Part two of a two-part series.
Abortion is a highly emotional issue for everyone, especially when you do not view this as within the realm of human experience, but in the arena of a battle between good and evil.
This religious injection ends rational debate. Everyone is biased in this area and I find myself on the pro-choice side simply because this is an issue of privacy for the woman and her doctor. I just won’t degrade women into being treated like cattle forced to give birth because of someone else’s beliefs.
So let me just ask you to consider how you arrived at your stance on this issue.
Do you find it interesting that men in power decide a woman’s health issue, either in Congress or the Supreme Court, or that many of the leaders of the pro-life movement are men and the leaders of most of the pro-choice organizations are women?
Throughout history, men have exerted their power to control women and so it seems this continues in the present as well.
It has been my experience that those women who oppose the right to choose change their minds when they find themselves in this situation. When this ceases being about promoting your beliefs and becomes a personal decision you face, then many become very pro-choice. This doesn’t mean they will have an abortion, but they do not want to be denied that option.
I knew a very religious, very pro-life young woman who came from a very conservative, prominent Protestant family. She did not plan on getting pregnant, but in a very human fashion, in the heat of that moment, it happened. The sad irony is that because of the very judgmental nature of her family, she could never let them know she was pregnant.
She made the decision to have an abortion because of the situation in which she found herself because of her family’s fundamentalist dogma.
Maybe if we had less rhetoric, less judging, less damning of those who want to let the woman decide as being demonic, maybe we could get to the dilemmas in which women find themselves when seeking an abortion.
If we can address those causes, like ignorance, poverty, fear, religion, mental illness and so on, we can work to eliminate the need for abortion. The great irony is that those who claim to be militantly against abortion support the conservative element in politics. Yet, under Clinton, whom the right-wing absolutely hates, the abortion rate has declined, and along with it, the teen pregnancy rate.
Things that conservatives oppose, like sex education, the distribution of contraceptives and the rational discussion of this issue without the religious threats, have all contributed to the decline in these rates.
The concern that the pro-life side claims for the woman who has had an abortion is interesting. They claim most women are traumatized by this action and suffer for years.
I looked into this claim and found that the American Psychological Association did a long-term study on post-abortion distress. They found no correlation between the abortion procedure and post-abortion distress.
The main factor found was the woman’s sense of well-being before the abortion.
This was true for women regardless of income, religious faith, level of education and marital status. I would surmise that those found to have had post-abortion issues were those women traumatized by pro-lifers who push the idea that the woman had sinned and therefore had done something wrong.
Then there’s adoption as the preferred option. I have heard this uttered many times by those who say abortion is not needed. If you have a healthy, newborn, Caucasian child, then yes, I guarantee not only can you have it adopted, by you can make good money doing so.
I know from experience working for the state that if a child has any medical complications (think crack babies here), defects or illness then the odds of adoption drop precipitously.
If a child happens to be African-American, Hispanic, mixed, etc, then it falls into the special needs area because of the sheer difficulty of finding adoptive families. The odds drop even further as the infant ages and is passed from placement to placement waiting for someone to adopt him or her.
Maybe if all that energy and money now being used to attack choice was used for these difficult adoptions, then I could garner some respect for those who are so militant on that side. A love affair with the fetus does nothing to help those children already here and in need.
To say simply that if we eliminate access to contraception and sex education that people will not have sex is beyond naive and denies any understanding of what it means to be human. In the absence of birth control and education, people fall back on their biological drive to reproduce.
Being a teenager means being driven by your hormones. Do you want to leave them alone in ignorance to find their own way? Do you think that by telling them nothing other than it is a sin will truly stop the vast majority?
We don’t leave loaded guns lying around for our children to play with, I hope. We educate them about the dangers of the gun and how to properly use it.
To me, it should be the same for sex.
How do you use that loaded gun?
This may sound jaded but we have to face facts. Some people should not be parents.
Abortion will continue to be needed as long as we have these issues in our society.
They can be solved if we decide to put aside our bickering tinged with some misplaced sense of moral superiority based on one’s belief system.
If you want to eliminate abortion, eliminate the need by working together on those things proven effective in bringing down the abortion rate.

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