Let's be Honest. Anti-Abortion Doesn't Make You Pro-Life.

I'll get right to it: I'm on the side of every woman who chooses abortion as a solution to what she considers a problem in her life. I don't need to know her story. I don't need to insert myself in her decision-making. I don't need to be judge and jury as she goes through the act of aborting a fetus.

I do need to support her decision against those who chant "Abortion is murder" and "Baby killer!" I need to let her know her worth is not any more, any less because her choices about motherhood are different from someone else's.

 I can  do this without hesitation, without equivocation, and I do it as a woman who worked hard at conceiving my three children, never once considering abortion as a solution for an unwanted pregnancy. I can do this because it's not about me. My own life, my own feelings, my own sense of right and wrong, has nothing to do with any woman's decision to abort.

So let me speak directly to those who throw out that phrase "pro-life", as if aborting a fetus is the be-all,end-all of life as we know it here on earth. If you insist on inserting yourself into any woman's life, deciding for her that she must carry a fetus to term, you can't, in all that's holy, stop there.

If you force a woman to bear a child she doesn't want, it should be on you to insure health, wealth, and happiness to both. The real sin is in turning your back on her once your interference brings about the outcome you were hoping for.

Children don't raise themselves. Women don't suddenly become Mother Mary at the birth. Real life doesn't suddenly become wondrous or heavenly on the appearance of a baby.

You can't possibly understand the factors in a woman's life that would bring her to a decision to abort. It's clear you don't care. That's how you lose your case. You don't care.

 We could spend the rest of our days defining life: When does it start? What makes it precious? Who gets to decide? None of it helps the woman who finds herself pregnant with an unwanted child.

You need to stop. I'm a mother who loved that life--reveled in it--and I'm begging you to stop.

Too many of you have used abortion as the single issue bringing you to the voting booth, and, for the most part, your choices have been piss-poor. You've put people in power who are intent on controlling our lives from birth to death, who are working to deconstruct every comfort, every gain, every protection, and you've done it without any deep thought beyond putting an end to abortion.

Abortion won't end. Closing clinics, forcing women to wait, to get permission, to endure indoctrination--none of it will stop abortions. Praying won't stop abortions.

You know what affects abortions? Free, readily available contraceptives for both men and women, economic stability, sex education, free or inexpensive child care, work schedules allowing for parenthood, a promise to value every single life, regardless of color, creed, or nationality. All of that. In many cases abortion is more than a right--it's a necessity. Whatever the reason, the woman and her doctor get to choose. You don't.

You must know by now that Planned Parenthood provides essential services to millions of women and families who wouldn't otherwise have access to obstetric or gynecological health care. You know that abortion or abortion education is an infinitesimal part of their work. You choose to believe the lies. You cheer when clinics close. You need to stop.

If you voted for Donald Trump or any other slug purely because you thought they would bring an end to Roe v Wade, you need to recalculate. How is the sanctity of life better under them? If your personal life is okay, what you do about the suffering of others under this regime is now your obligation. It's on you to prove all life is precious.

If you can watch poverty programs disappear and health care become increasingly for-profit, knowing it's the children who will be harmed most, you need to tell me how you can do that and still insist you care about the child.

If you can watch mothers and children being torn apart, separated, because the mother dared to want a better life in America for her kids--if you can watch that and do nothing, you've lost any chance at staking a claim for decency.

Life begins in the womb but can thrive only in a culture where kindness and humanity are the norm. If we were ever there, we're swiftly moving away. You must see that. If you care more about fetuses than you do about the lives of people trying to exist, to survive, in a world turning against them, you need to stop. This can't be who you really are.

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Cross posted at Crooks &Liars.

Women and Children and the Choices we Make

"I think everyone agrees with the goal of reducing abortion by encouraging consideration of other alternatives," [North Dakota governor] Daugaard said in a written statement. "I hope that women who are considering an abortion will use this three-day period to make good choices."

The governor said state attorneys have agreed to defend the law and that he's spoken with a sponsor who has pledged to finance the state's legal costs, the Associated Press reports.   --  Politics Daily, 3/22/11

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I have met thousands and thousands of pro-choice men and women. I have never met anyone who is pro-abortion. Being pro-choice is not being pro-abortion. Being pro-choice is trusting the individual to make the right decision for herself and her family, and not entrusting that decision to anyone wearing the authority of government in any regard. --Hillary Clinton

 In the summer of 1954, just before we entered our Senior year, my friend Rosie, with no forewarning or even a goodbye, went to live with her aunt.  A week or so earlier, we were leaving a drug store after having a couple of cherry Cokes and she fainted dead away, crumpling to the ground right in front of me.  It was a hot day and she convinced me that the heat had caused it, but when I called her house and her mother told me she had gone to live with her aunt in a town many miles away I put two and two together and realized with a shock that she was pregnant (or PG as we said back then). None of us who had been Rosie's friends knew the torment she was going through; nor did we ever hear from her again.  Later, we heard that she had given her baby up for adoption.  Shame was the reason she didn't tell me there on the sidewalk, and shame was the reason she never kept in touch with any of us.   

Shame was big back then.  When I was a young mother myself, living in neighborhoods where most of us barely had a pot to pee in, shame kept many of my friends from admitting they were pregnant until the evidence was beyond the point of ignoring.  Then the coffee table conversations went something like this:
 "Well, I'm PG again."
"Oh, no!"
"oh, GOD no!"
"_______'s gonna kill me."
(Crying here.  Sighing. Muttering.)
"I can't have this baby!"
"Maybe it'll be okay."
"No, it won't."

It was always the woman's fault.  Birth control was either with condoms or diaphragm or the rhythm method, and if they failed it was because the woman did something wrong.  That accusation was so ingrained, the women themselves believed it was their fault.  There were the lucky few who welcomed another pregnancy, but many, many more were devastated.  I can't say I knew any woman who went the coat hanger route, (mainly because they never would have admitted to it), but many of them tried drinking supposed miscarriage herbals or douching with chemicals or bumping into things or "falling" down stairs. 

 The feminist movement and Roe v. Wade, if they hadn't ever done anything else, can be credited with changing the prevailing perception that there were no choices for a person in a woman's body.  The fact that the works for conceiving were built into them no longer meant that women would be forced to conceive. 

That is the underlying wisdom of freedom of choice and it's what the Supreme Court saw as a constitutional right.

If, since Roe v. Wade, every child born in this country was afforded the kinds of protections necessary to ensure health and happiness, safety and well-being,  the argument that a fetus must be saved at all costs might hold water.

The sorry truth is that 14 million American children live in poverty right now.

Over 17 million children live in households where there is not enough food.

1.5 million kids go to sleep without a home of their own each year.

In 2007, approximately 5.8 million children were involved in an estimated 3.2 million child abuse reports and allegations. 

A woman who makes the choice to abort a fetus can never be accused of doing it lightly.  That is a cruel falsehood perpetrated either by men who will never know the pain of having to live with either choice, or by women who consider their own life choices so superior they have no problem with forcing others of their own gender to bear children--which they then have no problem forgetting about completely and entirely.

None of them lose any sleep over their own actions, but will band together, collecting millions of dollars that could be used to save children living in misery and instead use it to convince the public and a few callous legislators that aborting a fetus is akin to murder and should be outlawed.

Children are our precious gifts and should be our foremost obligations.  There is something crushing and terrible about the fact that lawmakers across the country are systematically defunding social programs currently helping families to just get through the day, if nothing else.  Many of those same lawmakers vigorously support the supposed pro-life groups without once considering the damage they're doing to the children we need to protect.  These children, no longer fetuses, need us.  The women who make the decision to terminate a pregnancy are not pariahs.  Our moral obligations are to the lesser and to the helpless already in our keep.

Shame on anyone who works against that very basic societal tenet.  Most of us are better than that.

Boy with Frogs - Brookgreen Gardens

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