Fuck Yeah: Abortions!

padaviya:

A 10-YEAR Adelaide study has busted the myth that women use abortion as birth control.

A Flinders University study of 965 women over 30 who used Adelaide’s largest abortion clinic found 62 per cent were using contraception when they became pregnant.

She said they were not using contraception for dozens of reasons such as: cultural bans, thinking they could never have children, having been raped or having had what was thought to have been “permanent” birth-control surgery.

Ms Abigail blamed primarily male politicians for perpetuating the myth that women used termination as a convenience rather than for emotional and medical reasons.

michellehaimoff:

Two weeks ago, an anti-abortion extremist invaded the waiting room of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Jackson, Mississippi - the only abortion provider in the entire state of Mississippi.

The Feminist Majority Foundation’s legal coordinator traveled to Jackson to discuss ways to improve security, to assess legal needs and to devise new ways for the local community to support the facility. 

Now they’re asking pro-choicers around the country to make an emergency, tax-deductable contribution to keep the organization open and its patients, doctors and staff safe.

To donate, please click here.

padaviya:

They are stories of women given injections in their seventh, eighth, and ninth months of pregnancy and forced to give birth to dead babies after days of contractions.

They are stories of women snatched by officials in their last month of pregnancy, dragged to clinics, forcibly injected with solution that kills their unborn child, and kicked in the stomach.

They are stories of dozens of women rounded up and brought summarily, by force, to a hospital where they are sterilized against their will.

The one thing worse than being forced not to have an abortion is being forced to have an abortion.

Wow. To the anon who just dropped that (large) message into my mailbox: Thank you, so much! I wish I could reply.. but anyway - it was truly inspirational and made me feel incredibly emotional.

If this blog can contribute to just one person’s awareness or understanding then it has not been in vain.

(via extremities)

sullivanstreet:

Why I’m Pro-Choice

I’ve done it. I’m successful.

And I’m feeling it.

I’ve entered the third trimester.

With the third trimester has come serious growing pains—literally. I no longer have ankles. I have tree-trunk legs. Beautiful, motherly tree-trunk legs. My belly is huge (no stretch marks yet, thankfully), and last time I checked I had about 4 chins. My favorite thing in the world is chocolate milk—I drink it by the gallons—and I have become head-over-heels-over-head-over-heels (since I was originally head-over-heels) in love with my husband all over again and again and again. It could be the oxytocin and other deadly combinations of hormones flooding my system, but I prefer to think of it as the evolutionary need to stick by your baby daddy (rather than standing by your man).

Things are going well here, though, on the whole. In less than three months, I will be bringing a child into this world—and I’m loving every minute of it.

And this has elicited some interesting reactions from those who know me, both online and physically. They ask me, “Are you still pro-choice?”

I have never been more pro-choice than I am right now, if that’s even possible.

I admit that I find the underlying reason for the question a bit ridiculous. After all, they’re asking me this because they’re assuming, somehow, that carrying to term makes a person anti-choice by default. Don’t all pro-choicers want to kill babies?

One truth of the matter is that I used to be a counselor. I was a counselor at a women’s clinic. I counseled women pre- and post-abortion. If they chose to carry to term, I helped them as best I could. Perhaps they needed to find a parenting class or adoption agency. I helped them. Or, if they chose to terminate, I would go through their procedures with them, holding their hands and supporting them every step of the way, if they needed it. It was the most rewarding job I ever had.

Another truth of the matter is that the stigmas and stereotypes surrounding abortion—the disinformation, the propaganda, the religion-driven emotivism—cloud the actual argument. No matter how complicated people want to make the discussion, no matter how complex they claim this debate actually is, the truth is that it’s really simple: Should a pregnant woman be forced, by law, to carry to term? If you say yes, you’re anti-choice. In other words, you don’t want the option of abortion available, legal, and accessible. If you say no, then you’re pro-choice. You want the option of abortion available, legal, and accessible. You are not “pro-life.” I don’t even know what that means. I assume it’s a nice euphemism for “anti-choice,” or worse, that contradictory and morally disgusting position that rests on the premise that “abortion is acceptable if the pregnancy is a product of incest or rape.” (Since when did context of conception determine whether someone or something has rights?)

People can muck everything up by claiming that a fetus has rights (which it doesn’t because it can’t), or that women who have abortions do so for “convenience” (which is pretty much the driving motivation for everything we do) and are thus “morally lazy,” or that a six-week fetus looks like this (and only a cold-blooded killer would harm something so precious), but all of this is nothing more than distraction from the actual argument.

They can use emotion and disinformation all they want. They can try to convince pregnant women to change their minds via guilt, coercion, religion/supernatural bullshit, or anything else. But one thing they don’t have as a tool is the truth.

The truth is that abortion needs to be accessible, legal, and safe for a myriad of reasons, some based on pragmatism, some on principle, but all rational thought leads us to the same conclusion: abortion is a social necessity, even a social good, and to deny women the option of abortion is to force them to carry to term.

The criminalization of abortion is diametrically opposed to the tenets of a free society. Any element of force that has no rational basis in reality is unethical. The criminalization of abortion forces women to carry to term. That in itself is unethical. It infringes on the right to liberty. That in itself is unethical. It lays the private and emotional decision at the feet of the government rather than the individual. That in itself is unethical. It gives more rights to a fetus that cannot have rights than to the sentient being carrying the fetus who already has rights. That in itself is unethical.

People may want to frame these as follows: women should carry to term and be willing to give up nine months for a pregnancy they themselves created, the right to liberty is not as important as the right to life, the government makes the laws, and the fetus can have rights.

And this is all bullshit. No one should be forced to sacrifice anything; the right to liberty cannot be arbitrarily denied (especially by some phantom “right to life” someone thinks a fetus has); the government may make laws, but it doesn’t have the Constitutional power to force women to carry to term; and two entities—one sentient, one not—occupying one body cannot have equal rights, so thus the nonsentient entity has no rights.

Pregnancy is a sacrifice—a very important one at that—and it has to be a sacrifice women are willing to make, to work through, and to bear—both the benefits and the suffering. No one else can make the decision except the individual herself. Carrying to term or terminating a pregnancy should never be forced upon anyone. The decision rests alone on the person carrying the pregnancy. To advocate for anything other than the absolute legal status, complete accessibility, and utter safety of abortion is an injustice and a slap in the face to women everywhere.

I could never imagine what it must be like to be forced to carry a pregnancy to term, to be forced to have to make the decision to either carry to term or risk my life in order to terminate the pregnancy, but someone told me about it. I recently received this email, which was a response to another article I wrote on abortion:

im really happy about what u said, that Pregnancy should not decide anything—pregnancy should be decided and desired.

im 26 year old woman, from the philippines, im 5 weeks pregnant now, and abortion is not legal, so many young girls were trapped in their unwanted pregnancies..it was really terrible, i wanna terminate my pregnancy but no clinic or medical help is available, that’s why women like me are forced to have self induced abortion or to go illegal abortionists just get the work done..it endangers the life of the mother but no choice, that’s the risk we have to take..

im planning to have a self induced abortion on my 6th week of pregancy for at that time the drug that i ordered thru the internet will arrived, for these kinds of drugs like misoprostol is banned here in the philippines, i dont even know how to take it, or what to do…ill just take it orally and see if sumthing happens, .. i hope to hear back from you again..thanks..

I just turned 27 this past Saturday, and I’m entering the third trimester. This woman is my age and halfway around the world. I made the right decision for me. I chose to try and conceive. I chose to carry to term. I made the best choice for me. This woman deserves that as well.

Women need to be trusted to make the best decisions for themselves. In the 21st century, it pains me to think I even have to write that, but I do. I have to shout it from rooftops, rationally and linearly explain it step by step, and assert myself at every turn, but you know something, in the end it doesn’t really change anyone’s mind. It pains me to think there are people out there who need to control women, their reproductive options, their bodies, and their minds, and this need supersedes the rational. It pains me to think anyone in a free country such as America could possibly think criminalizing abortion, protesting at abortion clinics, trying to end safe access to abortion, and trying to lie to women in the hopes of coercing them to make another decision is somehow the epitome of moral behavior.

This pregnancy has been a sheer joy for me, and it’s because I want to be pregnant that makes it so joyful. And that’s why I’m vehemently, rabidly, unabashedly, and adamantly pro-choice.

Anti-Choice Ultrasound Laws Don’t Change Abortion Rates, But Continue Getting Tougher — The Curvature (via clingtomymouth)

trust-in-jesus:

Is abortion permissible to save the life of the mother?

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My niece has been told by a specialist that she will die if she takes her unborn child to term. She has been told that if she does nothing both she and the unborn child will very likely die. I’m not kidding. This is what she and her husband have been told by her physicians. What on earth can be said or done?

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Michelle Arnold Catholic Answers Apologist   Re: Is abortion permissible to save the life of the mother?

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A direct abortion, in which the intent is to kill the child either as an end or as a means to some other end, is never permissible for any reason whatsoever, even to save the life of the mother. [W]e must both pray for a miracle and for your niece to have the grace and strength to be willing to lay down her life for her child (John 15:13). __________________
“If anyone comes to me, I want to lead them to Him.” —St. Edith Stein

Recent apologetics answers by Michelle Arnold

via forums.catholic.com Another excellent answer to a tough question. 

wait what

Anonymous asked: First I 'd like to say that I really am glad I found this tumblr, and hope others find it and become more educated. However in one answer you said this "No contraception is 100% effective, not even abstinence". I don't get where you'd think that abstinence isn't 100% effective against pregnancy. If you will, could you explain?

I am very sorry, I was not as clear as I should have been. A woman who chooses not to have sex may unfortunately live within a system where this choice is respected almost as horrifically emptily as their choice on whether to have children or not. I do not see this as a mere coincidence..

Both rape and more subtle forms of anti-choice are built on the same foundations of an ideology where women do not have control over their own bodies. As well as being physically and mentally damaging, they are abusive demonstrations of dominance; the literal manifestations of sexism.

I hope this helps.

sullivanstreet:

Thoughts From an Abortion Doctor

We all know that anti-abortionists aren’t really “pro-life,” they are “pro-forced birth.” They make huge assumptions about who the women are who actually have abortions. They think that all the women who have abortions are just young flaky women who have no concern for the life of the embryo/fetus they are aborting. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Most of the women seeking early abortion are either very young or in the late part of their reproductive life. The youngsters are often coerced into unwanted pregnancies by their partners, or they didn’t think or know that they could get pregnant. Some of the older women think they couldn’t get pregnant because they were “too old.”

The decision to have an abortion is an agonizing decision, that few women choose lightly. They will be criticized for whatever decision they make. What kind of terrible mother could kill her own child? What kind of terrible mother could give her child away to strangers? What kind of terrible mother would keep a child she can’t afford to care for?

Did you know that half of the abortions done in this country are done because of birth control failure?

The “pro-coerced birthers” think that these are immoral women who should be punished for their (sex) sins with an innocent child. Then they complain about “welfare mothers” who need money to support their children. Those “precious babies” become children who they don’t want to feed. Aren’t Christians supposed to provide charity for those who need it? Worse then that, they don’t want to use federal funds to provide effective contraception or abortions for poor women. They just want to keep punishing women. Of course, if it’s one of their own, she just “made a mistake, she’s really a good girl.” Abortions happen in the fundie community too, don’tcha know.

Did you know that 1/3 of women who have abortions had a partner who sabotaged their birth control method? This is true domestic violence.

Women who have abortions come from all walks of life. This is not a phenomenon of only the inner city. Many are educated, and most of them are just plain middle class people.

The 1st trimester and early 2nd trimester abortions are most frequently done as elective abortions for unwanted pregnancies. I don’t like to do elective terminations after 22 weeks because of the viability issue. Late 2nd trimester pregnancies are very different.

Virtually all of the late 2nd trimester abortions I do are for fetal anomalies, fetal deaths, and for maternal health reasons. These poor souls really wanted their babies. They are in deep mourning because of the loss of their children. They come in deep grief, many times feeling guilty because they are “killing” their loved and wanted children. They worry if the baby will feel the abortion, and they don’t want their child to suffer.

I would be the happiest person in the world to never do another abortion again. So why do I do them? Because pregnant women with unwanted pregnancies are willing to risk just about anything, including almost killing themselves, in order to try to end unwanted pregnancies.

I remember reading some statistics comparing abortions in the U.S. and Mexico, before they were legal there. About the same number of abortions were done in each country, just over 1 million abortions a year. In the U.S. about 10 women died as a result of legal abortion. In Mexico, about 10,000 women per year died as a result of illegal abortions. 10,000 women who were mothers, sisters, daughters, wives. Not pre-viable fetuses.