Earlier this week, I posted an article about abortion conversations that generated a great deal of discussion.
Here, I just wanted to thank everyone for their comments and highlight some of the amazeness.
The title quote about judgments came from vcmvo2's comment about a couple who had to end a pregnancy to save the mom-to-be from a heart defect.
Vcmvo2 wrote:
It can be very difficult to make the decision [to end a preganancy] because the reasons vary from woman to woman. I met a couple who didn't want one at all. It distressed them as they wanted the baby badly but it was killing the mom.
She had a really bad heart defect that only revealed itself during the last trimester.
They held out as long as they could but the baby wasn't maturing fast enough and my friend was getting worse rapidly.
Her husband was a wreck because he had to convince the wife to let it go.
They eventually recovered together, She got treated and her heart was strengthened enough to try in several years. And this time with no surprises and constant supervision she managed to give birth.
But even so they continued to come to the grief support group because it was no way over for them.
All kinds of things happen on the way to giving birth. And that is exactly why it is a choice for the woman to make. No man and his piddling little suggestions should ever come between women and their doctors. The causes of pregnancy are many. It is rarely a straight up experience and it requires compassion as well as allowing women the space they need to explain, if they want, why it was easy, bad, difficult, a relief or what. Anything that a woman feels about pregnancy is her experience and valid.
She may need more support and it should be freely given. She may be just fine and that should also be accepted. It's the constant judgments that wear women down.
What I love about her comment is how she frames the issue within the context of empathy and compassion and non-judgment. Things happen that we can't always anticipate and when they do, we should step up and help rather than judge.
Is abortion a "difficult" decision?
The second comment I'd like to highlight is one that I struggled with (in a good way) because it went against my own personal beliefs. BoiseBlue wrote:
As a woman, I'm not comfortable framing it [ending a pregnancy] as
something that carries a great deal of weight. For many women, it's not a difficult decision at all.
I don't believe it should be treated as anything other than a simple outpatient medical procedure. That's what it is, and our insinuations that it's a "difficult" choice undermines our very own claim that a fetus is not a baby. It undermines the claim that women can be trusted to make their own medical decisions.
It's simply not that hard of a choice for many women.
Where I struggled with this comment was in two respects: 1) it sounded harsh to me and 2) it went against my own experience with someone I knew who had had an abortion.
What I eventually realized was that BoiseBlue was trying to say something similar to vcmvo2's comment above that women shouldn't be "judged" if they decide to terminate a pregnancy. Framing it as a momentous emotional decision is a judgment that may or may not be true for all women.
I'm going to use a couple of other comments to help elaborate. Coquiero wrote:
For me, the most important point to get across is that women will ALWAYS have abortions. How anyone feels about it is irrelevant. It's our job to protect women who need or want abortions. It's not our job to question their whys. Do you trust women or not? If you trust women to make their own choices, then we have to make the procedure safe and legal for them.
The idea that everyone is conveying in one form or another is that medical procedures need to be available because it will happen. We know people sought options even when they were illegal. Our compassion should be non-judgmental and we should make safe options available.
Vetgrl said it this way:
This point is key. When we talk about abortion being a difficult choice, vel non, we often overlook that there are two very different meanings of the phrase.
The first is the anecdotal, like conquiero says above. This is personal to her and it's really not for any of us to say she was wrong.
The second is what you, pat of butter (my God, I love your screen name) are getting at -- the political frame that abortion is, and always ought to be, a very difficult decision.
It's the frame that we have to fight against because it seeks to impose upon us a prescribed reaction. Put another way, the frame seeks to push to the margins those of us for whom the decision to abort wasn't or isn't difficult.
I like the phrasing "prescribed reaction." Basically, what several people said was don't try to normalize one particular view of the decision to have an abortion.
Meteor Blades recommended Katha Pollitt's recent book Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights in which she makes a similar case regarding the framing of the choice as "difficult".
I would now say "it depends on the person" in answer to the question, is it a difficult decision? What I do know is that it's going to happen and we should make safe medical procedures available.
Period.
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Specifically use the freedom frame
Jill Klausen said:
The only other thing I would have added would be to have specifically used the word "freedom" in that post instead of simply implying it.
Another counter argument against the "baby killer" meme is that while we agree it's tragic to lose a potential life, it's even more tragic when we lose an actual life. We don't want to be woman-killers either. All pregnancies, whether high risk or not, carry with them the possibility of death to the woman. The list of serious complications is long and often unpredictable. Every woman should have the freedom to assess those risks and make the most responsible choice for herself.
Remember, the focus is on winning the independents
The Phlebob wrote:
I like your focus on strategy and on who we're trying to convince. It's never the die-hards, and it can never be them. It's those in the vast middle, who don't have their egos tied up in their beliefs and still have their intelligence and independence. It's critical that we remember that or we'll burn ourselves out.
Don't spin your wheels too much on the hard core few. Spend your energy on the much larger group of independents.
If a fetus were a baby, why aren't we trying to save fetuses that die from natural causes?
Gooserock had this to say:
Since 3/4 of all penetrated eggs die before birth, that would make 3/4 of all people killed by natural abortions.
You can't cop out by saying it's "natural." Heart attacks and floods are "natural" but we spend billions fighting them just to save a few thousand lives a year.
If fertilized eggs were "people" then the Christians should have been lobbying for centuries to divert most of our scientific and medical research into saving these millions of "lives" we lose every year.
Far more than lives lost to deliberate abortions. Or sharks or hurricanes or terrorists.
Let's be honest, it's really about punishing women.
What's interesting is that as a society, we don't seem to want to punish men in the same way. If dad was the primary caregiver, would we have commercials for clinics (like the commercials for erectile dysfunction treatments or Viagra)?
Enlist people to help care for the full life of the child
I love this approach because I suspect that many so-called "right to lifers" would rather not get involved in caring for children.
Anon004 wrote:
I was on HuffPo once and I was conversing with a pro-forced birther who was so proud that her group (whoever that was) had convinced a woman to take an ultrasound (this was in the days before state-required rape by vaginal probe) and because of what she saw, the woman decided not to have the abortion.
I responded by politely asking about her groups follow up with this woman -- did they see that she got good prenatal care and nutrition, did they see if, after the baby was born that the baby got good nutrition and medical care. Did they see if the women had good quality child care when she went to work or did they provide the means for her to stay home with her baby? Did they ensure the woman made a living wage and and decent housing for her and her child? Do they see to it that the child got a quality education in a good school district and make sure the child had access to activities outside school like dance or scouting or athletics? Did they help the child navigate through the maze of getting into the right college and getting sufficient financial aid? Did they use their connections and networking to get the child a job interview (or for the mother if she became unemployed during the period she was responsible for the child?
I'm pretty sure I lost the pro-forced birther at the phrase "did you follow-up" but I hope I made a few people realize that forcing a person to take care of a child from birth to 24 years is requiring them to make a huge commitment and when you do that, so you better be ready to assist them when they need it.
Ask people how they're going to follow up.
It's very easy to be self-righteous when you're talking about a decision you want someone else to make.
It doesn't look so moral though when someone tries to tell other people what to do without supporting them in any way, shape, or form for the rest of the child's life.
Thank you again
To me, the best part about the DKos community is the discussion. I learn as much (if not more) from talking with other people as I do from writing.
Thanks again to everyone who hopped on to share and comment. If you'd like to read the full post and discussion thread, it's here.
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David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy.