Michelle Goldberg said it best:
Sex-selective abortion is a problem worldwide, but not in our country.
Sex-selective abortion is odious. But banning it means allowing the government to decide what constitutes a legitimate reason for a woman to terminate a pregnancy, and forcing doctors to try to discern the motives of their patients.
I am Pro-Choice.
I believe in, and fully support, a woman's right to fully control her own reproductive destiny.
I believe that any woman should be able to obtain, or to opt of her own free will not to, a safe and legal abortion in a professionally staffed medical facility. I also believe that she should also be able to do so completely absent of having to prove to anyone else's secondary satisfaction that she is serious, that she has come to her final decision, and/or without her ever having to either explain or detail her own reason(s) to anyone else as to why she is choosing to seek an abortion. That is a private discussion between a patient and her doctor.
My position is pretty straightforward: 'It's her body, and it's her choice'.
I believe that no woman should ever have to endure the reprehensible indignity of being forced by self-appointed guardians of both her womb and her virtue to prove to their satisfaction that her decision is binding. She should no more have to endure any battery of medically unecessary but still mandated procedures and examinations to get an appointment at a professional facility than she should have to run a gauntlet of physical harassment, scorn, and abuse to sucessfully get inside of it.
In the original version of this diary, I posted my own personal Choice manifesto because of the issue of Movement Conservatives using the bad beltway triangulation of "Safe, Legal, and Rare" against Pro-Choice Women and all their supporters as a weapon. To shame people who support Choice into navel gazing on that stance because of any statistical fluctuations in the number of overall abortion proceedures that might occur that flies in the face of any kind of dedication to the totally uneccessary and irrelevant "and rare" add-on.
I said:
I fully support a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, or not, regardless of how many women may choose to have one, or how many abortions an individual woman may choose to have in her childbearing years. I want abortion to be safe and legal. Period. That's it.
I do not care one whit if abortions are rare or if they are not.
My reasoning was straightforward:
'Because it is absolutely none of my fucking business'.
Even if the abortion rate declines, or stays the same, or even if there is a very significant and sustained increase in the number of overall abortions. I am Pro-Choice first. There is absolutely nothing about a false equating of reducing abortion rates with being as important ensuring safe and legal abortion access and accessibility itself that matters to me or even enters my thinking.
I steadfastly refuse to allow somebody else's 'ick factor' about the unpleansantness of the medical procedure color either my activism or my philosophical position on defending Choice.
That is a core belief of mine that has not changed.
I revisit this manifesto on Choice because of a recent attempt to roll back abortion rights that came clad in the guise of enacting a solution in search of a problem: the fiction that there is a gender based abortion "crisis" in the USA because a single employee was deliberately scammed by a fake patient "undercover" at a clinic.
Recently, bad faith Movement Conservatives in the U.S. House of Representatives tried to take this Breitbart style ratfucking of a Planned Parenthood employee and turn it into a faux outrage to create a media feak-out, shame any semi-supporters of Choice into running away from their position, and also to attempt to not just go about restricting Choice, but actually criminalizing perfectly legal abortions and injecting themselves in the private affairs of doctors and patients. They intended to do this via a law intended to force an aggressive government intrusion into a woman's private deliberations with her doctor about why she has made her extremely personal and private choice and all under the pretense of attacking a simply non-existent gender-based abortion "crisis".
They tried, and thankfully failed, to pass this law that would essentially criminalize abortion (up to and including real prison time for the doctor and a criminal record and fine for the patient) if the woman seeking the abortion's personal reasons for seeking it were not up to par, in a very cynical hurry.
Light speed for this Republican House, which cannot even manage to deal with a jobs crisis in the fallout from one of the geatest economic periods of crisis since the Great Depression, and that is the big transparent tell that gives away the whole game.
This was never about 'Gender Selection' or a counter 'War on Women, if they just happen to be babies'. Not even for a moment. This was the work of regressives who proudly support the total banning of all abortion access, even in extreme and stomach churning cases of rape or incest. Even if the woman will certainly die without the proceedure. There is no acceptable reason for having one, at all, let alone various sub-catagories of Choice that are more offensive or more acceptable than others, to the Great American Womb Police.
This was a cynical power grab on the back of a fake outrage to roll back women's rights and to criminalize a woman exercising her basic rights as a woman to control her own body freely as it is her right to do so.
To an activist Movement Conservative, a true regressive, nothing in any part of American political life or policy that can be thought of by their movement as being a "liberal" policy or matter in place is ever truly a settled argument that is then simply moved on from. Not collective bargaining. Not environmental law. Not child labor laws. Not our voting rights. Not the minimum wage. Not Social Security. Not Medicare. Not Medicaid. Not workplace safety. Not Mirada rights. Not contraception.
And certainly Not Choice.
We cannot, and must not, even get conned into quibbling on regressive anti-Choice terms, up to and including endulging the inside-the-beltway elites fetish for fixating on anyone else's "ick factor" in what should always be a totally private decision between a woman and her doctor.
It is none of my business, nor anyone else's, why a woman might excersize her right to choose to control her own body. If any of us were to be suddenly magically privvy to the very private deliberations of anyone making such a painful and personal choice, we might not all agree with why a person may come to a certain decision, or approve of it at all, but really, that opinion is something that simply doesn't matter. It is something that shouldn't matter at all. Because that woman's choice, that woman's decision, and all of its so very painful and very personal intimate details, is fundamentally none of our damned business.
I trust women to make the right decisions about themselves. Each time. Every time. I have the courage of my convictions in every bit of my personal stance on supporting the right to choose. But there are clearly people who don't. They are the type of folks who cynically will do and say anything to get their way in the war on women.
In this case, it was a cynical and intellectually dishonest stunt about trying to portray America as being "like China" or "like India" because ideally a woman and her private lady plumbing simply aren't meant to be controlled by her father, her boyfriend, her husband, her pastor, her church, or her State here, clad in protecting women in the longterm. Let's tell a big lie, that we have a very real problem in the third-world happening right here in the U.S. and sit back and see if we can exploit any cracks that come up in the show.
But the other part of this was especially devious, it was a salvo in getting people who ordinarily believe that they have no right to intrusively speculate or voyeuristically dwell to do so 'in this special case' as if it is their place to do so 'just this once'. To try and spark a phony debate on the reasons why people who are not them might seek an abortion and about what hypothetical abortion decision triggers which are hypothetically worthy of our outside intrusion into any safe and legal abortion decision and which ones are not as a society.
What if. What if the outlier, that a woman might abort a baby simply for being a girl, is not an outlier? How do we know? Unless we prove it by deeply intruding, how do we know? We know by trusting the women in control of their own bodies are not the capricious straw women that the zealots paint them as. We know by both believing them, and believing in them. I am a man, and I am a feminist. There is no conflict in that.
A woman has a right to choose, period, and that woman who excersizes that right to choose should be able to obtain a safe and legal abortion at a clean and professionally staffed facility free of harassment and abuse. It's not my job or my place to try and talk you out of having a safe and legal abortion, or worry about your wanting to have one or why. Just like it's not the state's job to make a woman seeking an abortion's journey as difficult as possible so she quits in despair and has an unwanted child.
An unwanted child that regressive anti-Choicers and Movement Conservatives will then, naturally, refuse to give a tinker's damn about beause they are only "Pro-Life" until Birth. Then you are screwed.
It's simple: If you don't want to have an abortion, then fine, don't have an abortion.
Also simple: A woman is entirely capable of making her own extremely calm, deliberate, rational, reasonable, measured, and very carefully considered decision as to what to do about her own body all on her own.
Let us be clear of what is at stake, what rotten games are being played here, and the very real danger of allowing Choice to be eroded any further because of a distraction or in any misguided and hopeless attempt to satiate those whose big appetite to control the bodies of women they don't know is boundless.
Now, the zealots feel completely free to require that a woman essentially be subjected to state sanctioned rape with a foreign object, or they feel totally free to try and pass a law that says a woman should have to fill out a long and detailed questionaire giving her deepest reasons for why she is at the clinic, while at the same time demanding that her doctor and nurses act as potential informers, and are forced to keep notes on what is said and that they should also be available for later police investigation over the details of that woman's choice if any somebody, anybody at all, comes forward and charges that she made that choice for the "wrong" reason. From there, you could go to jail, your doctor and your nurses could go all do jail. Or everyone involved could all face debilitating fines, state-sanctioned harassment, and abuse. All this is from the "little government" crowd.
It's just another huge warning sign in a slow but steady string of huge warning signs simply not to be ignored here. There has been too much compromise and too much endulgence of those who would presume to be better at making up a woman's mind for her in the last few decades.
If you give regressives an inch they will always take a mile. Always. Your own rights, or a loved ones rights, not just to simply control your own body but also not to die in agony in some dank cellar or storage room at the hands of some freak could all be taken away if you yield and give that inch too many times.
The return of the back alley abortionist and the filthy coat hanger that butchers and kills desperate women who seek him out should always be too high a price to pay to try and satisfy somebody else's 'ick factor'. That is what we will be faced with as a society if all women ever lose the right to the choice to have a safe and legal abortion here.
Abortion is going nowhere. There will always be abortions. It's access to a safe and legal abortion that is what is on the table in the war over Choice, not the existence of abortion itself. Don't let anything obfuscate that this is the reality and the end game of losing this fight. Innocent people dying in pain rather than being operated on in a sterile facility and then recovering safely under the attention and care of a doctor.