I talked a little bit about my feelings on abortion in my last blog, but beyond really disliking children and never, ever wanting to birth one myself, I have a few real reasons for being proudly pro-choice, most of which have little to nothing to do with the actual part where I hate babies. I don’t actually think babies deserve to die. Or not most of them, anyway. But I do have a few pretty strong reasons for being pro-choice.
1) That people, men and women, own their bodies and reserve the right to do whatever they want to themselves. And I’m not talking suicide or self-mutilation, okay? Those stem from psychiatric issues. Not wanting to have a baby for whatever reason doesn’t qualify someone as mentally ill. The government shouldn’t be able to tell you what you can or can’t do to yourself. “But you’re not hurting YOURSELF,” people say, “you’re killing your unborn child.” Until the government (or medical science) comes up with a scientific and clear cut answer to when a person becomes a person and stops being a clump of cells or an embryo or a fetus, then the fact remains that that unborn child is a part of the woman carrying it. It’s essentially a parasite living off its mother, without whom it can’t survive.
2) If you study the history of abortion, it didn’t become illegal until the early 1900s, when medical doctors decided that pregnancy and childbirth should be their realm instead of the midwife’s. The illegalization of abortion was basically a power play by the medical field and had nothing to do with religion or the sanctity of life at the time. This speaks of a hypocrisy on the part of religious extremist who now oppose abortion and their unashamed rewriting of history.
3) Sometimes pregnancy is BAD for people. Women can die from pregnancy or childbirth. Women can die in childbirth to have a baby that is already brain dead. When you start illegalizing certain forms of abortion, it’s just a domino effect until all abortion is illegal, at which point women turn to other methods to end their pregnancies, which simply results in more deaths.
4) The illegalization of abortion is a classist powerplay. Rich people will always be able to have safe abortions. It’s the poor who will suffer, and the poor are the least capable of effectively raising a child in this country, where the entire social system is set up to ensure that the poor stay poor.
5) The answer to preventing abortion and unwanted pregnancy isn’t to illegalize abortion. The answer is EDUCATION. Educate the public about birth control, and provide them with free, safe birth control methods, and you’ll greatly reduce the abortion rate. But, of course, anti-choicers don’t want to do that. They advocate abstinence-only education, which has been proven to a) NOT keep teens from having sex and b) leave them uneducated enough about sex, birth control, and disease prevention, that more of them end up with unwanted pregnancies and STDs.
6) In the end, it’s not a question of being for or against abortion, it’s a question of being for or against CHOICE. And choice can mean many things. If we provide the public with the education and materials they need, a lot less of them will be put in the position in which they must make that choice. Some Americans–the apathetic ones, the parents who want the FCC to put locks on their televisions and censor news coverage–want the government to make that choice for them by taking it away entirely. I say, be responsible for yourself, be responsible for your body, and be responsible for educating your children and raising them to make their own right choices. But don’t try to force your choices on what should be a free-thinking people, because that’s the opposite of choice, and it’s the opposite of the tenets upon which the United States was founded.