Blog for Choice Day: Why I am Pro-choice

I am a pro-choice liberal.

At one point in my life, this was not so. I was raised Catholic by an extremely Catholic mother, like rosaries, plaster Virgin Mary statues, Sacred Heart Jesus, the works type of Catholic. A central aspect to being Catholic, as we all know, is a focus on anti-abortion rhetoric which centers around the term "pro-life". As I grew older, specifically between the ages of 11 and 15, I was a rabid pro-lifer. It was the way I was raised, and all I could think about whenever I heard the term "abortion" was little babies and vacuum hoses and ew, death death death. It was a matter of principle, of course, and I was just so much better than those grotty sex addicts who couldn't think about anything other than their pleasures and couldn't see that I thought they were murderers. Bible thump, Bible thump, Bible thump. You are evil and wicked, the taint is strong in this one, yada fucking yada.

As I slowly moved away from Catholicism due to other reasons, namely the gradual disintegration of my belief in God, I began to realize where my beliefs diverged from real life. Abortion isn't some monolith, some dire machine whose purpose is to eat babies. It isn't some simplistic process which people set about in complete carelessness. Abortion is a medical procedure. Nothing more, nothing less.

What arguments for banning abortion do, as I learned, is put women in the role of either the "slut" or the "mother". The slut fucks, has no shame, and abandons all responsibility. The [married] mother is the anti-slut, the glorious achievement of womanhood. These pictures of women are, of course, merely the tools by which women are further shown their place in society, one as always the lesser person, the one that must do as she's told and accept her lot in life, whether because of biology or some other slut ate an apple she shouldn't have. Either way, it's hateful, it's manipulative, and it's, above all, misogynist.

Since women are the ones whose body bears the burden of pregnancy, it is absolutely imperative that a woman has complete body autonomy. Pregnancy can kill. Pregnancy produces multiple consequences that many women cannot deal with and that many women do not wish to deal with. To tell a woman that what her body does is not up to her is the essence of the patriarchical system. It all hinges on this one issue, whether women get to decide what happens to them.

To say that they don't implies that they are lesser people. As I grew in empathy, I realized that this is an inhuman way of thinking, the robotic denial of the humanness of others. No one gets to tell me that I can't take medicine if I get sick, nor do they get to tell me that I can't go to the emergency room to get a broken bone fixed. Why do they get to tell women that, if they have intercourse and get pregnant, for whatever reason (bad birth control, no birth control, whatever) that they can't address medically the consequences of those actions? I should have known that climbing that tree could result in me falling out of it. Why do I get treatment for the consequences of my climbing a tree?

See, sex is a part of life, and attempts to make it worthy of derision and shame are merely about making women less than men. Pure and simple. And that is the essence of pro-choice. Women are the bearers of the consequences of pregnancy, therefore, they get to decide whether they wish to be pregnant. End of story. Had my mother not wanted to have me (shown in the above picture at age two), I would not exist today, and that is okay. I did not have a right to exist as long as my existence carried consequences to the physical well-being of my mother. I did not have a right to exist as long as I was a mere parasite. What makes birth infinitely more beautiful is that my mother wanted to have me. She wanted to accept the consequences of me. She wanted me to be given existence. Who am I, who are you, who is anyone to claim that they have a right to exist when it subjugates and cheapens someone else? A woman must always be given the choice to not carry pregnancy to term. Period.

***UPDATE***

And wow. A lot of amazing entries have gone up. Shakes Sis has a good rundown, and belledame222 has an excellent collection of quotes.