It’s likely we’ll have world peace before we all agree on whether abortion should be legal or not. But we don’t have to agree. We just have to keep it legal.
Those who work hard to chip away at Roe v. Wade, or disparage the work of Planned Parenthood, forget that abortions don’t have to be legal for women to have them.
Abortion needs to be legal so that women don’t die or permanently maim themselves by sticking knitting needles into their uteri, douching with deadly chemicals or placing their trust in your classic back-alley abortion doctor, as they did before 1973 when the U.S Supreme Court passed Roe v. Wade.
No matter how much some feel that they are working in favor of unborn babies, I bet those same people would choose a safe, legal and hygienic clinic for their own daughter if she was going to sneak off and have the abortion that she’d never tell them about. It’s not only people who "believe" in abortion who have them.
When people find themselves in desperate situations, they’ll do things they never thought they would. It’s a terrible situation that most report they never thought’d be in. I know this as someone who worked at a Planned Parenthood that did provide abortion for two years.
It must be hard for some to understand the turmoil a woman feels when she’s sure a pregnancy and a baby, or another baby, would be a terrible thing at a certain point in her life, and that the best thing for her at that point is to make it all go away. But it’s her body and her life, and she should have that choice. A woman’s life has as much value as — if not more than — that of her unborn embryo, fetus, or baby.
But at least for now our friends, sisters, daughters, selves, aunts, and yes, even mothers and grandmothers who make this choice have clean, safe clinics to go to and follow-up appointments, complete with guidance in finding a birth control method that will work for her.
Though I was pro-choice before becoming a mother myself, I was even more so after my pregnancies, and all the experiences I've had raising my kids so far. Not because they weren’t amazing little miraculous beings that grew in my womb, but because quality parenting is all-encompassing. Kids need constant care and attention in all sorts of ways, for years; it is, frankly, more than some women, or girls, have to give. Especially those with no support systems, who are poor, young, or struggling to feed the kids they already have.
Besides, legislating what people do with their bodies doesn’t work. Prohibition in the 1920s didn’t stop people from drinking alcohol. Laws haven’t stopped people from using drugs, or selling their bodies for money, and historically it didn't stop desperate women from finding ways to abort their pregnancies.
If people are really against abortion, they should do all they can to promote sex education and birth control methods, because of course nobody's going to stop people from having sex, either.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2015.