Whenever I read debates about abortion on American-dominated message boards I feel like I should just stay out of this whole issue.
Perhaps because the issues regarding abortion are not so emotively discussed here in Australia, I sometimes find it hard to relate to the extremist viewpoints of both sides of the issue. Because I truly think there is a great deal of common ground between both sides, and it often isn’t acknowledged.
I get very frustrated with what we here call the “right to lifer” viewpoint; the viewpoint which not only says that abortion can never, ever be a justifiable act, but is also against the very kind of education and access to contraception which might actually reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. I recognise that very few people hold such an extreme viewpoint, but the people who do are so vocal that they attract a disproportionate amount of attention; and they piss me off to the max.
I live in a country in which abortion is legal, but often remains inaccesible to those living outside the major population centres. I live in a vast land, in which there are many accredited medical facilities providing pregnancy termination services along with other specialised womens’ health care delivery (including maximum number of contraception options, cutting edge screening for breast and cervical cancer, etc). Sadly, though, many of my peers living in regional areas do not have access to these same kinds of facilities - their contraceptive options are limited to what their local GP (very often an elderly male, in rural areas) approves of prescribing, or what the one pharmacist in town is willing to stock, or a bizarre combination of both.
Very sadly, also, those very same regions in which women have extremely limited options for preventing pregnancy often have disproportionate levels of domestic violence and other social conditions into which a woman might not want to bring another child, or might not have the economic and social means to do so.
So just go to another town to consult a doctor, I hear you say? It’s an option that is totally outside of the financial reach of many rural-based women; you are talking of the travel costs running into at the very least hundreds of dollars, and in some places in this country, thousands of dollars. Amounts the family (or more particularly, the bloke) might miss from the housekeeping budget.
Even in urban areas, it would be all but impossible for my 14 year old daughter to obtain any reliable form of contraception without my consent. She could buy condoms and contraceptive foam at a pharmacy, but any more reliable option requires a visit to the doctor and a prescription. She’s only entitled to “free” medical treatment if she can produce my Medicare card - otherwise, she has to pay full price for both the consultation and whatever prescription the doctor gives her. Fine if she’s affluent; not so great if she isn’t, or she lives in a small town, or her parent refuses to acknowledge even the possibility of their child being sexually active.
Denial is a wonderful and self-protective thing; particularly if we are young and faced with an overwhelming situation which we don’t know how to deal with it. Leaving aside the situations where pregnancy is diagnosed at a late stage because women just didn’t have enough information about their bodies to even consider the possibility that they were pregnant (which, sadly, still happens, and which I regard as an indictment of the parents, and no-one else), I would submit that there are many situations in which young women in particular (but not exclusively) simply try to wish an undesirable situation away because it overwhelms them and they have no idea of how to deal with it. Do not young men do exactly the same thing? And they wish it away for so long that the post-coital pill and first trimester termination are no longer options. The woman across the road from me, who already has 3 children, didn’t “discover” she was pregnant this time until she was 27 weeks - she didn’t discover this because the asshole male in her life would have physically beaten her into going to an abortion facility and having the pregnancy terminated (as a pro-choice person, I fully support the right of a woman to carry a pregnancy to delivery if that is her choice, just as much as I support her right to terminate that pregnancy). By the way - this same male regards any evidence of her using contraception as proof that she is being unfaithful. She uses contraception, she’s an unfaithful slut; she doesn’t use it, she’s trying to “trap him” (I personally would like to rabbit- or bear- trap him, but that’s a whole other thread).
I love the people who made my first daughter’s birth special - everyone who pitched in and made sure she had gorgeous baby clothes and a crib when she came out of hospital, but very few of those people were there six months later let alone two years later. It might have been even better if her life mattered enough to those people for them to take an interest in it beyond those few short months during which she was only going to provide a “statistic” for either the pro-choice or the “right to life” lobby. But I don’t get too many letters from the “right to lifers” wanting to know how we’re doing these days or what she has achieved. I most certainly don’t get any letters now telling me how valuable she is and how interested the “right to lifers” are in her life and “by the way is there any other help we can give you?”.
That kind of interest comes from the same kinds of people - secular and religious, pro-life or pro-choice - who were always willing to support me through whatever decision I made in the first place, irrespective of the personal moral standards by which they chose to life themselves.
BTW - I’ve had an ectopic pregnancy; I had to have a tube - including a potential human being - removed in order to avoid bleeding to death. By anyone’s definition (whether pro-life or pro-choice), I signed that consent form knowing absolutely that I was removing all options of viability from that foetus and that makes it an abortion. Does anyone extremist want to argue with me that there are no medically justified abortions?
I think that many pro-choice people on this board have expressed their concern about the “gap” between which “foetal viability” becomes possible and our current laws overlapping. Yes, I do believe that ultimately we will have the technology which allows women the option of tranplanting their unwanted foetuses into the uteri of women who desperately want children - but that will not solve the moral and social issues of this debate. Neither will being able to grow aborted foetuses in vitro until they are post-term and able to be offered for adoption.
The common ground which we share is the desire for no unwanted pregnancies in this world - can we please work towards practical means of achieving that objective? And can we please all remain sensitive to the fact that not one of us - whether we are pro-choice or pro-life - has the right to tell a woman or couple who have been advised that a woman is carrying a totally non-viable foetus the best method of which she should be delivered of that foetus? I really think anyone in that situation is suffering enough without any of us making moral judgement about which medical procedures they use in order to lessen their pain or make their experience bearable.
Damn - knew I should have stayed out of this thread…
