I am pro-choice and like practically everyone who gives themselves that label, I fervently hope that no woman I know will ever have to confront that agonizing decision of whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.
Most of the time, I can understand the position of those who call themselves pro-life even if I disagree with them. But I will never understand, or forgive, those who think that it is right to put women through the kind of extra agony that this woman in Texas had to undergo as a result of new laws that seek to add misery upon misery upon them.
These are just awful people.
These are the rules that the comic strip Doonesbury has been satirizing all this week and here’s a MoveOn.org ad that drives the point home.
Ms Carolyn Jones experiences show that those Doonesbury episodes aren’t satire -- they’re documentary.
Doonesbury was censored in a number of newspapers because the topic was considered too horrible to show to people…but in real life, real women are experiencing this when they’re at their most vulnerable. It’s despicable.
I am pro-choice and like practically everyone who gives themselves that label, I fervently hope that no woman I know will ever have to confront that agonizing decision of whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.
An agonizing decision? Not for the majority of women who have ETOPs.
And it’s the fact that there’s such a fine line between the former and the latter that has turned me from pro-choice to rabidly, no exceptions pro-choice.
I used to consider very late abortions as somewhat of a moral quandary. The fetus is undoubtedly a person at that point, or at least no less a person than a newborn infant. But of course on the other hand, the Famous Violinist thought experiment shows why the fetus’ newly acquired personhood is not a sufficient argument on its own. In short: I wasn’t necessarily in favor of prohibitions on 3rd trimester abortions, but I used to have a sort of complicated ambivalence about it.
But then I came to understand that a) the vast majority of late abortions are done for what I would call medical reasons; and b) there are zillions of cruel fucks who, even if they nominally accepted an exception for medical reasons, have a definition of “medical reasons” that is sickeningly narrow, and would want a woman to be forced to carry a baby that was doomed to suffer an agonizing and brief life.
It got a whole lot simpler for me once I realized that: No restrictions on abortion at any time, ever. Even if you managed to convince me that in a perfect world, preserving the life of a viable almost-ready-to-be-born fetus trumped a woman’s autonomy (and I probably couldn’t me convinced of that anyway, but for the sake of argument let’s say you did), I would still oppose restrictions in practice, because even the narrowest of restrictions would inevitably be used by sadistic theocrats to inflict needless suffering onto women, seemingly just for suffering’s sake.
Well, but even if the decision isn’t agonizing per se, for many people it’s an awful — some might say “agonizing” — thing to have to go through. I think that’s what Mano meant, and it’s sort of splitting hairs otherwise. The point is, for the vast majority of women who choose to have an abortion, there’s already something pretty upsetting about the situation, which makes these laws, which seem to have the goal of making women “properly upset” or something, are just shockingly cruel.