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.
Abortion has nothing to do with fertility or “birth control (preventing conception),” except that a botched abortion may cause infertility.
IMO, everything is a risk factor. But, not arguing, just noting.:)
Damn one thing you can always depend on...an ugly as hell Salon writer. Guaranteed gay too.
And some people get mad and so no one is pro-abortion.
I read my first article from Salon yesterday.
Here’s the link: http://www.salon.com/2015/01/25/i_do_not_care_about_your_baby_partner/
It’s not likely I could stomach two of their pieces in as many days.
No global warming over there; their hearts are cold as ice.
Blessed Mother Teresa, please pray for us.
I am anti-abortion because it murders the most helpless of human beings.
Tarico is obviously gay and athiest which always seem to go hand in hand but it makes sense. God doesn’t tolerate lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, sexual deviancy / homosexuality, and stands in their way of “having fun”. Gonna need more coal...a lot more in Hell where there are probably going to be plenty of politicians, MSM, poll takers and propagandist writers
“Not arguing, just noting”
Except that your first comment was that you “have a problem with” the causes cancer thing. That certainly presents an argument regarding the validity of someone’s statement.
Were you to really dig into the myriad of scientific research regarding the link between abortion and breast cancer, you might just quit flippantly dismissing the findings based on what you “feel”.
In other words if your dedicated to worship at the devils alter you must be willing to sacrifice your children, or at the very least be willing to encourage others to do so.
Yes they are! People are either Pro-Life or they are Pro-Death (Pro-Abortion)!
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She completed her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Iowa and postdoctoral studies at the University of Washington. She subsequently joined the staff of Seattle Children’s Hospital and ran Children’s Behavior and Learning Clinic in Bellevue, Washington, before moving to a private clinic. Eventually it became clear that social and political trends were undermining what she was trying to accomplish as a mental health practitioner: to have there be a little less pain and a little more delight in the world. She closed her practice to take on some of those bigger issues.
What a gem.
Here is the link to her website,for those interested: Valerie Tarico. Be prepared to shower afterwards.
“I’m speechless.”
I, on the other hand, am not:
1. I’m pro-abortion because...A woman who lacks the means to manage her fertility lacks the means to manage her life.
(the means to manage our fertility is no sex outside marriage)
2. I’m pro-abortion because well-timed pregnancies give children a healthier start in life.
(whereas murdering unwanted children gives children no start in life)
3. I’m pro-abortion because I take motherhood seriously....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. (and Heaven forbid we allow anything difficult into someones life just because of their sin)
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.
(so abortion is profitable, Planned Parenthood is well aware of that. God too, though he may frown on murder for profit, but we can NOT believe in Him and therefore by denial, He does not exist, or does not care what we do with those He created in His own image. Is that what she’s saying here?)
5. 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.
(flat out admission of playing God here)
6. 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.
(tell me she didn’t just pull this one out of her butt!)
7. I’m pro-abortion because contraceptives are imperfect, and people are too....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?
(as though the creation of a human life is harm, just because it is the result of selfish sin, and killing a baby is NOT harm?)
8. I’m pro-abortion because I believe in mercy, grace, compassion, and the power of fresh starts...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...Three accidents, all my own doing, and three knee surgeries. Some women have three abortions.
(sin is not an accident, it is sin. The father deliberately penetrated the mother, and the mother accommodated him, not accidentally. It’s not as though Jack and Jill went up the hill and on the way down tripped and fell causing the coitus that resulted in pregnancy.)
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...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.
(a brave new world this woman and her cohorts are engineering so much more wisely than God, conceived from reading sci-fi)
10. I’m pro-abortion because I love my daughter...“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...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...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...“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...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.
(This is...drum roll...the cherry on top of the whipped cream in this cupcake’s perfectly manipulated world: it’s for the children! We kill children for the children. Didn’t we all see that coming?)
In order for abortion to be morally acceptable, one has to believe he/she is a better decision maker than God, or believe God is not going to hold him/her responsible for his/her acts. Or maybe it helps to be a complete moron.
So it is all about you, Valerie.
So will you be held responsible for the deaths of the many children that are denied the God given right to live?
Pursue your licentious lifestyle to your detriment.
Just saying.
Perhaps you should do some research.
Just saying.
II Timothy 3:1-5
1 But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: 2 For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, 3 unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, 4 traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!
Exactly, totally agree.
She talks about babies and poverty too, this is close to the eugenics view of Margaret Sanger.
I’m distressed by the crime that comes out of the black community, but I’m not going to think the solution is to abort more black babies who are 3 times more likely to be aborted than a white baby. I think that is the stat “blackgenocide.org” gives.
So, this is basically what the planned parenthood/abortion/rev. sharpton/obama crowd stand for.
And you are absolutely correct, probably another homosexual atheist type for abortion.
Her comment: “In this moral universe, real people count more than potential people, hypothetical people or corporate people.”
Perhaps she should consider that Jesus died on the Cross for her sins. Is she a “real” person or just a pretender?
*********************
That's exactly what I was about to post.
Oh good grief. That woman is hideous. She certainly has the
face that she deserves, and don’t worry about abortion, killer.
You are unlikely to be getting pregnant any time soon.
Ugh! Ugly inside and out.
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