Blog for Choice Day
So it's Blog for Choice Day. Here's mine.

I have grown up in a world where women have choices, abortion being one of them. I have grown up in a world where feminisim is the norm rather than the minority. I have grown up in a world where my rights are not taken away simply because I have breasts and a uterus. Through my life, I have hated being a woman at times; perhaps because my breasts were swollen and sore, or because I was suffering debilitating cramps, or because I couldn't be named Jack or Roger or whatever was my favorite boy's name of the week. However, I never hated being a woman because I couldn't play on a sports team, or because my interest in math and science was discouraged*, or because I was told I couldn't do things because I was a girl.

I do not personally favor abortion. If I was pregnant right now with an unplanned baby, I would likely not abort it. I obviously cannot speak for my own state of mind when I have never been in that situation, but one of my dearest friends was adopted, the result of an unplanned pregnancy. My two little cousins are the result of an unplanned pregnancy, and I love them dearly. I cannot imagine living life without the three of them, and I can't imagine that I would deprive someone else of a Sophy, or a Ty or Jon.

And yet, and yet, and yet. How can I walk up to someone else and tell them that they cannot have an abortion because I say so?

How can I look a woman pregnant with her father or brother's baby in the eye and tell her she must bear that child, regardless of possible genetic complications, and bear the shame? How can I tell a rape victim that she must have her rapist's child and delay by nine months or more the start of her own healing? How can I tell a woman who knows her child will live for perhaps a day out of the womb because of genetic problems that she must go through that trauma?

Less urgently, how can I tell a woman whose boyfriend pulled up stakes when he found out she was pregnant that she has to raise a child alone? How can I say to someone who cannot support a child or afford proper prenatal care that they should go ahead and risk it anyway? How can I tell a young married couple that they should have children because that's their job?

How can I tell anyone else how to make this choice?

Abortion is a deeply personal and painful subject. Why then do we insist on drawing it into the public realm, where it does not belong? No one can know the personal circumstances or feelings of a pregnant woman except herself. No one can make a choice without weighing all the factors first. To make a choice as possibly heartrending as whether or not to get an abortion, the decision-making process becomes even more important.

If we were to reverse Roe v. Wade and make abortion illegal again, we would be taking away that choice and that decision process. We would in effect be making that personal and painful decision for every woman on the planet. We would be putting the lives of children who do not even exist yet and who may not ever exist ahead of the mental and physical health of women and girls today.

We would be telling women and girls that their own thoughts and feelings did not matter, do not matter, and never will matter. We would be telling them that their choices are invalid. We would be telling them that their children are more important than they are, and that, God knows, is a perception far too widespread already.

No, I would not have an abortion myself. But I grew up in a world where women have rights and choices. I will not stand by and watch those rights and choices taken away.




*Quite the opposite, really; I had a teacher encourage my nonexistent interest with promises of puzzles and explosions and was bitterly disappointed in high school when we never got to blow anything up.