Blog for Choice Day: Why I am pro-choice

I remember before Roe v. Wade. I remember being in junior high, when a girl in my gym class who was tall and thin suddenly started looking a little poochy around the belly. Next thing I knew, she had gone off to "visit her grandmother for a while", and that's how I knew she was pregnant.

The Roe v. Wade decision came down during my senior year of high school, and it meant that those "trips to grandma" were a thing of the past. When I went off to college, even though I went to a very provincial school in eastern Pennsylvania, there were still free clinics where contraceptives, and instructions on how to use them, could be easily obtained.

I was always very conscientious about using birth control, though I knew other girls who weren't. I was always pro-choice, and I was also equally certain that the decision to have an abortion was one that I never wanted to make. I was on the pill for eight months, and it made me fat, moody, and pimply, so after that I never used anything but barrier methods ever again. Because barrier methods have the highest failure rate, having abortion as a fall-back position made sex a point of pleasure, rather than one of constant anxiety.

And that, my friends, is why the so-called pro-life movement must be fought -- because the fact that so many people who are looking to the government to criminalize abortion are perfectly fine with the high body counts in Iraq, with the death penalty, with maternal death in childbirth -- as long as the contents of the womb are held sacred. Their position is so absurd on the face of it that it's necessary to dig a little deeper, and what you always come up with is fear of themselves and their own impulses.

It's a hideous irony that the current president, who represents himself as the public face and leader of the most retrograde Christian elements in our society, is at war in the very part of the world from which all three of the western religions emerged, because the treatment of women in ALL of the religious cultures that grew out of the Fertile Crescent is pretty damn reprehensible.

The passage of Roe v. Wade was the final nail in the coffin of women's slavery to their reproductive functions. Women could now decide whether and when to bear children, whether and when to have sex, and could indeed allow themselves to enjoy sex. And therein lies the objection to legalized abortion.

It's interesing that this first Blog for Choice day occurs this year, because it was just a few months ago that I finally threw away my diaphragm, because I no longer need it. Age is the ultimate contraceptive. I am fortunate in that abortion was a decision I never had to make. But I would defend vigorously the rights of other women to have access to the same choices I did had I needed them. Because the forces that would criminaliza, or even chip away at your right to control your own body, aren't going to stop with abortion. If you look further at the so-called pro-life movement, you see elements of Christian Reconstruction and other retrograde groups seeking to return our society to what they regard as the "good old days", when women did NOT have the ability to determine their own destiny. That economic conditions don't lend themselves to the kind of patriarchy they worship never occurs to them.

I'm frankly appalled that it's come to this; that thirty-plus years after Roe v. Wade, we are not only still fighting this battle, we are already fighting a battle against those who decry a "culture of contraception"; that a president can appoint a head of family planning for the U.S. who opposes contraception -- and that there is so little outcry.

Contrary to what the right would have you believe, there has never, ever, ever been a pregnant woman who got up in the morning and said, "I think today I'll get my nails done, then I'll go shopping, then I'll have an abortion and then go out for a nice lunch." The myth of blithe abortion-seekers is just that. Only those who have never run to the bathroom every fifteen minutes to check their underwear for spotting, making bargains with God that if he just please, please, makes their period come, they promise they'll take precautions next time, could think that women need to wait 24 hours to think about their decision. Nothing makes you feel more out of control of your own destiny than thinking you might be pregnant when you don't want to be. A woman is not a womb that can talk. A woman is not just a housing for a fertilized egg. Too many women have died, too many women have suffered the damage of botched abortions, too many women have fought too hard for too many centuries to be regarded as equal human beings for us to give up the fight now, just because a new generation has forgotten what it was like before.

"`I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?"

Job xii. 3.