This is going to be long, a bit rambling and might even take on a few inadvertently Rand-ian philosophies. I completely understand if you wish to disregard this completely.
Anyway. I am rarely passionate about anything, the way I was raised, the family I had and the life I've lived causes me to stop and analyze every emotional response I experience to make sure that it's both rational and deserved. I try very hard to avoid knee-jerk reactions and as such I've thought carefully about whether or not I'd even respond to this thread. I'm sure that before I hit the submit button I'll read through what I've typed three or four times before deciding if what I have to say is actually worth saying. I want to address many things here, not just the issues of abortion but the original posting of "This is My Body" and some of the finer details it brings up. With that said, I feel that I need to tell a few brief stories so that I can fully explain how and why I've come to the feelings and conclusions that I have.
I grew up in a home that was full of affection and shared knowledge. My grandmother worked as a librarian and my father was tinkerer, artist, inventor and dreamer. Over breakfast every single morning we would talk about things we'd dreamed the night before. Ideas we'd come up with. Questions we didn't know the answer to. There were very few things that were off limits when it came to discussions and as I got older my family freely explained things to me that I needed and wanted to understand. One of those things was my mother.
See, I've related a story before about my mother's pregnancy
here. What I didn't mention there was that no one in my immediate family believes for a moment that a doctor would mistake a woman six months pregnant with
twins for a woman six weeks pregnant with an unliving fetus. This was before ultrasound, not before doctors were trained to measure a uterus. :? While no one came out and said it it was clear that my mother lied and went to an abortion clinic after seeing the doctor that informed her she was pregnant. She lied saying she was 6 weeks pregnant and hoped they would abort my sister and me with no questions asked. I don't blame her.
I am neither pro-life nor pro-choice. I don't believe for a moment that things can ever be that simple when speaking about life and death. There's no line in the dirt, there are no teams; there is only each individual person and
their decisions. Believing for one moment that there are rules that can always govern every individual in every situation is hubris on level with Bellerophon. (Just because you've slain the Chimera doesn't mean you deserve to join the gods.) My mother wasn't raped, she was in no danger of dying, my sister and I aren't mentally incapacitated but she found herself in a unique situation. She was a lesbian, using my father as proof positive to her family that she wasn't. It was supposed to be an easy relationship to walk away from, a comfortable place to stay until she was financially independent enough to not need the support of her family and could tell them the truth. We were a complication she couldn't afford and because of that she tried to end us.
Knowing that my mother most likely tried to murder me just hours after finding out I existed doesn't make me hate her. It doesn't make me want to stand up and shake my fist in agreement with one side or the other. It makes me realize how personal and individual each life choice is for each person. She faced something that very definitely was going to change her life, prevent her from the life she wanted. Prevent her from being herself. In the video one woman says "These decisions have nothing to do with you. If I'm not hurting you or stopping you from pursuing your inherent right to happiness it's none of your business." I find no fault in my mother seeking out her own inherent right to happiness. In a single moment she found all her plans, all her dreams ripped from her and pulled far from her reach. The simple dream of living as the person she was, seeking the partner she preferred was slipping from her grasp and she was afraid. In that moment, I'm sure she felt that abortion was her only hope for happiness.
When a woman chooses abortion she is choosing life just as surely as she is choosing life if she carries to term. The difference is that she's choosing
her life,
her happiness. It doesn't matter her reasons, it doesn't even matter if she's taken into consideration the political, social and cultural issues of an abortion. Whether or not she keeps that child is a matter of her well being. Some women would be miserable and guilt ridden at the idea of depriving a child of life. Some would be happy to know that that child will never have to live through neglect, resentment and despair. It is all incredibly personal and I don't think anyone has the right to pretend that there's a cold cut formula to this sort of choice. There is no way to say "If pregnancy originated from X,Y,Z allow abortion. If untrue, deny action." We're not machines all poured from the same mold and as such can't expect dealing in absolutes to ever be an effective method for regulation of anything let alone something so intimate.
Now, on to other issues. I don't think anyone else has mentioned it so I think I will. There is a line in the video where one of the women says "And allowing myself to be penetrated once does not assume your right to do it again for your own purposes and your own reasons." This refers to laws that have been passed recently in some states that require women to get a transvaginal ultrasound before an abortion. This alone, isn't a terrible thing, it could very well prevent the sort of thing my mother tried to do to me. But, when you realize that most of the states that have passed this law also have laws that state that women can only get an abortion in cases of rape, incest or significant threat to the mother it changes the perspective a bit. In some cases you're not only forcing a woman that's been raped to have something foreign shoved into her but in many cases a doctor will deny an abortion if the fetus' growth doesn't match the dates a woman states she was raped. While this is obviously not the case for every woman there are other factors to be considered with a law like this.
Ultrasounds in the first trimester are not medically necessary, neither are they particularly effective. A traditional ultrasound has trouble even spotting a fetus in the first few weeks of pregnancy. That's why they opted for the far more invasive transvaginal ultrasound. Beyond the obvious discomfort these procedures are also stupidly expensive. I was a high risk pregnancy with my daughter. I was having gallbladder issues and they'd found a large chorioangioma that was threatening to steal nutrients and blood supply from my developing baby. Because of this I had an ultrasound every week from the middle of the second trimester until she was born. I was lucky enough to have fantastic insurance that covered it completely but I still got a statement of what each ultrasound cost. Each week we did a simple ultrasound checking prenatal vitals and taking a few measurements, never lasting longer than ten minutes...each ultrasound cost $800, sometimes more.
While many of the states with these laws have an amendment that requires the government to give women a list of places that will do an ultrasound for free, most of those places are funded by pro-life groups that will do anything in their power to brow-beat, guilt trip and otherwise coerce a woman into changing her mind. It seems like common sense but in the face of this law I find myself actually having to say that women in this situation don't need to feel judged along with their already jumbled and mostly negative emotions. A woman also has to wait 24 hours between ultrasound and abortion. If she's lucky enough to go to a free clinic she won't have to pay that huge ultrasound bill that most insurance companies won't pay for because--as stated--they're medically unnecessary she still has to take not one but two days off of work. She's not paying directly but she's still paying for it in the end.
This is a matter that's greatly important and personal to me. I was beaten and raped when I was 16. I nearly died. I'm in physical therapy almost a decade later in part because of the injuries I suffered back then. I demanded that the doctors run a pregnancy once a week for the next six weeks. I spent the entire time terrified that I'd come back with a positive result. If I'd ended up pregnant from my rape I would have wanted an abortion. While now that I'm older I think I could love the child despite the trauma, at the time any reminder of the event sent me into a panic. A lifetime of reminders wouldn't have left me sane. And if in order to get that abortion a doctor had told me "We're going to put this thing inside you and swish it around a bit so you can see the tiny rape seed growing inside you." I would have lost it.
And now, finally to the points brought up in this thread about a father's rights. While in an ideal world, everyone that had sexy with each other would be in a healthy, loving, cohesive relationship that's not the case. If a man wants a child it needs to be planned because it it's not a planned pregnancy that child can very easily become a trap to the mother. If the relationship wasn't serious, wasn't meant to be a forever paring then asking a woman to spend nine months with you while she carries and cares for a child she's planning on handing over to you the moment she finishes labor is a prison sentence. Instead of bars and razor wire she has swollen feet, stretch marks, sore breasts and morning sickness. Her body, the only one she has, the one she needs confidence in is going to be changed forever by the pregnancy. And if she's still looking for "the one" after you she might not have the confidence in her body that she once did. Beyond that, when she does find the right guy or girl how does she explain to the person that she's going to spend the rest of her life with that she has a child that might one day be curious enough to look her up?
Fathers can disappear into anonymity, mothers can't. There's no way for a mother to stand back, hands in the air and say "That's not
my baby, it must be some other girl's." Even if a man badly wants to be a father, wants the child that this hypothetical woman is carrying; even if he will be the most fantastic and attentive father in the world, he has no right to ask a woman to give up her body, her confidence and at least nine months of her freedom to that end. If a man wants to be a father he needs to make the commitment to that child before conception, he needs to understand that the difference between father and sperm donor is the decision to actively create a child rather than making the best of a broken condom.
