My mom was a hippie activist feminist. The sort who communed nude with nature, and bought her 6 year old shirts with that wonderful quote about fish needing a bicycle. Part of that was being very pro-choice. She firmly embraced the idea that women should be in control of their own bodies.
She explained things in extremes, because every avalanche starts with pebble, every flood starts with a drop of rain. The small things, the things you let go by because they seem like no big deal add up.
I'm pro-choice for my daughter, just like mom was pro-choice for me. We made our choices, to have our children. Now I want them to have the same choices my mother and countless other people like her made sure that I had. Choice is part of freedom, it can't be separated from a woman's basic right to pursue her own happiness and create her own destiny.
So women keep fighting for the right to fight in wars, to work in traditionally male jobs, to have power over their destinies and follow their dreams. They are winning these fights, but there is one thing that keeps popping up that can slam the whole women's movement back to the 19th century, that can be used to curtail all freedom for women.
Reproductive rights.
Suppose a woman can't get access to reliable birth control, she's got a great career, her whole life as a productive and happy member of society is in front of her. She uses what she can get, she's making responsible choices but for whatever reason (and there are a lot of medical reasons) she can't use birth control pills. She's in a monogamous relationship and she gets pregnant even with all those precautions. This woman is not a slut. She's planning. She's being careful. Should her life,her plans, be put on hold or cancelled entirely? Should this bright young woman have to marry in order to have security for her and her coming child?
Then what have we fought so hard for? This is exactly the same option she would have decades ago.
But that woman isn't only one facing that. My mother had an IUD, she was in a committed relationship, and she got pregnant. A doctor determined that she had very little chance of carrying the fetus to term. If by some miracle, there was a live birth, the child would have been severely disabled. This is the sort of thing that ruins good marriages. Mom had a really hard choice to make. She also had health issues. People keep trying to make it clear that pregnancy is normal, that pregnant women can be healthy and strong, but pregnancy is hard on bodies. It kills women every year.
Why should anyone be involved in that decision other than my mother and her doctor?
How about the thousands of women every year impregnated against their will by a rapist? Can you imagine the pain of having to take care of yourself while carrying your attacker's fetus to term?
But those aren't the only reasons I'm pro-choice. Remember that pebble?
If you don't have the choice with your own body, if a fetus is a human life that can be murdered- then how much choice do you have with your body?
What's considered child abuse at that point? Who gets control of you to keep you from abusing your fetus? Does your job involve lifting, working with chemicals, anything like that? Well, now you have to quit. But someone will have to help you pay the bills. You are no longer in charge of your own destiny.
Take it a step further, there were jobs that women of child bearing years were not allowed to do in some places. But now in the interest of protecting the fetus, you're a potential walking incubator all the time if you're a fertile woman. So you can't have that glass of wine without your partner or another person to say "No, she couldn't be pregnant." You can't work certain jobs.
This is the core of pro-choice, the idea that a woman, capable of voting, running a household or large corporation, someone with experience and a life ahead of them is valuable. That their rights are not less because they have a uterus that can sustain and develop life.
So yes, I'm against murder charges for fetuses. I'm against laws that prevent pregnant women from drinking, I'm against anything that can be that pebble, that can start the flood that ends with women being nothing more than walking incubators for the next generation. Because without the right to choose, half of that next generation will be kept like children for most of their adult lives and possibly never get to reach their full potential and that full potential can be amazing for the human race.