4 May 2024
Since I was nine years old, I’ve been aware that I had a federally protected right to have an abortion should I become pregnant, and for whatever reason, not be prepared to take that to its conclusion. In 1973, before women had equal rights, before gay people had equal rights, before Black people had equal rights in reality, when we were still in Vietnam and Nixon was in office, I knew that if it’s my body, it’s my choice.
I never—never—questioned my basic right to make that decision, and the corresponding right to request an abortion provider, a doctor, to help me.
Beginning today, after almost fifty years, people with uteruses will begin to have that ‘privilege’ taken away. They may believe they have a right, but it will be denied to them in many, many of the disUnited States. Because of those obstacles, they may have to lie, suffer, fear, and die to have an unwanted child, keep secret the abortion or the baby given up after birth, or keep (or have kept for them by family) a child they didn’t want or prepare for.
One out of every four people with the equipment to have a child has had an abortion. The reasons are all over the map. Consensual sex without adequate protection. Rape. Failed protection. Fetuses with heart-breaking damage. Women for whom carrying a child to term would be deadly.
But the reasons don’t change anything.
It’s a person’s right to decide to have a child or not, and it always is. Children shouldn’t be brought into the world for any reason but that they are wanted. Most men never question that an abortion is an option—they don’t think about it at all until they are the potential father, and then they say, “OK, so get an abortion.”
The person with the uterus is the person who has to take all the risks and suffer all the consequences. The person who does not carry a child should NEVER get a deciding vote.
I have been willing to argue over ‘how broad should the right to abortion be? when is a child an independent entity whose rights overrule the rights of the person carrying them?’ I always thought the answer was obvious from a moral standpoint: if a child could survive with normal (not extraordinary) measures outside the womb, they have the right to be considered (not overriding, but considered) separately from their mother. I never got too worried about the push-pull of that conversation because the demarcation between viable and nonviable is shifting, and we need to keep talking about it from a moral standpoint.
I’ve also been interested in having discussions about what to do so that no one ever has to make a decision like abortion. Better birth control, both pre- and post-conception, better education, better pregnancy tests, more options, no stigma, free childcare—these are win-win scenarios that can serve both sides. No unwanted children should be our goal.
But today I have little patience for those conversations, because the anti-choice side has not been arguing in good faith. They are punishing us for being capable of reproduction. They are treating us as if we are simply vessels for fetuses.
