Late at night, when I can't sleep due to an aching knee (I really should get it checked out), I read and think. One train of thought led to the question, "What does it really mean to be pro-choice?"
Yes, it means that abortion should be legal. Yes, it should mean that women who get an abortion should be able to have proper medical facilities instead of back-alley abortions or underground clinics. But really, why am I pro-choice instead of, as I insist the opposition is, anti-choice?
Oddly enough, Sarah Palin helped provide the answer.
Sarah Palin, as many of us know, gave birth to her fifth child, one they knew would be born with Down's syndrome. Now her daughter, Bristol, is pregnant, which caused a certain quote from Palin to be dug up. When it came to abortion, even if she had been raped, Bristol would have the child because Palin "would choose life."
In the dark of night, Mercedes Lackey's Exile's Honor on my lap and cat on my chest, that thought stuck me cold. Bristol Palin would not abort her rapist's child because her mother "would choose life." I realize she's underaged, and her parents would thus have to be part of any medical decisions, but it wouldn't be Palin having this hypothetical child, it would be her daughter. What her daughter believed, whether it might be that the rapist shouldn't be rewarded by having his genes spread or that every life is sacred and this future child shouldn't be punished for a monster's actions would be moot. She would have no choice. She would have to have the child, no matter what she felt.
That, reader, that is what pro-choice is about. It's the view that a woman's own beliefs and morals should guide her steps. It's the decision that a woman can decide for herself whether she's ready for a child or not. It's the idea that a woman should be allowed to choose not only to have an abortion, but to "choose life." The birth of a child would be her decision, not a religion's or a government's. No matter how against abortion she is, with Roe vs. Wade in place, she can proudly say she chooses life. Without it, no woman can state that, for the choice would be gone. The decision would say that women don't have the intelligence or morality to make a choice, and it must be made for them so they don't go astray.
Sarah Palin said she would choose life for her daughter. She fights so no other woman can say the same.