Tragedies of the commoners

[textualdeviance]

What with this whole KomenCorp/Planned Parenthood funding debacle, I'm seeing an uptick in folks talking about abortion. Most of this is sensible, of course--I try to stay away from places where people think women are obligated to go through pain, misery and the risk of death for the sake of an amorphous clump of cells--but I've also seen a bit of the "oh, abortion is such a tragedy" sort of thing, too.

Ugh.

Abortion is NOT a tragedy.

You know what really is a tragedy?

-The fact that contraceptives aren't 100% effective, healthy, free, and readily available to anyone who wants them.

-The fact that so many girls and young women think their sexuality is the most or only valuable thing about them, or who are afraid to say no to sex they don't want, or to ask their partner to use contraception.

-The fact that so many boys and young men think that marriage and fatherhood are inherently weak or uncool, and that sexual conquest without respect for their partner is a badge of honor.

-The fact that we don't immediately remove children from abusive homes, and lock up sexual predators for good.

-The fact that sex education is incomplete, wrong, or utterly nonexistent for millions of kids because we've allowed religion to trump science, and because we treat sex as something inherently dirty and immoral.

-The fact that we don't have universal health care which would improve reproductive health across the board, and also ensure that women facing an unintended or complicated pregnancy don't choose abortion solely because they otherwise couldn't afford the medical costs.

-The fact that many poor women choose to abort solely because they can't afford to raise the child.

-The fact that we have a horrible cultural split in how we see mothers: as either saints or demons. We create a cultural standard in which mothers are revered beyond any other role a woman can play, and then wonder why so many girls and young women choose motherhood before they're ready. And then, when they have gone down that path, if they didn't do it the "right" way, we call them lazy sluts, leeching off the government.

-The fact that adoption is a minefield of both cultural stigma and overly-complex (and expensive) bureaucracy, making it incredibly difficult for women who want to choose that to find waiting families. (Seriously: don't get me started on the horrific class divide involved; so many girls/women adopting out only because they can't afford to parent, and so many parents of modest means unable to adopt because they can't afford it. Gross.)

If we weren't such a borked country, the number of abortions would be next to nothing because the number of unintended or problem pregnancies would be next to nothing. But because we are so borked, it's ridiculous to call abortion a tragedy when it's quite often the best solution under far-more-fucked-up circumstances. Abortion will and always should exist, because there will always be circumstances in which it's necessary. But for the love of FSM, why can't we fix all that other stuff that has the rate so damned high to begin with?

Comments

[thefirstalicat.livejournal.com]

Not quite on topic, but in relationship: here in Canada, and I think to some degree in the US too, the trial and verdict in the Shafia case is causing huge discussions. If you don't know, this is an Afghani family living in Montreal, relatively wealthy, in which the husband, 2nd wife (in a bigamous marriage) and eldest son planned and carried out the deliberate murder of the first wife and three daughters (of the husband and second wife), who were 19, 17 and 13 at the time of their deaths. Convicted of 1st degree murder, the discussion revolves a lot around the concept of "honor killings" in the Afghan community, whether it's appropriate to call it that or use the wider term "femicide," meaning the deliberate killing of women specifically because they are women. (Hold on, I'll make the connection, honest!)

A recent CBC discussion brought in a history professor who noted that, until the mid-19th century at the earliest, the concept that men had the right and/or duty to "control" female sexuality was absolutely the norm in Western societies too. The whole concept that men have any say in women's choices is a patriarchal concept embossed in the need for men to control women's sexuality, and it's only very recently that (most of) the West has come to see that as being wrong. That is, the Afghani family described above isn't far from us a century or so ago.

The idea that women can't control their own bodies in terms of conception and non-conception or abortion is exactly the same thinking that permits this Afghani father to kill his own children with, to his mind, impunity, because they deserve it. I'm farther to the left than anyone I know on the abortion issue - I don't believe that ANY man, including the father, has ANY right to make ANY decision about the fate of the fetus, that it's entirely the woman's decision (although she might want to inform the father of her pregnancy, but even that is entirely up to her). In a sane world, women's bodies would be theirs to use (and misuse) as they like. In the real world, pulling funding from Planned Parenthood for work that actually saves lives is just dispicable. But it's part of the same continuum, which assumes that women's bodies are not their own property.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

I don't actually think it's true that if the US weren't so broken, there would be almost no abortions.

I also kind of think that anytime you talk about how the ideal situation is that abortion wouldn't happen, you perpetuate the ridiculous "morality"-based stigma on abortion. I'm still working out my thoughts on this, but it really doesn't seem like a particularly useful or constructive thing to say.

[textualdeviance.livejournal.com]

You're right--I could've worded that better. Although I will say that the perspective I'm coming from is the whole uncomfortable-and-invasive procedure one. When possible, I would think that it's preferable to avoid such unpleasantness if one so chooses. My concern isn't a moral one, and isn't about the embryo, but about wanting to spare girls and women from something that is, at best, along the lines of the worst period ever, by ensuring they have other choices available.

There's nothing wrong with needing unpleasant medical care (as I'm sure you've seen me talk about) but if there are ways to help increase people's access to choices about that care, all the better. If women still, after having every ounce of education, mental health care, financial support and access to effective and healthy contraception, choose abortion, that's perfectly fine with me. But at the moment, I think there are too many other things getting in the way that are forcing or leading women to make that choice when they might otherwise choose not to have an unplanned pregnancy in the first place.

And that's pretty much my equality theory in a nutshell: working toward a world in which everyone has every possible choice (and full information about them) available without restriction, and not assuming, from a middle-class, educated perspective, that because some folks have and make informed choices, the full range of those is available to everyone. (Classic example: Western fauxgressives assuming that women in woman-oppressive cultures wouldn't be oppressed if they weren't choosing to be, and therefore we shouldn't intervene in their cultures to try to give them more choices. Ugh.)