I know I usually write about life with a hearing ear dog, but with all the attacks on women's health, I need to share these thoughts I first put to paper back in 2005 on abortion.
This may be triggery for some people, so if you think you may be among them, don't read below the cut.
Tomorrow, I'll share pictures of Itzl.
It's been 7 years since I first wrote this, and very little has changed for the better in that time. We’ve had states try to pass draconian anti-abortion laws, we’ve had one champion for women’s rights railroaded out of her authoritative position because she decided her people could offer women what they need. In the news, we read stories of women “being raped”, not of “men raping women”, and watched court cases of rape victims being further victimized. We've seen 11 year olds being accused of "asking for it" when they are gang-raped on video. We've heard of women forced to carry terminal and dead fetuses because they aren't allowed to abort them - even though abortion is still legal. We've seen laws being proposed that would criminalize women who miscarry - adding insult to an injury. We saw a woman imprisoned because she expressed doubts about having the baby she carried (and what pregnant woman hasn't panicked during the pregnancy?). We've seen legislation proposed that would make it legal to hunt and kill women's health care providers. We’ve seen more women and children becoming homeless because they weren’t allowed a choice that could have prevented the whole problem. We have people actively and vociferously advocating having babies - in spite of the fact that we are breeding ourselves out of resources. All of that is horrific beyond words, inhumane and completely disregarding actual lives in favor of potential ones.
We need to consider the welfare of those who are already born and living in this world. We need to care for those who are alive now, and in need now.
I believe life, and the life of the soul, begins at conception. I do not believe sentience begins at conception. That is something that develops when the tissues mature enough to nourish the seed of sentience and nurture it to fruition, about the time it becomes viable and capable of living outside the womb without devastating developmental deficiencies. Life is sacred. All life is sacred. I am morally opposed to the malicious taking of any life, but I believe life that already exists independently takes precedence over a potential life. Choice must be moral, ethical, and legal. Let me explain.
I chose life for myself and the children I bore, because I am inherently selfish and fluffy. I choose for no other woman because I am an American. It is the precise separation of religion and law that allows disparate faiths to thrive alongside one another, including disparities within religions, such as Catholics and Methodists. The American attitude of freedom of religion and the separation of church and state has ensured our safety in the practice of our beliefs, and our rights are not dependent upon the morality of the privileged few, but rather on higher ideals of justice, equality, and freedom.
I am pro-choice because it is the only moral choice to make when it involves other people.
Without choice, there can be no morality at all.
Consider. A woman who becomes pregnant has not just her unborn child to consider, but also any other children she may currently have, her health, her own body, and any other people dependent upon her. She is the custodian for all of them. She must be allowed the freedom to choose to add this unborn child to the family or to abort it for the greater good of those already born. If we take away that choice, then the unborn baby may be saved but at the cost of a far greater evil to the woman and to those already born.
Is it better to allow a woman her choice, knowing she may choose to abort in some cases, or do we remove that choice and most assuredly commit evil in every single case?
Life must be protected. There is no doubt about that. As a woman, it is my duty to protect the life of my unborn child as well as my already born children, not the government's, not some preacher's, certainly not yours. It is my duty to protect my health and well-being so I can take care of myself. It is also my duty to protect the lives of other children I may already have, and those living children take precedence over an unformed and unborn potentiality. It is my duty as a woman to protect the people already living in my care, and I must consider so very many things.
The welfare of the developing embryo is, like the embryo's own tissues, too caught up in the mother's own existence to be considered separately. The distinction between mother and child occurs gradually. In the beginning, when there is no distinction, when the embryo is incapable of independent viability, it is and must be entirely and completely the mother's decision on how to safeguard all the lives within her care, from her own and the already-born to the unborn within her. The mother can, should, indeed, must, protect herself first, because she must be healthy and able to care for those dependent upon her. Then she must protect the already born who are in her care – whether those are older children of hers, her elderly parents or grandparents, cousins, kin, mates, mates' kin, co-workers, neighbors. She has a large group of people to consider, not just the one unborn child.
Life must be protected, and the question becomes, whose life?
The pro-life argument is not one of law or physical technicalities, but of the spirit. It is not life with which they are concerned, but the soul. Let me address this from my own Numenist perspective.
To have any integrity of the human soul at all, we must be allowed to know, and knowing, to choose our path. To remove a person's right to choose is tantamount to gainsaying the spiritual concept of free will. Free will is an important part of Numenism. This includes the free will to determine when to sever a soul from the divine and house it in an individuated corporeal being. Those who would prevent a woman from making a choice to bear or abort the unborn embryo may think they are stopping a terrible crime, but what they are actually doing is harming everyone - everyone connected with the woman, everyone in that woman's neighborhood, society, culture, and religion. They are stifling spiritual growth, playing god in an unhealthy way, and abusing the intelligence granted us.
It is wonderful and good to be pro-life. If you can change someone's mind with love, compassionate words, and the physical and financial support they require, so much the better. It is not acceptable on a spiritual level to force someone to make choices they would not make because you feel it is the right thing for them to do. Removing choice from someone removes their humanity, their adulthood, their hard-won maturity. It stunts them. The removal of choice makes them slaves who must obey the commands of those who control them.
This isn't about killing babies, it is about the freedom of the human soul. It is about being allowed to choose our destinies. It is about being allowed to have respect for our own gods-given reproductive lives, and it is about having no shame when we protect ourselves by doing what we must.
I could never ask a woman to risk her life for a pregnancy she did not want. I could never ask a woman to shoulder a lifetime responsibility she does not feel she can bear with grace. I could never presume to make a life-altering decision for anyone not myself. I didn't even have my son circumcised so he could make that decision for himself when he was old enough. How could I have the utter arrogance to decide if a woman would bear child or not?
I believe that abortion is the taking of a life, but it is not murder. There is no negative stigma of a woman choosing to preserve the emotional, physical, and mental well being of her life and the lives of those already dependent upon her. Abortion is a method of self-defense and protection for her and her world. To label a woman who has had to choose an abortion with the same name as the people who deliberately drown their unwanted already-born children or shoot them or starve them is a disservice to the soul of society. When we burden society's soul with too many negatives, it responds in harmful ways. Those already-born become less valuable, more disposable. People who know their lives are not valued in turn place little value on other people, and violence, greed, and callousness become common.
The reality of abortion is not good or evil. It is human struggle, filled with blood and grief and fear and pain and humiliation. Nobody plans to get pregnant just so they can have an abortion. Abortion is not used as a primary method of birth control, not by any sane, valued being. Birth control methods fail, and abortion is a back-up for that. Women are raped by men and impregnanted, and abortion is there to help protect the woman from one major consequence of the man's violent act. Only the woman can determine if she is capable of surviving a pregnancy forced on her through violence, or through failed birth control, and then spending the next 20-25 years raising a child created in violence.
And that brings us to what our society would consider the dark side of abortion and what I consider the bright side of it. Relief. Abortion is a safety valve for families. The choice to abort or not allows the woman and her family freedom and safety. It is a considered action that dignifies the value of human life and the human soul by considering all parts of the equation and not just the one unknown cipher. Like any act of great human consequence, there are times when abortion is the right and only thing to do, and times when it is a terrible mistake. The pregnant woman is the only one right now who can make that decision, and once made, we, as a society, cannot ethically and morally judge her choice, not and remain a moral and ethical society.
Who are we to second-guess her choice, a choice that is never as simple or easy as it sounds?
We have the wealth, the technology, the knowledge, the skills, and the ability to make every child born a wanted child, to prevent unwanted pregnancies, to safely abort dangerous or unwanted pregnancies, to provide support while any children are entirely dependent upon the family, to make families stronger and safer.
But we don't.
As a society, we Americans devalue the mother, we force women into untenable positions to assuage the vocal demands of a small group of control freaks, we force children into untenable lives of poverty and violence, we make all of society colder, meaner, and more selfish. We cut funding for Medicaid, for education, for child nutrition, for food stamps, for housing, and have the unmitigated gall to consider ourselves decent, moral people. We get laws that restrict pay and job conditions, and we attack mothers forced onto welfare because we prevented them from making the hard, informed choices they must make.
Abortion is not easy. It is as life-altering a decision as giving birth, and there's not a woman who has had an abortion who doesn't regret the need for that decision. They may not regret the decision itself, they may rejoice that they could have that choice, but they will always regret the need that forced the decision upon them, a need our society should have prevented, but didn't because we refuse to provide the support pregnant women and mothers need.
This isn't even addressing the primary reason for allowing women to make the choice to carry or abort the pregnancy – the spiritual growth that such decisions will bring. By abrogating the woman's right to choose, we stunt her spiritual growth. We enslave her soul and the souls of all her children and dependents, and through them, all of society.
Perhaps there are those who want women to remain spiritually small and weak; they are themselves small-spirited.
There are those who will cry out, "But what about the father's right to choose?"
And to them I answer: The father's right to choose takes place before the act of coition and orgasm. Once he decides to squirt out his sperm without using or confirming the presence of birth control, he hands over the decision for what happens next to the woman. It is her body, her life, her family, her community, her spiritual well-being that informs her decision. She may choose to allow him a part in her decision, but it is ultimately and completely her decision, and it will remain hers until we develop something along the lines of the Bujoldian uterine replicators. When we have artificial wombs that put no woman's life at risk to carry a baby to term, that involve no woman's emotions, bodies, or families; then men can decide to take custody of the embryo, grow it in the artificial womb, and raise it.
When women can walk away from the pregnancy as easily as men can, then men can have a choice in the future of an embryo.
So, if men want to make that decision, to take the lifetime responsibility of growing and rearing a child, they should hustle and develop working artificial wombs as soon as they can. Until then, they need to take responsibility for their fertility, either through using condoms and a spermicide, through abstinence, through vasectomy, through the male birth control pill, through self-control, through masturbation or through providing the emotional and financial support the children and their mothers need. They do not have the right to access a woman's body against her will (and how she dresses or where she goes does not give unspoken permission, and any female under the age of at least 16 is never asking for it and men should know better than to even think about it), and they do not have the right to force motherhood on any woman by refusing to provide for their own birth control. And they must always, always be aware that birth control does indeed fail, that surgical sterilization isn’t always 100%, and that mistakes happen, people are forgetful, may have an idiosyncratic reaction to birth control, and sometimes, sometimes, in spite of all the effort to the contrary, pregnancy occurs.
Abortion is a safety valve for those instances. For men as well as women.
Abortion is never an easy choice. No matter what the media tries to make us believe, abortion is never lightly undertaken and is not the birth control method of choice for any woman. It's an invasive procedure that requires care so the woman can, when she is ready, get pregnant and have a baby. So many things can go wrong in an abortion - sterility, permanent disability, maiming, even death of the woman as well as the embryo - that no sane woman would submit to it without a compelling reason. If a woman is impregnated by a man - through failed birth control, through lies, through rape, through changed circumstances - she has very few options. Every one of those options has a strong potential to be detrimental to her health, her spirit, her mental well-being, her finances - and the health, well-being, and care of those already alive and in her care. Even a chosen and planned for and healthy pregnancy damages a woman's body. She needs the right to choose the damages she will suffer.
If a woman lives where she can still choose abortion, she has to undergo a risky surgical procedure to free herself of the unwanted pregnancy - a man walks away without having to undergo any kind of surgical procedure or alteration to his body, without any risk to his health and life and mental well-being.
If, for religious or ethical reasons or, increasingly often, for lack of adequate medical care in her community, she has to carry the unwanted pregnancy to term, she risks a host of damages and ailments, up to and including death. A man gets to walk away without any kind of damage to his body and certainly without any fear of dying because of the pregnancy and birth or the host of infections, hemorrhages, and depressions that occur after birth.
If a woman chooses to place the child for adoption, she can't do so without the father's permission if she was foolish enough to name him - permission he can deny just to punish her - and it is a punishment to both the mother and the unwanted child, to have to work and spend money to feed, house, clothe, and educate that unwanted child, frequently without any support whatsoever from the father - who gets to walk away without losing a moment's sleep over the lives he's just destroyed. Even if a court of law determines he should pay child support, he still gets to walk away, and often he can get away with not paying that child support. Very few women get to walk away from a child they've birthed, and no woman gets to walk away unscathed from a pregnancy, however short it may be.
If the couple are married when the child is conceived and the man decides he no longer wants to be responsible for the child he helped create, all he has to do is walk away. No one condemns him for it. No one blames him if he denies the child is his. After all, short of DNA testing, there’s no proof, not like there is when a woman gives birth. Maternity is rarely in doubt.
So many men have taken the option to just walk away, it's a wonder women haven't risen up and reacted with far greater anger and made far stronger demands. It’s a wonder women even consider giving men any choice at all. But they do. Most women offer the father a chance to help in the decision.
Men make their decision to impregnate women the moment they allow their sperm to squirt out into a woman. If men failed to use birth control themselves, (via abstinence, condoms, male birth control, self control, or vasectomy), they have already made their decision.
The burden of birth control is not and should not be entirely upon the woman.
Me, I'd like to see every child born be a wanted child - planned and anticipated and hoped for. That means everyone has to own up to their part in the procreation process - from erection to childbirth, and take responsibility for the results of their choices.
That means we need a wide variety of choices, from better birth control for both genders to better behavior from men and women to better health care. We need artificial wombs so women can walk away from a pregnancy as easily as men do. We need better methods of adoption and fosterage. We need more humane peer pressure.
We need to allow women the freedom to choose and we need to give them easy access to knowledgeable and skilled physicians to help them in their choice. This in turn means we need doctors skilled and educated in all aspects of women's healthcare, including abortion, and the freedom to use those skills and knowledge at need without fearing for their lives.
And men? If you want to have a choice in the continuance of a pregnancy - get busy developing artificial wombs and help build a society where women feel safe giving birth to children, and have the same freedom to walk away from an unwanted embryo that you already have.