Half of all pregnancies are accidental, and some of those are going to be unwelcome, unsupportable or unviable, as well as unplanned.
Abortion, therefore, needs to come out of the closet and be claimed as a “positive social good,” Pollitt argues. “It is an essential option for women — not just ones in dramatic, terrible, body-and-soul-destroying situations, but all women — and thus benefits society as a whole.”
If we hewed to the notion that an embryo achieves personhood when sperm meets egg, Pollitt argues, we’d have to investigate all miscarriages as potential homicides, perhaps punishable by death, as one Georgia bill proposed. And why don’t more die-hard abortion opponents fret over embryos discarded during the course of I.V.F.? The reason is that destroying an embryo in pursuit of a baby is part of a noble struggle, whereas destroying an embryo to finish high school or law school or even to put enough food on the table for other kids is considered selfish at best. (“The difference between a petri dish and a womb isn’t in the embryos,” Pollitt writes, “it’s in the woman’s perceived intention.”)
As the years passed, the reasons for my friends’ abortions shifted from teenage haplessness to failed IUDs to dire fetal anomalies to chemotherapy to, yes, rape. Not to mention: “This is not the right time for my family.” Or: “This is not the right time for me.”
In two generations, contraception and abortion have allowed women to widen their worlds dramatically. If you’re a woman, I don’t need to detail all the barriers we still face. If you’re a mother, I don’t need to tell you all the ways in which the workplace is set up as if you didn’t have kids, and schools, camps and childhood extracurriculars as if you didn’t have a job. There are still those who would reduce women to potting soil, or in the immortal words of Todd Akin, a source of “food and climate control” who enter into a contract to raise a child every time we have sex. Motherhood is hard enough if you go into it willingly. And Pollitt is correct to insist that the right to an abortion is merely society’s down payment on all the rights we are yet due.
So, if I'm getting this right, a) abortion is legal- women can abort their babies up until a certain portion of the pregnancy, b) afterwards they experience negative feelings because they did something that seems morally questionable and certainly anti-biological, c) godamn those negative feelz!, d) they try to convince the world, and most especially themselves, that abortion is a "positive social good", and if you don't think so THAN YOU MAY JUST END UP BEING PUT TO DEATH AFTER A MISCARRIAGE (BECAUSE THAT SERIOUSLY MIGHT HAPPEN1111), e) RAPE, JUST BECAUSE, and f) FYI: the entire world is against women
so, therefore, g) all that bullshit makes my feelz a little better.
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