Choppy Waters: Abortion
Yeah. I am going to write about abortion. Everything I say here should be viewed through a specific lens, namely that I am a white male. I do not know what it is like to be anyone else. I do have an opinion on this and a perspective that I want to share. You might not agree with all of it. That’s OK! I want to learn from you so please share your disagreements with me.
I titled this post “Choppy Waters” because I do believe I am sailing into rough seas. Abortion is a thorny issue to talk about, especially as a white man, one that has grown up during a time when abortions have been largely safe and available. And while I do think the most important ideas on this topic should come from women, men absolutely need to be part of the conversation. Notice I said “conversation”. This implies as much or more listening than talking. I want to do both.
I believe that in future generations human beings will regard abortions, especially the ones we have today, as barbaric, inhumane things. I think they will look upon us like how we might judge a doctor who 200 years ago thought bloodletting was a reasonable treatment for sickness. Try as some people might, I do not think there is any way around the idea that an abortion ends a human life. And if you watched any of the graphic videos of abortions taking place, I don’t see how you can feel casual about it. This is not to say that the women who go through the trauma of abortion take it lightly. I know most women do not. I speak about the people who have no skin in the game.
I have always felt that progressives make the wrong argument in favor of legal abortions by trying to minimize what the entire purpose of abortion is. Yes, you can say “oh it’s just a little clump of cells” and things of that ilk. But that is missing the point entirely. Abortions are designed to end what could become a human. Any life can be reduced to merely being a clump of cells. Instead, I think the argument is to ask what the alternatives are for women who want/need to terminate a pregnancy are.
Are we really itching to go back to the days of coathangers and disreputable abortion providers? Is this what we want for our girls and women?
Hell no.
Legal, safe abortions have undoubtedly saved millions of women’s lives. It has allowed them to choose when they have a child and by whom. Forcing a 13-year-old girl to have her brother’s baby after an incestuous rape seems to be far more barbarous than any abortion available today. Imagine what their lives would be like? And sure, this might be an extreme case that doesn’t happen very often. But it does still happen.
The choice, as far as I can see it, is not about whether or not abortions end a human life. They do. I’ve had friends who have had miscarriages and the loss they feel is as real as any. It seems ludicrous to me to consider and count a fetus as a person who is lost in some circumstances and a meaningless clump of cells in others. Rather, the choice here is what rights a woman has over her own body and what options are given to her before, during, and after pregnancy.
The first and best way to reduce the number of abortions is for sex partners to never get pregnant in the first place. This can be achieved in a lot of different ways. Birth control, condoms, and sex education are vital tools on this front. It is a fact that poor sex ed and a lack of access to birth control increase the rate of unwanted or unplanned pregnancies. If birth control were widely available and had no social stigmas attached to it, more women would use it, I think.
Men also have a role to play in all this too. Have you talked with your partner about birth control? Do you have access to condoms? Do you reach for one when things start without being asked? Men have to step up in these areas. It shouldn’t fall solely on women to broach the topic. They already have to carry an unfair burden simply because of biology. Simply put, never getting pregnant in the first place is the best way to avoid ever needing an abortion.
But OK, we don’t live in a perfect world. You might end up slipping one past the goalie at some point. What then? What options are out there for women who get pregnant without intending to? It’s easy to blame them and say “well, if you didn’t want to get knocked up you shouldn’t have had sex”. But come on. That’s not the world we live in. I’m sure there are lots of people who have been caught up in a moment of hot passion and later had to sweat out a pregnancy scare. Yes, of course, people should be accountable for their actions. But we don’t deny cancer treatments to smokers or head injury exams to athletes. Shit happens. Blaming people after the fact doesn’t change the predicament they find themselves in.
You’ll notice I am not really mentioning abortions in cases of rape, incest, or if the life of the mother is in danger. That is because I don’t really see those instances as being debatable. Saving a living, breathing person should always be more important than that of an unborn child. Always. And with rape and incest… come on. Do I really have to explain why a man raping a woman and then forcing her to have that child, thus tying them together for the rest of their lives, is a bad thing? This would be like giving a bank robber a lifetime job as a teller at the bank they robbed. I am focusing mostly on what could be called “voluntary” abortion or choice abortion, situations where a woman has the ability to choose what to do.
For me, that is what is really at the heart of the matter. A woman should have the autonomy to decide what is best for her, her family, and her future. Birth control is not 100% effective. Condoms are even worse. Forcing a woman to carry and birth a child she does not want seems intolerably cruel. And yes, I’ve heard all the arguments about adoption. And maybe if we had an adoption rate of 99% that could make sense. Except, we don’t. It’s far below that. Foster care is not always a good experience. Adoption is an expensive, lengthy process. People seem to think that a woman can just give birth to a child, place them in a peach tree, and some kindly childless couple will come along and pick them up. That’s not remotely close to what happens. Being within the foster system can be brutal. Condemning a child to that life simply because a stranger believes they should doesn’t seem fair.
Abortions, on the other hand, ends that child’s life before it even begins. I don’t remember being in the womb. Heck, I don’t remember anything until my 5th birthday. And while that doesn’t mean a fetus can’t feel and experience things, a ten-minute procedure seems to be far more preferable than 18 years of foster care or living in a home that did not want them.
And what if the women keep their babies? What help and structure do we provide for them? We don’t give them daycare, which remains prohibitively expensive for many families. We don’t give them healthcare. We don’t feed or clothe them adequately. Unwanted pregnancies impact all of us, our entire society. If we force women to carry them out the least we could provide are some basic services and care. But, we don’t. Instead, we care very much what a woman does with a fetus but not very much what happens once it’s born.
So where does all this leave us? If abortion will someday be viewed as tragic and barbaric by future perspectives (who will probably have more access to 100% effective birth control) then can’t we just say that even by today’s standards that it’s not a good thing? I think we can. But whether abortion is good or bad isn’t the issue. There are lots of bad things we permit to exist. We allow companies to fill our air with pollution in the name of profits, electricity, and “progress”. We tolerate gun ownership despite how dangerous they are and that only a minority of Americans own them. We lock people up in prisons for having drug addictions. There is a seemingly endless list of things that are objectively “bad” that we tolerate in our society for the “greater good”. Abortion needs to remain one of those things.
I have been present for an abortion. When I was younger, my girlfriend and I had a secret savings account with enough money in it to get an abortion. I can tell you from experience that it is not something women take lightly. It can be a traumatic thing to endure. The last thing women need is strangers who have nothing to do with their private medical decisions shouting at them.
Drive into any rural part of Minnesota and the highway billboards are full of anti-abortion nonsense. They serve one purpose: to guilt women into making a different decision. They show pictures of happy, healthy babies, smiling with their mothers. The intent is implicit: why would you kill this? But never addressed in these ads are whether or not is anyone else’s business in the first place. I don’t think it is.
Part of being an adult is holding two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time. Abortion can be bad, evil even, but it still might need to exist. It isn’t something that strangers should be able to dictate to other people. Women already face an uphill battle in our society. Stealing their autonomy over their bodies doesn’t help anything.
If men could get pregnant, I think we all know this wouldn’t even be a discussion. We’d have drive-thrus where men would get a pill to take. There would be whole aspects of our society built around it. Men would coordinate their abortions and go rent a cabin somewhere to fart and eat pizza and kill their babies together. It is only because women carry the babies that people care. The most threatening thing to our patriarchal society is women having autonomy and independence.
That, my friends, is the crux of this. Restricting abortion rights isn’t about protecting the unborn or stopping something bad from happening. It is exclusively to control women and force them to maintain the role that centuries of male oppression has placed on them. They are to be the bearers of men’s children, the makers of the home, and to know their place within that household.
There is a very real possibility that Roe v. Wade will be overturned in the next few months. I dread the day when that happens. Republicans and conservatives have been building to this moment for decades. They have stuffed the court full of people who agree that abortion should not exist. And their years of work are about to come to fruition. I don’t know what options there are.
One thing that could happen is that the Democrats who CONTROL ALL 3 BRANCHES OF GOVERNMENT could simply pass a law that enshrines abortion as a right. It wouldn’t be a cure-all but would at least buy some time. Will they do it though? LOL nah. The Democrats are weak and mostly useless for anything progressive and meaningful. But that’s a whole ‘nother discussion.
Instead, I fear that a group of mostly white people will be allowed to force their minority opinion upon the rest of us. This is not how a democracy should work. And yet… here we are. I don’t have a message of hope for you. Only a rallying cry. The fight can never stop.
Never.