Extremists are holding the Abortion Debate hostage
Abortion is not a binary conversation. But me, and many of my fellow American women are standing by and letting it operate as though it were.
In 2017, when asked: do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances or illegal in all circumstances…
50% of women said it should be legal only under certain circumstances.
As the poll dives in deeper, you will see that the majority believe that beyond the first trimester, it has to be about the medical safety for the mother, or situations of rape or incest, or the potential medical health of the child. What is even more noticeable is how persistent these percentages are going back in time.
If we are going to have a sane and rational debate on this topic, we have to look at all of the aspects that drive abortion in the first place. We have to look at women’s reproductive health rights. We have to look at what support women have available to themselves when they discover they are pregnant.
If we freely handed out condoms, birth control pills, and the morning after pill, most of these issues would go away.
If we had meaningful help like free daycare, free healthcare, and shame-free financial aide for mothers… most of these issues would go away.
When we don’t shame women into feeling like many of these options are immoral, then most of these problems would go away. In fact, to a great extent, they have. As we have made access to birth control and healthcare treatment available to women; the abortion rate has gone down. But the extremist won’t tell you that.
Christian extremists like to paint a picture that any woman who would say they are pro-choice… in any way, shape, or form… is gleefully promiscuous, and would dance on streets bloodied by fetuses. As though we revel in the notion of sex and death.
The same extremist Christians will also say that birth control is wrong because sex is wrong. They will say the morning after pill is still “killing a life.”
They’re so extreme that women have no room to actually do anything sensible.
I know how damaging these extremist Christians can be on the psyche of a woman, I grew up in that rhetoric myself. There is an enormous amount of guilt placed on you for the fact that you can potentially carry life. You know that all you have ahead of you is soul-crushing shame should you commit the ‘sin’ of becoming pregnant before some pastor or priest has deemed you married, and therefore worthy of your god-given right.
These views are oppressive, and they shouldn’t be what’s driving the conversation around women’s rights, and the unborn child’s rights.
I’m not done with the extremists. There are extremists on the left as well. The extreme on the left paint a picture that women’s rights are all-encompassing, and that there is no point at which an unborn child might actually take precedence. They say no matter what a woman has a right to choose. They don’t allow any nuance in the conversation either.
It creates a false slippery slope that says something like: if you put any kind of regulation around pregnancy, it will unquestionably lead to shackling women down to the beds; forever pregnant at the mercy of evil men.
I know everyone was all abuzz about The Handmaid’s Tale movie… but it’s a movie.
This extreme rhetoric is more attended to, and so ends up much louder than the truth as expressed for the average woman. This leads to the the position on the left to be viewed as: liberal women don’t care to take any responsibility for the life they may hold in their body.
Both positions are nonsense. Almost all women believe that it is sacred, and a responsibility that we can carry life. For almost all women it is a heart-wrenching decision to make if you believe you cannot carry your child through to term.
89–92% of all abortions happen during the first trimester, prior to the 13th week of gestation (AGI/CDC). This clearly shows that women do take the responsibility seriously, and they’re not cavalier about it.
To have an argument between “all abortion; all okay, all the time” versus “no abortion under any circumstances (and no easy access to contraception under any circumstances)” is not a real debate, and so the crux of the problem.
Like so many other debates in America today, we have allowed extremists to steal the conversation and pitch meaningless rhetoric through the airwaves like it solves something. But it doesn’t, and we have to claim our sensibility back.
Advances in modern medicine and science make this a real topic to discuss. We are understanding more and more how the being in the womb grows, and when it becomes conscious. It is important that we objectively look at the facts, decide what is legally appropriate, and most just, for all parties involved. It is a super meaningful and important topic, and it is critical that it gets to be reviewed by the people that it really effects.
If we make it important to ask questions like:
- how do we realistically help prevent unwanted pregnancy,
- how do we take care of women who want to carry their child to term, but don’t have the financial capability or support to do so,
- how do we transform the conversations around pregnancy, such that a woman could choose to shamelessly give her child up for adoption
…then we could make real progress. These are all of the real and meaningful questions that would actually help to continue to minimize abortion rates.
Voices of reason need to be raised and join the conversation. We need to stop indulging extremist values. We need to show up to vote. We need to put the extremist rhetoric back where it belongs… on the fringe.
