can never know what the alternate futures might have been.
But some things we can know or predict, at least at the level of probability, and I think this knowledge provides a basis for guiding wise reproductive decisions. My friend Judy says that parenting begins before conception. I agree. How and when, we choose to carry forward a new life can stack the odds in favor of our children or against them, and to me that is a sacred trust.
10. I’m pro-abortion because I love my daughter. I first wrote the story of my own abortion when Dr. Tiller was murdered and I couldn’t bear the thought of abortion providers standing in the crosshairs alone. “My Abortion Baby” was about my daughter, Brynn, who exists only because a kind doctor like George Tiller gave me and my husband the gift of a fresh start when we learned that our wanted pregnancy was unhealthy. Brynn literally embodies the ever changing flow of the future, because she could not exist in an alternate universe in which I would have carried that first pregnancy to term. She was conceived while I would still have been pregnant with a child we had begun to imagine, but who never came to be.
My husband and I felt very clear that carrying forward that pregnancy would have been a violation of our values, and neither of us ever second guessed our decision. Even so, I grieved. Even when I got pregnant again a few months later, I remember feeling petulant and thinking, I want that baby, not this one. And then Brynn came out into the world and I looked into her eyes, and I fell in love and never looked back.
All around us, living breathing and loving are the chosen children of mothers who waited—who ended an ill-timed or unhealthy pregnancy and then later chose to carry forward a new life. “I was only going to have two children,” my friend, Jane said as her daughters raced, screeching joyfully, across my lawn. Jane followed them with her eyes. “My abortions let me have these two when the time was right, with someone I loved.”
Those who see abortion as an unmitigated evil often talk about the “millions of missing people” who were not born into this world because a pregnant woman decided, not now. But they never talk about the millions of children and adults who are here today only because their mothers had abortions—real people who exist in this version of the future, people who are living out their lives all around us–loving and laughing and suffering and struggling and dancing and dreaming, and having babies of their own.
When those who oppose abortion lament the “missing people,” I hear an echo of my own petulant thought: I want that person, not this one. And I wish that they could simply experience what I did, that they could look into the beautiful eyes of the people in front of them, and fall in love.
It’s best not to read such things. I think Val should go start her own country where they kill as many babies as they want. God would destroy that country pretty quick. It’s only a withering remnant scattered throughout the states that keeps this country around.
hollywood/academia must be so proud...what better way to "destroy from within" than to actually...destroy from within.
Well done comrades!
...now time to push for pedophilia rights!
It’s part of the left’s indoctrination of school children in “sex ed” classes where they now espouse anal sex and masturbation as acceptable “alternatives” to sex instead of the proposition that perhaps, just maybe, people should WAIT to have sex until they’re married.
Nah, abstinence education NEVER works, right?
Right?
Just so endangered species are protected ....
They seem to have left out population control, especially certain populations.
Although I might agree with all those statements, I totally reject the apples and oranges comparison.
First of all, this is, and should remain an individual choice with no role whatsoever for the central, state or local government.
I have failed to notice a stampede of demands for "government" to fund self-inflicted knee-replacement and pro-chemotherapy and pro-cataract surgery. These are all afflictions in which the victim plays no role in choosing the affliction, whereas abortion has a string of perps directly responsible for the condition, completely in control and in addition, subject to "first resort" and avoidance.
There has been a tendency for several generations now to erase the concept of crime, choices and consequences and the societal victims are totally ignored, primarily the taxpayers who are saddled forever by criminals using baby factories to fund their indolent lifestyle for generation after generation. A strange form of involuntary servitude, otherwise known as "slavery.".
The purpose of laws are to protect society at large, not the irresponsible and criminally bent. The notion that the perps are "blameless" can and should be permanently rejected.
If costly and pervasive crime and criminals are deemed "blameless," beyond the control of the criminals, and not subject to punishment, then all crime, including murder, sick perversions and cannibalism can no longer be prosecuted and punished.
Perhaps society should reconsider treatments that in the past have proven 100% effective, including the freedom for the criminals to persist in their actions, without the monumental societal cost.
Ten reasons, or 10,000 reasons are insufficient to allow the irrational burden to continue forever.
Last, but not least, It is impossible to find in the Constitution the obligation or power granted to elected government to create "rights" which make slaves of the vast majority of its citizens.
Yes, throughout the existence of the Republic, lower courts and even Supreme Court decisions have been reversed when they obviously have the sole effect of exacerbating the negative results of stupidity, feeblemindedness or insanity of a tiny segment of the population.
Even millions like her are a small percentage of the total population.
The real victims are the other 95%.
And our elected, ignorant criminal legislators literally have nothing to lose, since they have the power to exclude themselves from the consequences.
And to think that because of semantics and words, we slaughter 3,300 live human beings every day, just shows how disgusting our country has become.
This is exactly what Hitler's people did in the slaughter of the Jews and homosexuals during WWII: semantics and words . . . no scientific facts as to their humanism . . . just semantics and words.
New York Assembly Passes Bill Allowing Shooting Babies Through the Heart With Poison to Kill Them
Life News ^ | 3/25/15 | Steven Ertelt http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3272534/posts
Abortion exploded with the sexual revolution. God the Father and Jesus the Son taught sexual immorality is wrong.
Abortion is both the sin and the result of sin; the turning away from God. Abortion is a sinful, selfish & faithless act. Jesus taught the love in love your neighbor as yourself as agape love - that is love that is deliberate, that is not only selfless but altruistic. Abortion is the polar opposite of agape love.
Please pray for Christian revival in our country.
But isn't it wonderful that you can make that judgment for yourself? and suffer the consequences if you're wrong?
Only up to age 25?
Personally, I'm for no age limit.
Call it the permanent right to a deferred abortion.
The overwhelming majority of the "gentiles" murdered in the National Socialist program of mass murder WERE NOT HOMOSEXUALS. They were slavic or other "inferior" races; murdered because they were "untermenschen". The present day holocaust industry talks about how the National Socialists murdered 6 million Jews, because they were Jews. And well it should. The murder of 6 million people should not be forgotten. The holocaust industry, for some reason, seems to ignore that the National Socialists murdered 5.5 million Poles, Russians, etc. because they were Poles, Russians, etc. It is wrong to do so. The murder of 5.5 million people should not be forgotten.
Sometimes, but not often enough, there is cosmic justice for incompetent parenting.
Yeah, that’s lovely.
Valerie, please tell me: How many Einsteins have been aborted? How many RRs have been aborted? How many Salks have been aborted? How many Bill Gates’? How many Steve Jobs’? Oh, you can’t answer that, can you? Because no one knows and we’ll never know. God knows and he is keeping count, you idiot!
There is a strong correlation between abortion and breast cancer. They cannot scientifically call it causation, but they know abortion is a significant increased risk factor.
What other drivel would you expect from a “writer” with a name like Venereal Taco?
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