1) Abortion should be Safe
2) Legal and acceptable, and
3) Rarely utilized.
I hear this a lot. I hear it all the damn time, even on feminist forums. “Birth control is important because it PREVENTS abortions.” I want to say “fuck that noise”.
Birth control is important because a woman should have control of her fertility. It’s important because a man should have control of his fertility. Hear that, guys? Hurry up and make your own damn pill. And wear the condom.
But back to point three there. Point three can fuck off. It’s a judgment. It’s a value statement. It should be rarely used. Sure, you don’t see someone saying to a diabetic, “We’ll give you insulin, but it should be rarely used. Same thing with that kidney transplant. Be sparing with those!” No. Fuck you.
There is no qualifier. Women have the right to do anything they want to their bodies. No, “But what if she gets pregnant and has abortions on purpose!?” Tough. It’s her body. Just stop it right there. It’s her body. Nothing else matters.
Another thing I hate is this, “Every woman should get one free pass, one free abortion.” No. A woman gets as many abortions as she wants. If she wants one, she needs one. It’s her body. There’s something in it causing her distress, putting her under undue stress, threatening her well-being.
Abortion should be, as with all other necessary (non-elective) medical procedures:
- Legal
- Safe
- Free
- Accessible
- Unlimited
It’s not something I’m willing to qualify or argue. I trust women to make good choices when given autonomy and power and hope. I trust women. I trust us with our bodies.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Wolf // Apr 10, 2008 at 1:51 am
What you said.}:P
2 Wolf // Apr 10, 2008 at 1:52 am
Something that DOES piss me off though- is the woman I know who had an abortion, got preganant again, found out it was TWINS when she went to set up an appointment for another abortion, and decided that because it’s TWINS, she was keeping them.
So because it’s one baby, it’s ok to abort, but when it’s twins it’s a whole new ballgame?
Stupid rationalization if you ask me.
3 ande // Apr 10, 2008 at 2:07 am
*hands up* Yeah, but people HAVE babies for shitty, shitty reasons all the time. So. It’s shit, but it’s her body.
4 Thomas Thurman // Apr 10, 2008 at 2:26 am
I think any time you trust people with the autonomy to do things, they will use it to do dumb things. Just like when you trust people with free speech, they will use it to hurt people. It doesn’t mean you censor their every word.
5 binsk // Apr 25, 2008 at 6:34 am
I trust women to make good choices when given autonomy and power and hope. I trust women.
I guess this statement rankles me a little bit, but only because I trust anyone–man or woman–to get away with whatever they can with whatever’s not nailed down. I’m just suggesting that there’s not a gender gap when it comes to selfish or selfless behavior.
6 wyvernfree // Apr 30, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Hmm. Pardon the dated response; I’ve been going back through your old Signal postings during a dull moment at work, and some of them are thought-provoking.
In this case, I agree with “legal, safe, free, accessible, and unlimited,” but I also have to wonder what’s wrong with “as preventable as possible.” In a perfect world, we’d view an abortion as equivalent to any other medical procedure, wouldn’t we? And in every other case I can think of, prevention is preferable to a surgical solution. It’s better to never get cancer in the first place than to successfully remove a tumor, for example. So why wouldn’t it be better to prevent unwanted pregnancies than to abort them? “Birth control is good because it prevents abortions” shouldn’t be any more loaded a statement than “Dietary changes are good for XYZ condition because they prevent surgery.”
Now in the same perfect world, no one should have to justify having the surgical procedure if that’s what they consider best for their health, and we don’t live in a perfect world to be sure; but even so, surely it’s always preferable from a public health perspective never to have had an unwanted medical condition at all, no matter whether that’s an unwanted pregnancy, cancer, a staph infection, or anything else.
7 ande // Apr 30, 2008 at 2:09 pm
@wyvernfree
I think because ‘as preventable as possible’ MIGHT be fine for the future, but in the present opens up too much possibility for shaming. “You should have/could have prevented it.” It’s also weaselly. Let me see if I can put this right. Preventable/avoidable puts the onus on the woman not to get pregnant at all costs so as not to have an abortion and — not generally, as you put it — to avoid harm to her. The moralistic reasons for avoiding it — it’s ‘killing a baby’ — still trump the other. Moreover, it allows for the framing of the abortion as a failure on the part of the woman.
It also opens up the door for the ever-insidious ‘Concern Troll’. The Concern Troll co-opts a tiny fragment of women’s health issues to advance their control-freak agenda, while ignoring all other genuine problems facing women. As soon as you let someone get a foot in the door by talking about how abortion (and early abortions are a very safe proposition) should be prevented at all costs for a woman’s health and safety, you destabilize the entire structure.
While it would be great to prevent women from having to undergo abortion procedures, the present system does so at their expense. I would prefer to say instead that conception itself should be as preventable as possible, not abortion. With no conception, there is no need for abortion. It also places the emphasis back on the greater risk of harm to the woman, which lies in pregnancy (and the consequences). While I think that pregnancy and birth are wonderful things when wanted, they are at the core of a damaging mythology that’s gripping our society and strangling the life out of a good portion of its members.
8 wyvernfree // Apr 30, 2008 at 3:48 pm
I guess I see the shame issues (which I agree are intolerable) as a separate problem. I don’t think most people see it as shameful to have medical treatment for cancer or another illness, yet I think most people would agree it would be better if we could find a way not to get cancer in the first place. Apparently back in my grandmother’s day, having cancer did actually use to be a shameful family secret. Hopefully someday my grandchildren will be as confused that abortion used to be viewed that way as I am about my grandmother’s cancer.
I dunno, weren’t you the one positing the other week that it was a mistake for people to worry so much about how the ‘abortion artwork’ business might set back the abortion rights movement that they end up limiting the movement themselves? It seems to me that there’s the same potential danger to worrying about how concern-trolls might leverage treating an abortion like any other medical procedure into something that could set women back. I’m not even sure they’d get very far with that anyway, because 95% of the people who oppose abortion rights also oppose contraception, so they’re not likely to be the ones offering that as a preferable alternative.
I do think that framing it as “preventing unwanted pregnancies” is probably a better idea at this point in time than “preventing abortions,” in the same way that “preventing cancer” is a better presentation that “preventing chemotherapy.” It’s just that I really don’t think I’d look askance at someone who said that funding asbestos removal would prevent paying for more chemotherapy down the line, so I’m not sure why I should look askance at someone who says funding birth control would prevent paying for more abortions (or more pregnancies and unwanted children!) down the line. I doubt there is any overlap between the people who say that and the people who want to criminilize abortion or marginalize women’s rights. Perhaps I’m being too optimistic, but I think most of the “safe, legal, and rare” NOW crowd genuinely do care about related women’s issues like reproductive health and freedom, problems of rape and domestic violence, etc.
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