How pregnancy can keep you pro-choice
I take it for granted that everyone interested in women's issues should read Respectful of Otters, home of the very smart, thoughtful, compassionate Rivka. She's recently started posting again, after a hiatus for the birth of her first child, and I rejoice to see her back in the blogosphere. Her recent post about pro-choice motherhood is just stunning.
...my personal experience with pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood has strengthened and deepened my conviction that abortion is a valid choice that must remain safe, legal, and available.
I had an easy, healthy pregnancy (even morning sickness was just a mild annoyance, rather than a real problem); a loving husband I trusted to take care of me; a supportive family; excellent prenatal care from knowledgable, supportive, and empowering midwives; an uncomplicated and relatively quick delivery; an uncomplicated physical recovery from the birth; and no postpartum depression. I had, in short, about as easy a time of it as you can have. And yet I was acutely aware of how much of my energy was drained away by the developing fetus, how incapacitated I became as my pregnancy advanced, how vulnerable and dependent on my husband I felt, how crushing the sense of responsibility was. Even the least complicated of pregnancies is a profound burden and a profound vulnerability - physically and emotionally. I never fully understood that until it happened to me...
Because adoption exists as an option I am focusing on pregnancy and birth here, and not on the experience of raising a child. But I will say this: as hard as it is to carry and deliver a baby, motherhood is much much harder. Again, my circumstances have been excellent: financial comfort, flexible job, supportive and involved husband, loving family and friends, plenty of childrearing knowledge, et cetera. But still there came a moment, in my daughter's third week of life, that I broke down in hysterical sobs and asked her why she hated me so much. I'm telling you, motherhood is HARD. You have to really, really want it. If you don't, I'm not sure how you get through - but I don't think it's good for either you or the child.
Amen. Bringing another life onto this little blue planet is one of the most momentous decisions any of us can make. The number of things that can go wrong, the profound way pregnancy changes your body, the million little ways that having a child alters you- even if you do not choose to parent - are just staggering. That's not a weight anyone who doesn't want to should have to bear.
I get why moderate politicians are going around talking about prevention and targeting zero abortions. It's not pretty. Abortion is not a comfortable topic to talk about; imagine how hard it is to go through. What I hate about this approach is the lurking Victorianism - oh, heavens, what an icky, awkward topic, we don't want her to have to worry her pretty little head about it. Let's just outlaw that case, and then the next one, and limit that one, etc, etc. It shows such a fundamental disrespect for women, a basic lack of trust in their ability to make their own decisions. For example, a few years ago, the Texas Legislature passed the obnoxious Women's Right to Know Act, requiring abortion providers to provide women with a laundry list of information, some of it inaccurate, about pregancy, contraception, childbirth, child support, etc. Like we're all such morons that it would never have occurred to us to, I don't know, say, do some damn research ourselves before we made a decision this big. Nope. They think we need 181 strangers, more than 80% of whom are men, only a handful of which have any medical training, to tell us what's what.
Life is complicated. Birth control fails. People screw up. Part of being a grown-up is having to make the best choice you can, even when you don't much like any of the available options, and then living with the consequences. Sometimes the best choice is abortion. I don't think anyone is thrilled about that, but guess what? Women can handle it. We all make hard decisions every day of our lives. We don't need anyone to protect us from the reality of our lives; we're soaking in it. And sometimes when our lives get especially complicated, the exact thing we need is safe, legal, accessible abortion. Yes, some of us will cry afterwards. Some of us will feel bad. This is not a surprise. And we can handle that, too. We have all felt bad before, and the vast majority of the time, it didn't kill us. So stop trying to protect us from ourselves. We don't need it. You want to know what we do need? I've got a big list, but the most basic item on it is just this: respect.