I've always been opposed to abortion because I feel that a child is a child from the moment of conception. With my own child growing inside of me, I have been reading more and more about fetal development in the first trimester of pregnancy: the baby can feel pain, has fingernails, has all major body organs, kicks and swims gracefully in the amniotic sac, has reflexes, and by week 12 can even suck it's thumb. To me, all of these milestones are markers of humanity. And as I've read about my baby's progress and seen my baby's ultrasound, I keep being reminded that thousands of babies are killed despite showing these markers of humanity. No, my child could not survive outside of the womb. But when people raise this issue, I'm reminded that no infant can survive outside the womb without someone caring for it.
I'm not opposed to contraceptives or sexual education. I experienced both and was especially grateful for contraceptives so that Tucker and I could somewhat plan when we started our family. But I get so frustrated with the liberal-conservative vitriol over the issue of abortion. Liberals claim that pro-lifers are misogynistic for wanting to limit a woman's rights to her body. Conservatives claim that pro-choicers are favoring convenience over a child's life. Both sides are guilty of hypocrisy. Liberals rail on conservatives for being pro-life while limiting access to basic human rights like healthcare. My question for liberals is how a child's right to life is not considered a basic human right? Further, how can some claim a woman's right to her body trumps a child's right to live? Many pro-choicers claim that a woman's rights have precedence because the fetus is not truly human yet. But as Ayelet Waldman's interview admits, as quoted below, with modern-day technology, it's hard to argue a fetus is just a "clump of cells."
I'm not saying that many women don't agonize over the issue of abortion. Ayelet Waldman gave a raw, emotional interview with NPR's Fresh Air describing her second-trimester abortion and the searing pain of knowing she had killed her baby after finding out that the baby could potentially have a chromosomal disorder. She admitted that it wasn't a matter of not being able to afford care for the child but that it was a matter of not wanting to care for a special needs child. After making her decision, she was depressed for over a year. She was racked with guilt. Yet, she still supports a woman's right to choose. While I don't understand her perspective, I respect her honesty in facing the fact that she did not abort "a clump of cells" but that she killed her baby. Here is an excerpt from her interview:
I think I would respect pro-choicers more if they at least admitted that it's not "all about a woman's right to her body" as if somehow there is no other person involved. There are other people involved, one person in particular: the child, who is being killed by no fault of its own.“For women of my mother’s generation, who struggled so hard to get the right to abortion, what they needed to do in order to achieve that right and to maintain it was to describe what they were doing in a certain way. So I - you know, when they were describing the process of having an abortion, language was really important to them.“So they never called the baby a baby. It was a fetus. It was an embryo at best, you know. It was - and this is a quote - a clump of cells. But to women like me, who've grown up in the age of the ultrasound, we now have three-dimensional ultrasounds of our babies from the very beginning, you know, when we can actually see their features, recognizable features, and we can see them suck their thumbs. And for us, abortion - even though I think I am absolutely as committed to choice as my mother is - the idea of abortion and the fact of abortion has become something very different. And I think women of my mother’s generation are very uncomfortable with how we talk about abortion….“Well, we had a D&E, which is a dilation and extraction, which is they, you know - and here’s another point where, you know, my mother and I differ completely on this. You know, my mother, when she describes a procedure, she doesn't describe the details. And for me, I needed to know exactly what was happening. And in this procedure, your cervix is dilated, and the baby is extracted, and the baby's extracted, essentially, in pieces from your uterus.“It's horrible. It’s - the photographs that you see that the right-to-lifers show, you know, they're real photographs. I mean, that's really what it’s like. And I say this because I feel like I can’t support a woman’s right to choose unless I’m willing to look at the darkest side of it, and that was the darkest side of it.“So one of the things I asked the incredibly generous, gentle doctor who did the abortion was, I asked him if he would make sure that the baby didn’t feel anything. That was – sorry (crying) That was really important to me, that he be dead, essentially, before that grim process took place. And the doctor promised me that he would give an injection that would make that happen.”
But to me, Conservatives are just as hypocritical. Conservatives rail on liberals for being murderers, yet these same right-wingers will readily jump on board with the United States' imperialistic war aims, nuclear proliferation programs, and death penalty defenses. My question for conservatives is, if you're going to be pro-life, shouldn't you carefully consider war, nuclear issues, and the death penalty? How is an aborted child any different than a death-row inmate that's not truly guilty, or innocent civilians caught up in drone attacks? Shouldn't conservatives also be trailblazers for international aid programs and fair-trade support to protect children overseas from slavery and trafficking? Shouldn't conservatives be front-runners for foster care programs and adoption programs? If conservatives truly believe in anti-abortion, shouldn't they be just as concerned with caring for the children after they are born? Otherwise their rhetoric for cherishing and protecting life falls flat.
I read a New York Times Op-Ed today called "The Safe, Legal, Rare Illusion" that revealed the similarities among Republicans and Democrats regarding the abortion issue as well as the cracks in each sides' argument. The author claimed the pitfalls of the Conservatives' program against abortion was
"that it doesn’t map particularly well onto contemporary mores and life patterns. A successful chastity-centric culture seems to depend on a level of social cohesion, religious intensity and shared values that exists only in small pockets of the country."About Liberals' program against abortion, the author explained,
"a lack of contraceptive access simply doesn’t seem to be a significant factor in unplanned pregnancy in the United States. When the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed more than 10,000 women who had procured abortions in 2000 and 2001, it found that only 12 percent cited problems obtaining birth control as a reason for their pregnancies. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of teenage mothers found similar results: Only 13 percent of the teens reported having had trouble getting contraception."The author, clearly favoring a more right-to-life stance, concluded his article with the following:
"At the very least, American conservatives are hardly crazy to reject a model for sex, marriage and family that seems to depend heavily on higher-than-average abortion rates. They’ve seen that future in places like liberal, cosmopolitan New York, where two in five pregnancies end in abortion. And it isn’t a pretty sight."
I don't think that pro-choicers and pro-lifers will ever admittedly share common ground. But I sure would love to see us engage in respectful discourse that admits the areas of hypocrisy in each sides' arguments and stops using hyperbolic rhetoric that reveals at best half-truths. In other words, the media rants against Susan G. Komen and Rush Limbaugh's offensive comments need to stop. This type of mudslinging doesn't help anyone, least of all the unborn children many conservatives hope to speak for.
