Letters to the Editor

• The problem with "killing a fetus is murder"...

  [Read the article: Antiabortion activists mark Roe anniversary]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  ...is that we hold sacrosanct the right to control over our own health and our own bodies. To the point where we cannot be compelled to donate a kidney or blood to our child even if our child would die without the donation and the donation would not seriously harm us. There is legal precedent to state this.

  If killing a fetus is murder (and to be honest I do think it is), then the question is: is it justifiable to murder a human being to prevent it from living inside your body? And if the question weren't emotionally charged with the whole anti-female, anti-sex attitudes of the religious right and the "oooh, cute baby" thing all normal humans have going on, the answer would unequivocally be "yes".

  I mean, there is no circumstance in real life, aside from pregnancy, where a human is compelled to support the life of another human in a non-fatal but health-damaging way. However, we can turn to fantasy and science fiction to give us an idea about how we'd feel about it if it weren't charged with anti-sex attitudes and baby protecting. Vampires. Especially the kind in fantasy that don't kill you, they just want some blood. Just a little blood. People donate blood all the time, and without the blood, the vampire will starve. Doesn't it make sense to legislate that humans need to feed vampires? Uh, *no.* In all vampire fiction the decision to feed the vampire is either a choice humans freely make or an act of rape the vampire perpetrates on the human, and vampires who violate the human's choice are usually seen as worthy of destruction.

  Of course, babies aren't vampires. Babies are innocent and did not choose to live inside mom's tummy. But then, most vampires didn't necessarily choose to be vampires. Babies are caused to exist by an act mom engages in, whereas humans don't create vampires. But nine months and potentially permanent health effects is a lot more than a single blood donation. If mom could accidentally eat something that caused her to get pregnant, or more to the point, if *dad* could accidentally eat something that caused *him* to get pregnant, there would be no question but that the right to control your own body would trump the right of anyone else to live inside it. However, what causes pregnancy is sex, and who has a pregnancy is women, and we are coming off 2,000 years of anti-sex, anti-woman attitudes in society at large, so you get "Well, she chose to be a slut; she deserves the punishment of pregnancy."

  I am pregnant right now. I didn't plan it; I was still breastfeeding, and I wasn't as careful with the birth control as I needed to be. Financially and in terms of my health this is an awful time to be pregnant, but I did want another child and I'm not getting any younger, so I choose, voluntarily, to allow this accidental pregnancy, to endure pissing my pants every time I sneeze (and sneezing constantly because my nose runs) and being unable to sleep because I'm a tummy sleeper and can't get comfortable on my side and being nauseous and burping all the time and knowing, based on the last pregnancy, that I could very well be facing two weeks in the hospital again, only this time with a toddler. I choose this. I know the consequences, I know they are hurting me and will hurt me more, and I choose it because I wanted to have a second baby. If I didn't choose it, then no one has the right to force me to endure it-- including the child that came about by accident. No one has the right to live inside me and mess up my health and impair my ability to care for my family and even potentially risk my life unless I choose it. And having sex is not the point where we make the choice; sex has become vitally important to maintaining loving relations in our society. My marriage would be destroyed, as well as my mental health, by choosing not to have sex. The choice is the point where I know I am pregnant and decide that I will permit that person to live inside me.

  Humans suck at being pregnant. It's biology. I'm sorry, but as long as pregnancy sucks, we need abortion. The solution to abortion cannot be legislative, because you can't legislate biology. The only way to solve a biological problem is technology. So give us a technology of 100% foolproof birth control, or give us a technology that allows us to remove a fetus and gestate it artificially, and we can afford the luxury of outlawing abortion. As long as pregnancy can destroy a woman's life, health and future, abortion is a necessary evil.

  Also, it's pretty easy to prove that most pro-lifers are actually anti-woman and anti-sex by the fact that they also reject every form of birth control except abstinence, they don't support universal health insurance for children and pregnant women, they don't support mandatory paid maternity leave or maternity leave long enough to allow a woman time to fully recover from pregnancy (it took *me* a lot more than six weeks), they don't support nationalized day care.... SO here's the thing, if you're a woman they want you to either be married to a man wealthy enough to support you when you are on unpaid maternity leave, and preferably quitting the workforce entirely, or don't have sex. Marrying poor men is as bad as sex out of wedlock. And of course, if you get raped it's because you're a slut. Pro-life feminists who really believe abortion is unjustifiable murder have to seriously take a look at who else is on their side and what those people seem to want.

  Permalink Tuesday, January 24, 2006 02:01 PM