This is sort of about abortion but not entirely. It is more about how strange and murky the origins of a human being is. To put it out there, I would say that I come down on the pro-choice side of the abortion question, but I detest this idiotic way that it is debated: “Get your laws off my body” vs “Stop murdering babies.” It’s not that simple and no one wins that debate. But I feel that if people were to consider the realities of the situation, and how to improve those realities based on common sense, we might actually fight less and get somewhere.

This is a long one…

My Background

So, I was raised in a conservative household, with a pro-life perspective, though it wasn’t discussed much. My parents have shifted way to the libertarian right in the years since I was a child, so I didn’t get as a hard a pro-life indoctrination as I might haveg. I am grateful for that because it let me consider what was right for myself, without fear of going too far against the family moral code.

Regardless, there was a bit of an idea about “murdering babies” and stories of a friend who had an abortion and regretted it later. In addition, my mom thinks that her mother tried to abort her, because she has a large, vague scar mark on her thigh that’s always been there. She was the third child, unplanned and her mother was not without troubles - drinking, unhappiness, attempted (unsuccessful) suicide later in life. So I don’t discount the possibility that Mom is right about that. And I can understand that creating some resentment about abortion! At the same time, I’m glad my grandmother didn’t kill the both of them in the process.

I have been considering this problem since I was 15, or earlier. I would have called myself pro-life at one point. Then I spoke to the mom of some kids I babysat for, and she told me about the coat-hanger phenomenon, and that opened my eyes a good bit.

After a couple decades of thinking about it, here is where I have landed: abortions are tragic and horrible and painful. But like many things, if you outlaw them, rather than go away, they just go underground and become more awful. My perspective is rather pragmatic, in response.

Pragmatism

I have a theory that a primary difference between socially conservative and liberal is pragmatism vs idealism. I agree with conservatives about quite a few ideals. I just don’t think they work that way in practice. Yes, I would like abortions to not exist. Does that mean that blaming women and making them illegal will accomplish that? No. If pregnancy exists, ending pregnancy will also exist.

It seems to me that the conservative ideals of “personal liberty” tend to fall away in favor of conforming to a social standard. Such as, we want you to be “free” but we don’t want you to be gay or a single parent, or transgender, and we don’t want you not to conform to our structure, because “family values.” Though I don’t see how one person’s life choice interferes with the next person’s freedom to make their own choice. I think that protecting freedoms only gets more important when they challenge your comfort zone. Anyway.

Abortion doesn’t appear out of nowhere. There are many factors that set the groundwork for pregnancies and therefore abortions. Shame around sex, so you can’t talk about it, or be informed. Not that the information doesn’t exist, but if it isn’t taught at a young age, it’s a problem because that’s when we need it most!

Planned Parenthood is condemned for offering abortions. But they are the best and often only affordable resource for birth control and cancer screening. I went there for a check up and birth control and they were wonderful. If you get rid of access to low-cost birth control, you will have more unplanned pregnancies, not fewer.

If you are someone who thinks that sex is sinful and people should be abstinent, I refer you to the existence of the human sexual urge. It is powerful. It isn’t new and it isn’t going away. Besides that, people are reaching puberty earlier and getting married later than ever before in history. Making sex shameful and a taboo will only make people repressed, guilty, unprepared and miserable when they do have sex. Yes, sex is a responsibility and it should be handled responsibly. Teaching them how it works won’t make them leap into sex sooner. Trust people with that responsibility and prepare them for it, don’t shame them and keep it secret. Driving a car, joining the military and voting are also huge responsibilities, but we try to prepare young people for them. If they can be trusted to do those things, why can’t we trust them with their own bodies?

Shame

I was not prepared for sex. I didn’t understand nearly enough about it. I felt the shame too, even though I was fairly responsible. But it sure could have been better. I was freaked out by condoms and that could have easily gone wrong, if I were more fertile. Or perhaps that was just luck. I am very thankful I did not get pregnant with my emotionally unavailable ex. That would have been a disaster. I was financially unstable and sometimes hungry. I had this silly idea that if I got pregnant I would have to go live in my parents goat shed. Because my ex-fiance was not able to take care of his own finances, never mind a baby’s, and I had very meager financial prospects, and few marketable skills.

Anyway, shame about sex lays the groundwork, for abortion. Because if sex is evil and sinful, and pregnancy is therefore sinful, then it is sinful and evil if you do get pregnant. And if you have no future if you become a parent at an inconvenient time, then it makes you desperate. And desperate people do desperate things. So you can’t just take our puritanically-descended Christian culture and expect to make abortion go away because you outlaw it. People will have sex. It won’t stop because some preachers say so.

In addition to these factors is the social pressure not to have kids. If you want people to bear and raise the children they are gestating, it needs to not be the end of a person’s hopes and dreams. I would argue that the pathway to put children up for adoption should be made more open and embraced, and we should have options so that people can raise children and not be trapped in poverty. I’ll wager that a lot of abortions happen because women feel they have no way to raise those children and can’t give them a good life. On the other side of this, a ton of people want children and can’t have them biologically, but don’t even consider adoption, because it can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take years.

Some people say abortion is murder, but if it feels like the end of your life as you know it to have a baby, what would you do? A woman still needs to be able to feed herself and her kids, and go to school to get the job she wants, and that involves childcare. The “American dream” is an ideal we love, but it is very hard to get out of poverty. Wages can be low, and house prices are high. Never mind the cost of health insurance and such. Minimum wage work does not do the trick.

You may think that is all the social issues that are beyond the scope of abortion, but those are all the things that set the stage for a person’s life and her decisions. If a woman is pregnant and trying to figure out how to live and whether she can raise a baby, that is what she is thinking of. If she will be shamed, and trapped in poverty, and give up her dreams, with no options for that baby, who would want that? If she would still be respected and can raise her baby and still get an education and not be trapped in poverty, that may change the situation in some cases.

I am not saying that would make all abortions go away, but it is an important factor that contributes.

Autonomy

The other element here is bodily autonomy. That one gets squirrely. Does a fetus have rights? Is it a citizen? Do those rights supercede the rights of the person carrying that fetus, if it is against her will? What about if the only way to save another person’s life was to donate a kidney? Should that procedure be mandated against the donor’s will? Does that person’s life supercede your own will? These are murky ethical questions, but the right to your own person ought to be pretty central, wouldn’t you say?

I honestly don’t know that I can draw absolute lines here. Life is precious. However, pregnancy and childbirth is a risky, all-consuming experience. I got pregnant and it very, very nearly killed me, because it was a ruptured ectopic. This stuff is not for the faint of heart. Forcing it on a person would be a very deep trauma. When I learned my baby had no heartbeat, I had to live with the knowledge that there was a dead baby in my womb for a week before my D&C, and I couldn’t do anything about it. That was a deeply horrible feeling. For me, it was because my baby died, but having a baby there against your will, and you can’t do anything about it, could be equally awful and disempowering.

When Does Life Start?

Then there is the question of when does life start? As a person doing IVF and who has lost three pregnancies, I have a deeper understanding of these mechanics. I don’t know that I can say when life starts. What is conception? Is it a fertilized egg? Or a five day old embryo like the ones I have in the freezer at the fertility clinic? And how does that relate to the fact that if I get a positive pregnancy test I won’t even tell anyone till I get to the 2nd trimester so I can have a little confidence it might stick? After three losses, this is my reality.

Because for sure, every fertilized egg, and every embryo, is not going to be a person. That is not my choice, that is how Mother Nature works. The IVF community calls the process of going from number of collected eggs to seeing how many are fertilized and then how many grow into day 5 embryos that can be transferred to the womb, “the Hunger Games,” and that’s about right. In IVF a person can get any where from a handful to a couple dozen eggs in one egg retrieval. Sometimes more, sometimes fewer. And the number that fertilize and are healthy and will grow into a healthy fetus varies wildly but it is not many. Twenty eggs can easily result in just a couple of embryos, and they may not even grow successfully into babies.

What it’s Like

If anyone thinks that abortion is a birth control strategy, let me explain that it is not just something you do that’s no big deal. It hurts, physically. It is a process. I speak from experience. I haven’t had what is generally considered an abortion, but I have had the same procedures. I took the mifiprestone and misoprostel - medication abortion when my doctor misdiagnosed my ectopic pregnancy as a miscarriage. They use those drugs to clear out the contents of the uterus. Which means hours of cramping and contractions and days or weeks of bleeding. (For me it worked to expel some contents but of course did not address the ectopic pregnancy which ruptured later.)

And then I had a D&C for my missed miscarriage just a couple of months ago, which was followed by very painful contractions for a few days. I don’t think everyone has that much pain with a D&C, but it’s still a surgical procedure. My point is, no one can take this lightly. Anyone who acts like an abortion is easy and casual has never experienced these things.

There are also conversations about allowing abortions with medication, but not surgically, which I take issue with. If you take the drugs for a medical abortion, and it doesn’t work, you may have to do a surgical one to complete the job. You can’t do it half way, and it needs a doctors care. Anything that restricts doctors in giving the right care is going to cause problems.

Ungrounded Idealism

That is what I am concerned about here. Making vast, idealistic statements about what is morally okay, and then acting like it’s a surprise when women wind up hurting themselves attempting home abortions, or getting incomplete medical care, is just irresponsible. Remember when politicians in Ohio tried to pass legislation that ectopic pregnancies have to be reimplanted, so you don’t kill the baby? Ha! Well, that sounds lovely, but that’s not something we have the medical capability to do right now. Meaning the idealism is out of touch with realities on the ground.

Plus Medical Reasons

There are people who would outlaw abortion based on a Down Syndrome diagnosis. Terminations for Medical Reasons (TFMR) is a sadly not uncommon occurrence. And these are wanted babies, with parents making the best choice they can to spare their baby suffering. We would do no less for a pet living in pain. For abortion laws to get involved and make those situations worse is unconscionable.

When I was pregnant with my baby who miscarried, I was terrified that my baby would have Down Syndrome and I would have to decide whether to keep the baby knowing he would live with a huge medical burden from the outset. Part of my fear was that my mother would disown me if I decided on a termination for that reason. Having to make that choice one way or the other was my worst fear. And I did have a baby with Down Syndrome, a boy, but he wasn’t strong enough to make it to 11 weeks, so I was spared that decision. It still broke my heart to lose him.

When a baby is born, there is certainly a being, a consciousness. At what point does that consciousness take root? I don’t think we can know. That was a part of my decision making process. That is not to say that people with Down Syndrome can’t live vibrant wonderful lives. It is a wide spectrum of health and life experience, same as everyone else. That is where it is just not absolute and I don’t think you can dictate it. Mandate that no one can have a medical termination for that reason? Or mandate that everyone must? No. It is too personal.

This enters into my spiritual beliefs though too. I believe a spiritual being will enter a growing body to become my child. But I don’t know if a being has taken up residence in a 10 week old fetus. I hope that the spirit who would have been my baby boy will find a body who will be strong and have a full life.

In Summary

After my experiences, I feel that to be a woman is to live strangely close to both life and death. We can bear children, but for every one born, so many eggs are not fertilized or are fertilized and don’t implant, or implant but don’t grow healthy. It is not absolute and it is not easy. At least 25% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, probably more. So then, where does life begin?

Same as with every other step of IVF. Do you do IVF at all? Do you genetically test the embryos? What happens if you have leftover embryos? You cannot mandate any of these choices, nor should you.

And that may be beyond the scope of the abortion conversation, but I think perhaps it’s not. Because how you live your life and what choices you make about your own uterus is so innately personal.