The topic of abortion resonates very deeply with me, and by deeply, I mean to say that anyone who is against it needs to look me in the face and be able to say the following wholly without regret or rationalizing:
If your father had gotten you pregnant at any point during the decade that you were sexually abused, you should have been forced to carry the baby to term, you should have been forced to raise the child in an environment in which it was likely to be abused right alongside its mother, and you should praise god because you are fulfilling your destiny to become a mother.
Hence, I LOVE this post by Jill over at Feministe on abortion as a moral good. She does such a good job of articulating what I can only express (at this point) in the antagonistic blathering of the previous paragraph. Here’s a sampling:
Abortion itself, though, can be a savior for women, and a positive choice. Abortion is a medical procedure and, like most medical procedures, is preempted by some sort of negative event. And yet the discourse around abortion is focused on how “tragic” it is. Is open-heart surgery “tragic”? Is an appendectomy “tragic”? Obviously the circumstances leading up to open-heart surgery and appendectomy are bad. But the procedures themselves, I would argue, are good responses to bad situations. As is abortion….
Choosing to have a baby is just as much of moral good. In contrast, I’m not so sure that being legally forced to carry a pregnancy to term is morally good at all (just as being legally forced to terminate a pregnancy would not be a moral good). We can’t evaluate the morality of an individual’s choices if they don’t have agency. Abortion rights offer individual autonomy to give birth or to not give birth. The right of an individual to make their own choice about whether or not they will offer their body in the support of another organism is a moral good. The individual making a choice which will be most beneficial to them is a moral good, whether that choice is abortion or birth or both (and most women who have abortions, it should be noted, make different choices at different times in their lives). The abortion procedure itself, like most other medical procedures, is a moral good. And like most other medical procedures, it is bad when done without consent, or when coercive. As is childbirth. (emphasis not original)
Women need agency. Anti-abortion arguements don’t give it to them, and then I go (self)victim blaming myself because I get antagonistic, fucking angry and blathering as I did above. Personal mandate for today, this week, this month, this life:
I am entitled to make the choices that are the best morally for me, for my woman-self. If agency is not given to me, I will claim it as my own, because there is a whole community of women who will support me in mind, even if they are not here to say it to me directly. I am entitled to cleansing anger, and I am entitled to that anger as long as I have to fight for agency.
