To govern means to be able to see things from many sides, weight the impact of each side and determine the best course of action even when that best course imposes a level of discomfort or poses a dilemma. Abortion, and even contraception, can be a minefield of emotion, roiling with the turmoil of confronting various religious beliefs regarding pregnancy, traditions that impact the rights of women, and traditions and customs that define power structures and privilege.

“I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long poverty shows us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.”   Caitlin Moran

I’d like to speak on the abortion issue. Before I decided what my personal position would be, I had discussions with women- those who had had abortions and those who had not; those who were pro-choice and those who were not; I talked with mothers who had chosen for their daughter to have an abortion in cases of incest and I talked with girls who had been forced into pregnancy by a male relative. I read articles and books, three of which stood out for me: The Ethics of Abortion by Robert Baird and Stuart Rosenbaum, Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions by Daniel Maguire and, because abortion is primarily a religion-based argument, The Justice Men Owe Women: Positive Resources from World Religions by John Raines.

I chose not to use the term “pro-life” to describe the anti-choice position, first, because no one outside of the occasional psychopath could be defined as “anti-life”. Second, a person either supports that females have the right to choose whether to have an abortion or not, or they do not- that is the crux of the issue;  and third, because many of those who have tried to co-opt that term are not opposed to capital punishment or war, and often support political policies that cause death in other countries or even their own, through poverty, illness, neglect or hunger.

The truth is, no one is pro-abortion and no one is anti-life. This is why words have to be more honest and less emotion-inducing. A person is either anti-choice or pro-choice, a person either believes that a female has bodily autonomy or does not. A person believes that a woman must have control over her own body, or be made, upon becoming pregnant, a ward of the state – at which point, a person has to agree the state then has full responsibility to provide for and raise that child and its mother in decent conditions and with education, housing, food, finances, and more being made available for both, while providing the mother with free child care so she can pursue gainful employment or training for same, at the level of a living wage so as to ensure the female and child are not trapped in poverty both before, during and after the 19-20 year span of the mother- child relationship.

Therefore, for the purpose of this op-ed, I took the pro-choice position that a female is an already living, thinking, independent, free full human citizen of the nation with the full rights to her own body and the reproductive choices she makes, just as males have the free use of, and choice regarding the contraceptives they choose to use.

Therefore, my position is that women and girls must have  decision-making control over their own bodies as to whether they will carry a fetus to term and give birth or not.

For those who say girls and women should “just not have sex “, it is important to remember that for a number of women and girls, the choice of pregnancy or not is taken from them, whether through the religious beliefs imposed on them, the law, incest, rape or failure of contraceptives to work.

The youngest victim of rape, Lina Medina, gave birth at the age of 6.5 years old. The UK’s youngest was 12, a victim of rape by her brother. Yelizaveta Pantueva was 5 years old when she was raped and impregnated by her 70 year old grandfather , giving birth just days after her 6^th birthday. I want you to think about that, and look at the size of a 6 year old body.

In the US, 28 girls aged ten and under are recorded as having given birth, in most cases through rape by relatives or neighbors or “unknowns. Even in the case of marriage, judicial and parental consent laws have seen multiple girls as young as 12, 13 and 14 married to adult males.

And of course, history is filled with the stories of religions, people, cities, nations, even whole civilizations built upon the bodies of girls and women forced into pregnancy. And sadly, in some places today, young girls are still victims of forced sexual encounters supported by religious custom and social tradition, that can lead to forced pregnancies.

Fully adult women often experience great pain and physical and psychological harm during pregnancy, and sometimes, death occurs. Imagine being a child and going through this. One of the most thoughtless statements I heard was a women who, upon hearing of a young girl being made pregnant by her own father and learning the mother and daughter were seeking an abortion, said “She should be made to have the baby and be taught to give her pain to God”… I think about a young girl being forced against her will to endure a pregnancy and endure giving birth, after having been forced to have sex by and with her own father- and I wonder why the woman who objected to the abortion had nothing to say about the father and seemed more upset by the abortion than by the rape and incest, even knowing that some girls and women break in their bodies, minds and spirits when forced to endure an unwanted pregnancy or birth.

For many women, lack of access to, or affordability of, contraceptives, results in unwanted pregnancies they/the parents do not want, cannot afford, pregnancies that can result in child abuse and neglect.

And when you examine the reasons given for not making contraceptive access available, even excluding abortion, it is almost always driven by a social/religious belief that, without the fear of getting pregnant, females will go out of sexual control, as though they are driven and controlled by animal instincts- yet seldom do we hear about males needing to learn more self-control. And this is a global problem.

Bottom line, a fetus is not “a baby” nor is it a life yet: it is a potential life, and it gets closer to that potential as each month passes. But nature is not perfect, which is why in the past, and still today, some religious and cultures do not designate the pregnancy as a life or baby until the child is born. Throughout much human history, the fetus has not been viewed as a baby, nor as a human life until it quickens, or becomes able to survive outside the womb (the most common criterion used today in drafting laws regulating abortion) or takes its first breath. And in the past and in some cultures, if the child was born flawed or weak, they were exposed and left to die or set apart to die. Of course, there have been various arguments claiming different times for when life begins, depending on the perspective of individual opinion, yet there are flaws and points to each argument.

I’ll also add, some religious took the view that sperm, too, were “life” and made male masturbation a punishable crime… it might surprise men to discover what laws deal with this across the globe even today… and not solely aimed at public actions alone. The only difference is, it is more common to condemn women and excuse men, because pregnancy is more evident than masturbation.

The living, breathing girl or woman, however, is a viable, thinking, already alive human being, and ought to have more rights than a potential life (and we have had this as a precedent, when a couple has had to choose between the life of the mother or the life of a child in emergencies) and ought to have the same bodily autonomy as any male, otherwise you are declaring that once she is pregnant, by whomever and by whatever means, a female is a ward of, and property of, the state and/or church and/or other humans claiming the right to control her body and determine its use. There’s a word for that- it is called chattel- it is called slave.

If a law required were passed that required all males to undergo a vasectomy that was only to be reversed when they were certain they wanted children, the uproar would be heard round the world. Bodily integrity and the right to make such intimate, personal decisions would be called a “sacred right”- and that bodily integrity is at the core of the pro-choice position.

The word “victim” has several meanings and shades, and in the case of contraception and abortion, is used to emotionally manipulate the girl or woman making the decision. Making abortion illegal is telling the people of a nation that they and the nation have permission to commandeer an already born human being’s body and hold it prisoner for 19 years, subject to even more laws should that person fail to properly provide and care for the child they have been forced to have, no matter whether the person forced to be a parent is fit for, suited for, desirous of or capable of taking care of said child. That would, in essence, create two victims, leaving us all to have to decide which “victim” is more deserving to be considered a “whole” human being with rights… an argument we never hear when discussing male entitlement to, or sexual violence against, females, which is in itself interesting.

“It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.” Mother Theresa

This idea that a girl or woman decides to have an abortion so she can ‘live as she wishes” is misleading- and ingenuous. It implies that the female has had a choice for pregnancy and then decided she didn’t want it- and she should just accept it.

It implies the female in question is old enough to carry a pregnancy to term without consequences to her own life, both physical and psychological- and she should just accept the consequences.

It implies the female has the capacity and means to raise a child into adulthood; it implies that the female does not already experience starvation, poverty, homelessness, hopelessness, or abuse- and if she does, she should just accept starvation and deprivation for both herself and the child.

It implies the female can lives as she wishes, ignoring completely that in many countries, under certain religions, and under some laws, females are not only not allowed to live as they wish, but are forced into lives of pain and suffering and enslavement- and in every case, the female should just allow her oppression and enslavement and suffer, even at times suffer for someone else’s belief that she should suffer.

What I find interesting is that so many women (never mind men!) who have never suffered, or who have never been deprived, or never experienced the reality of poverty, hunger or being controlled, are so willing to place other women under control and demand they endure what the speaker often has never endured, and in the case of males, never will endure. In doing this, the children, too, are just as condemned as the mother, in multiple ways.

“If we lived in a culture that valued women’s autonomy and in which men and women practiced cooperative birth control, the abortion issue would be moot.”  Christiane Northrup

Part of the solution is to establish and train all our children, boys and girls alike, that there is equality in the nation and that responsibility for pregnancy and contraceptive use is a mutual responsibility.

To teach them that incest and rape is illegal and against every moral code, and they have a right to say no to adults and older children, and will be safe should they report the offenders. We must shape our laws, enforcement and society to reflect that mindset and culture.

And finally, for those girls and women who choose to keep the child, whatever the circumstances, the nation and the people must be willing to step up to the plate to ensure that, should a parent be unable to provide properly and to a good standard for the child, the state will pick up the tab and ensure that each citizen born has proper food, shelter, clothing, education, and opportunities and hope for a future.

©2021

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a19748134/what-is-abortion/