Why Abortion Must Remain Legal

After a delightful afternoon with Pea, I came home to find this thread being hijacked by a pro-forced-pregnancy troll. My response to RM, and to every person who wants to outlaw abortion:

[C]onception is a very arbitrary starting point. You do know that sperm and eggs are technically alive, right? It’s an interesting fact about this world that nothing alive can come from something dead; life can only come from something else that is still alive. So why is the joining of the sperm and the egg the magical moment if the only criteria is that there is life?

According to your logic, then, we should protect sperm and eggs as if they are actual human lives. Women and men should be constantly having unprotected sex so that we can avoid the tragic holocaust of the body flushing out unused and/or unimplanted eggs. And of course that also makes masturbation totally out of the question for men. In fact, if a woman dies before she has reached menopause, or a man dies without ejaculating all of the sperm he has created since the last time he had sex, we should save those sperm and eggs, and put them in as many fertile women as possible so that they have the chance to continue to live too. Women whose bodies reject a pregnancy or who have even one period should be tried for murder, since it is obviously her fault that the sperm and eggs were allowed to die.

Of course, that makes me wonder what the prescription for women with dangerous or unfulfillable pregnancies would be. Is a woman required to continue an ectopic pregnancy, even though it would kill her? Is a woman required to carry an anencephalic fetus to term as long as the fetus is still alive, even if it could kill the woman to do so? Is a woman required to carry a fetus with a different Rh factor than her to term even though it will inevitably kill the fetus? Because everything has a right to life, according to your logic.

And in this world of yours where conception is always the beginning of an individual life, what happens to those women who inevitably try to abort anyway? What about the women who puncture their own inner organs with sharp objects while trying to abort themselves, since they can’t have a doctor do it in a safe and sanitary environment? What about the women who manage to abort part of it by themselves but not all and develop an infection as a result, but are too afraid to go to a doctor until it is too late because it is against the law? What about the women who insert nasty chemicals or who take poisonous abortifacient herbs? When you are talking about preserving life, do their lives mean nothing at all?

I have twice made the decision to abort.

The first time, I wasn’t serious with the guy. He was physically attractive but emotionally distant. Still, we talked beforehand about what would happen if I were to get pregnant accidentally and agreed without hesitation that I wouldn’t keep it. We used condoms; I was on the pill. A few weeks before I was supposed to fly to another country for a three week vacation, the condom broke. I immediately got Plan B from Planned Parenthood (it wasn’t over-the-counter then) and took it, but my period didn’t come for an entire month. I was convinced I was pregnant. When I returned from overseas, I asked him what he had done while I was gone. He responded, “Watched porn.”

I laughed. He didn’t. I was very glad that we had already agreed on abortion.

And then my period finally returned. I wasn’t pregnant after all. When we “broke up”, he said as many hateful things to me as he could, threw as many darts as he could. It just made me more happy that I hadn’t been pregnant but had had the option of abortion should it have come to that.

The second time, I honestly thought I was in love. A close friend had just died suddenly. At his impromptu wake, I met B*. He was cute, funny, attractive. I felt as though I could really talk to him, really tell him what I felt and thought.

The condom broke again. Again, I took Plan B as soon as possible. But this time, I felt an incredible confusion of feelings. The possibility of being pregnant felt incredible, like the entire universe had just opened itself to me and poured in all of its light. I would lie in bed at night, strung between stars and the earth, aware more than I had ever been before of how interconnected and amazing all life is.

But the dark cloud in my sunny day was reality. I was on my own, no helpful family members that I knew of or was willing to turn so shame-facedly to. Though I still spoke to my father then, I knew I would find no shelter under the canopy of his gambling addiction, and my mother couldn’t have helped me if she wanted to. My grandmother had made it clear that she didn’t approve of sex outside of marriage (I realize now that she would have considered helping me far more important than any moral or legal considerations, but I didn’t know that then) and I couldn’t bear the thought of burdening those few family members who would have helped me, who had less money than I did.

Money was the biggest issue. I didn’t have much. My job didn’t provide health benefits or maternal leave – both of which I knew I would need if I continued the pregnancy. The company was far too small, and the job had so many details, it took months to learn; if they hired someone to cover for me, they would have to be hiring someone to replace me. There was no question of how they would react – they were like family and I knew they would support me – but they had to think about money too. And then, once the child was born, who would watch it while I was at work? How would I afford daycare? Where would I find daycare? What if the only daycare I could afford was out in the sticks, off of a bus route (I had no car), not open all of the slightly peculiar hours that I worked?

B was no help either. He was homeless, still sleeping on other people’s couches while waiting for a place that he could afford to open up. He had just gotten a job, but frequently skipped it for frivolous reasons (and ended up losing it just a few weeks later because of this). He was an alcoholic, too, who frequently flew into blind rages when someone so much as looked at me when he was drunk, so that there were many times I stepped in between him and someone else because I knew that was the only way to diffuse a situation; he wouldn’t risk hitting me. His family was more messed up than he was, the ones that I actually knew about. His father, also an alcoholic, lived on a reservation. I knew reservations and would never want a child to grow up in one if I could help it. His sister dealt with the same basic economic situation I was facing, the same bleak by-the-teeth life I was facing with an unexpected pregnancy, except she’d found a man to help with the rent who liked to scream at her oldest daughter constantly.

I had no alternative that I could see. Though I desperately wanted to keep it, I didn’t see how I could provide it the kind of life that I believe a child needs.

This time, my decision wasn’t respected. The nasty things that came out of B’s mouth, his claim that it was his child, were disgusting. I told him it was my body that would have to do all the work and I was not about to let him try to guilt or scare me into carrying it to term. His complete lack of compassion for anything I was feeling, his refusal to listen to my love for it or my heart-broken logic, made me realize that I couldn’t actually trust him, that he was more interested in his possible offspring than in the woman he purported to love. That my decision revealed this to me before I became ensnared with this man for the rest of my life meant that I was, again, grateful to have this choice, even if I ultimately didn’t want to have to make it.

I was incredibly lucky to again discover that I wasn’t pregnant at all.

(*I feel no need to give B a nickname or include him in my cast of characters since I doubt I will talk about him much.)