Women and Abortion

[polimicks]

According to the Guttmacher Institute (http://www.guttmacher.org/sections/abortion.php), 1/3 of American women will have an abortion in her lifetime.

The majority of women who have abortions are already mothers raising children (60%).

The reason most frequently cited for obtaining an abortion is economic hardship and preserving quality of life for the woman's existing children.*

According to the Guttmacher Institute "There is no evidence that abortion is being used as a primary method of birth control." http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/2008/09/23/TrendsWomenAbortions-wTables.pdf

Late term (post 24 weeks) abortions make up only .2% of all abortions. Not two percent, but two TENTHS of a percent. None of those women who had late term abortions did so "Because, tee hee..." They underwent an arduous medical procedure because either they and/or their fetus would DIE or the fetus was already dead, or the fetus was so malformed there was no hope of life, i.e. anencephaly. All late term abortions are tragedies, but not for the reasons the Anti-Woman/Anti-Choice folks would have you believe. They are tragedies because those babies were loved and wanted, and ultimately either would have died and/or killed their mothers had the pregnancy gone to term.

Recently AntiTheistAngie (http://angietheantitheist.blogspot.com/) has caught a lot of grief for Livetweeting (http://twitter.com/antitheistangie) her abortion. Because of health, economic and other issues (she already has a special needs child) when her birth control failed, she decided on RU-486, a chemical abortion. In order to demystify the experience, because on researching it for herself, what little information and personal stories she did find freaked her the hell out, she decided to broadcast her experience to the world.

I applaud this.

However, in response she has suffered a whole lot of death threats from the "Pro-Life" faction. People have threatened the life of her four year old son. They've called her a whore and a liar. WWJD? Apparently he'd start screaming epithets and killing people. Funny, I don't really remember that part of the Bible.

She's also caught a fair amount of slut-shaming from "Feminists." I put Feminists in quotes, because slut-shaming is one of the least Feminist acts I can think of. Mary Ann Sorrentino to name one name, http://open.salon.com/blog/mary_ann_sorrentino/2010/03/08/abortion_as_self-promotion Because apparently all those Feminists who fought for the right of a woman to have an abortion, only meant if she was properly quiet and shamed about it. The fuck? Sorrentino also completely glosses over the fact that Jackson wasn't just gleefully having sex without protection, her birth control FAILED. She was being responsible, even if she didn't have a tubal ligation (which Sorrentino apparently thinks you can get just by asking for one. What world is she living in, and can I move there?)

Also, speaking out about abortion has a long history in Feminist circles, from the Redstockings Abortion speak-out 41 years ago this month, to the "I had an abortion" t-shirt campaign which began in the early 2000s, to sites like http://www.imnotsorry.net and the LJ comm http://community.livejournal.com/imnotsorry/

Sorrentino is unhappy because Jackson took a "private" matter and made it public, and she should have just kept quiet. In a subsequent podcast, she's likened Jackson's livetweeting of her abortion to the Paris Hilton sex tape.

Well, we all know how well keeping quiet works for socially charged issues, don't we? Seriously, is "Just shut up and maybe they'll let us keep our rights" the new party line? Fuck that. So once Sorrentino is done playing "No True Feminist," maybe she can take a look around and see that "keeping quiet and playing nice" has resulted in a near constant eroding of access to abortion since the 80s.

Personally, and I have been guilty of this in my younger and stupider youth, if I hear you slut-shaming a woman who has had one or many abortions, in my presence, I will call you out, loudly, profanely and probably with a lot of hand-waving and gesticulating.

Abortion is not "dodging responsibility", it is a responsible course of action. If you know you are not ready to have a child emotionally, financially or for whatever reason including just not wanting to have one, NOT HAVING THAT CHILD is a RESPONSIBLE DECISION. Not bringing another child into a country where thousands upon thousands of children are languishing in foster care and can't get adopted IS THE RESPONSIBLE THING TO DO. Not overburdening the financial capabilities of your family IS THE RESPONSIBLE THING TO DO. Fuck that, "Have the baby and the money will come" bullshit. What kind of responsible behavior is that?

Anti-Choicers are not about saving babies, because if they were they'd be for things like SCHIP, and school lunches, and subsidized daycare, and more money for education, and things in the new healthcare bill like all children are covered. Anti-Choicers are about punishing women for having sex they don't approve of. Anti-Choicers are about punishing women for attempting to control their reproductive capabilities and limit family size.

The number of children a woman has and how early is the strongest indicator that she will remain in poverty for the rest of her life. Married or not.

I've not had to have an abortion, because the one pregnancy scare I've ever had ended in a probable miscarriage (Woot! God aborted for me! Suck it, anti-choicers!) But when I thought I might have been pregnant, my first thought was, "Where am I going to get the money for an abortion?"

Now, I'm not including you in Anti-Choicers if you personally wouldn't have an abortion, but you still support the right of other women to CHOOSE FOR THEMSELVES.** No one says you have to have an abortion. It's not like we're out there rounding up pregnant women like cattle to meet our weekly abortion quotas.

Abortion is a deeply personal issue that no one else can make for you. Nine months is a long time to harbor a parasitical creature in your womb. And given maternal death rates in this country (worst in the industrialized world), I wouldn't want to play that sort of Russian Roulette with my health either, if I didn't have to.

Everyone wants to decrease the number of abortions. But how you do this is by increasing the availability of contraception and education on those contraceptive measures. You don't do it by forbidding women to have abortions, because that just results in a lot of dead women. But that's ok, right? I mean, dead or forced to give birth, they're punished, right? Fuck you.

Well, except for rich women, they'll just fly somewhere it is legal.

So you're for punishing POOR women.

It's funny that the most outspoken opponents of access to abortion are ALSO against contraception. This is point two in why we all know you're all about punishing women for being poor, dirty whores, and not about saving anyone. Seriously, pull your fucking heads out, ok?

That's all for today, and may I remind you all of my new, draconion moderation policy: http://polimicks.livejournal.com/27643.html. I will be generous with bahletion.

*Oh, and the tendency for even Feminists to buy into the "lying whores" trope drives me up a wall. I believe it was on Pandagon, in a comment thread over a year ago, where someone said, in response to the Guttmacher findings on economic reasons, essentially, "Well, I'm sure that women SAY it's for economic reasons, but of course they're probably lying to make themselves feel better."
Look, trust women, or don't. But shut the fuck up either way.

**Many women who would deny abortion to others, believe they have a "good" reason for having it, and theirs is the "only moral abortion:" http://mypage.direct.ca/w/writer/anti-tales.html

Comments

[polimicks.livejournal.com]

It is just as much in the nature of humans for some of them to NOT have children, either through physical flaws or just deciding to opt out.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

It is also in the nature of humans to differ in many ways, including in aptness and wealth.

[polimicks.livejournal.com]

Yup, like Molly Ivins said, "Some folks are born on 3rd, and convinced they hit a triple."

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

What does this have to do with anything? My initial point was that while individual liberties may be locally beneficial for the individual, they may also be non-beneficial for society as a whole, which, in turn, affects their personal benefits. I dispute not the claim that selfishness is natural, but that it is necessarily helpful. I cite your own example and interpret it in this light. Women who, pursuing their own benefits, choose not to have children are part of the reason why women with many children are poor. You don't seem to dispute this, but argue that the logical solution is for no one to have many children or for no one to have children early. I do not see how this is a logical outcome of the premises.

[polimicks.livejournal.com]

I apologize, you weren't terribly clear in your intent, and I'm a bit over-sensitive given some responses I've gotten to posts in the recent past.

I do think people would be better served by having fewer children later, on a whole, really. We no longer have an economy where large families are a boon to production.

I apologize again for perhaps not reading as generously as I might have.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

My intent is rather ambitious. It is arguing that when conservatives argue against such liberal values as the right for abortion they do not intend to inflict misery on women as a whole, nor is such misery a necessary eventuality of the values they advocate. It may appear that they do, since denying a person of any bit of freedom is typically painful to the person. Yet, as I said, this may be compensated for by socium-wide effects. They argue that there is nothing intrinsically horrible in a society in which abortion as a mechanism of family control is barred from use. The more traditional society which they advocate differs from the liberal one in a number of ways, and some of those ways (lower divorce rates, increased communality, to name a few) compensate for the cuts in the personal freedom department. It pains me when intelligent liberals consider conservatives as a whole as either idiots, evil persons, or both, and I do not believe that such an approach is either helpful or justified in the majority of cases.

One argument against pro-lifers that I have seen is "women will continue to have abortions anyway, but in worse conditions and under greater risk". True, but you may also say that in a society in which theft is illegal burglary still occurs, with increased risks both for the burglar and the robbed. (I apologize for making this analogy, as I know it is very inflammatory, but I bring it because the general principle in operation is in my opinion similar)

Another argument is that in some cases abortion makes sense due to medical or other reasons. Well, most pro-life proponents are not radically against all abortions. In fact, in medieval Christian Europe if the life of the mother was perceived to be in danger during birth, they had a practice wherein they'd drill the skull of the emerging child and extract it by parts. The life of the mother came first. Neither are there many countries in which abortion is illegal under all circumstances.

[polimicks.livejournal.com]

The big problem is that the society the more conservative members of our society keep hearkening back to didn't really exist. We just didn't get the full picture because people kept their mouths shut.

I did bring up two indicators that those folks really are interested in punishing women.

1. Their unwillingness to provide for children after they are born i.e. see my examples like SCHIP, the current health care reform legislation, funding for education...

2. Their opposition to readily accessible contraception, and education as to how to use it properly. The fact that many abstinence only programs LIE about the efficacy of condoms, describe birth control pills as "abortificients".

There may well be some anti-choicers out there who really do care about the babies. I admit that, but they are a small minority compared to those whose actions seem to indicate they're more for punishing women.

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

You are correct, conservatives often refer to a romanticised version of the past, and those of them who don't are often pro-choice anyway.

Neither do I understand their opposition to subsidised childcare or healthcare.

Neither do I believe that lies are a good idea.

At the same time, it seems to me that when you accuse pro-lifers of a sadistic desire to punish women for, I'm guessing free fucking, you are ignoring not only what I've said about the possible benefits of limiting individual freedoms, and not only the parts of the conservative agenda that limit the sexual freedoms of men, but also the fact that many pro-life proponents are women.

If you wish to argue that those women are ignorant servants of the patriarchy, then you may do so, but you will get a laugh from most of them, as they tell you exactly what they think of various facets of secular liberal society that you yourself find problematic without quite making the connection between them and your civil positions. I've seen traditional societies. "Lookism" and self-image are arguably less of a problem, for instance.

It's not that I think that western liberal societies are not in many ways the best form of society there ever was. But I don't think that people who oppose some of its features are necessarily evil or stupid.

I'll tell you why I bother to say all this. It is because some republicans have some good things to say. And the knee-jerk reaction to anything that carries a conservative label or comes from the general direction of the political right that many Lefties have is therefore very unhelpful.

[polimicks.livejournal.com]

Believe it or not, there was a time I would have voted for McCain, and had he gotten the nomination instead of Bush I would have voted for him rather than the Gore/Lieberman ticket. But after Bush and his cronies squashed his run at the nomination using smear tactics like suggesting his time as POW had unhinged him, he just... caved to the party line.

The current John McCain is not the man who admitted in an interview that he would support any daughter of his in her choice if she chose abortion.

This post is about ONE subject. Abortion. And you're right. I don't have a whole lot of patience for people who refuse to see that women are people and not just incubators (and the Left does not escape this tarring, believe me. Don't get me started on"pre-pregnant").

I do not knee-jerk against everything that "carries a conservative label," but in this case we DO know what happens when abortion is illegal, particularly when you also hinder access to contraception: Women die.

Knowing that, how can you view moves to make abortion illegal as anything BUT trying to punish/hurt women, particularly when there is an active attempt to limit access birth control at the same time?

[shelestel.livejournal.com]

Well, the women who oppose abortion don't practice it, right? Women who do have a certain economic advantage over them. So it could be seen as resistance of the poor to the rich. In general, lower-class opposition to middle-class liberals can be seen as stemming from the fact that "if A is more powerful than B then equal freedom for A and B means that A will continue to be more powerful than B" (paraphrase on a William Vollmann quote).

But no, it's true that there are some insane people out there who oppose all family planning efforts, and yes they should shut the fuck up. Not that I think that family planning efforts ought to be focused or predicated on the availability of abortion on demand.

[polimicks.livejournal.com]

If you'd been paying attention, you would know that I don''t think family planning efforts should be "focused" on abortion, but by stating that, you have exposed yourself as arguing in bad faith. Subsequent responses will be deleted.

Have a nice day!