Me: I’m not bleeding yet. What if I’m pregnant?
B: I might be too. We can abort together.
Me: Then we’ll order congratulatory cakes for each other?
B: Yup!
All I can imagine doing is calling a bakery and ordering a cake that says ” congrats on the abortion.”
So, I was reading this article and the correlating reddit comments and one of the comments seriously made me go a bit twitchy.
While I find this article offensive on many levels – I think he is right about one thing- why don’t they work on making better formulas? Some mothers do need it for a variety of legitimate reasons and I think doing all we can to get it as close as possible to breast milk can only be good.
I read this and the very first thing I thought of was “legitimate rape.” Abortion, breast feeding, birth control, and a thousand other things don’t need legitmizing. They are personal decisions based on a variety of factors. Because you work 12 hour days and come home exhausted and don’t have the energy to breast feed is a legitimate reason to use formula, just like if your body doesn’t make milk.
How you choose to feed your child(ren) when they are babies is your choice, and no one should be demonized for it. I admit, this is something I personally kind of struggle with when I see young(almost teenage) mothers buying formula at the store, but I have to remember, I’m not in their shoes and while when I have children, come hell or high water I’ll breastfeed for a good long time, that isn’t everyones prerogative and that’s ok. It doesn’t have to be.
Whether it’s birth control, abortion, breastfeeding, or formula feeding we don’t need to legitimize the use of any of those things because my legitimate isn’t your legitimate.
It wasn’t a coat hanger. It was a wire.
The theory was that by inserting the wire through the cervix, moving it around a bit and then removing it, an infection would result and the pregnancy would be aborted. It worked. It was March 1967.
Afterward, after I watched the ‘doctor’ wash his hands with one of those little soaps wrapped in white paper, after he tilted the bedside lamp just so and after he said, “That should do it,” I got dressed, left the motel with the flashing vacancy sign, made my way to the bus station in downtown Detroit, and rode in the dark in the eerie silence of a mostly empty Greyhound all the way back to Mt. Pleasant, the tiny Michigan town where I was a freshman in college. Curled up next to the window under my black pea coat, I wondered how long it would take, whether it would be on the bus or later. I worried that something a lot worse than being pregnant would happen to me because of what happened in the motel room, that I’d get sick or bleed to death. I wondered if I would ever feel right about what I had done and if there had been choices that I hadn’t considered. I remember feeling like a mouse that had found the tiniest hole for escape while a giant tomcat loomed. I was distraught, empty, and alone on that bus. Back in my dorm room, Jane, my roommate, held both of my hands in hers and said, “It will be ok. You’ll see. You’ll have lots of children when the time is right.” It was a gesture of kindness and compassion that even now brings tears to my eyes.
I was 19. I had slept with my boyfriend just a single time. When I missed my period, I ever so reluctantly made an appointment with the town gynecologist who confirmed the pregnancy and then quizzed me incessantly about whether I knew who the father was. Did I know who the father was? Of course. There had only been one person ever. Yes, I knew.
The doctor told me to tell my parents but I couldn’t. My mother who had suffered for almost her entire adult life with severe depression was so deep in her terrible place, on the couch or in bed all day, sleeping or staring, that I almost cancelled my departure to college. The last child at home for many years, I had become her driver and caregiver when these episodes occurred. Leaving seemed like the worst kind of betrayal and yet the pull of the relief I knew I would feel being out from under her mental illness was irresistible. I really wanted to be in a place where people were happy. The thought of going home, sitting down on the couch, where I knew she would be, to tell her I’d gotten pregnant was unfathomable. Without question, I could not do that. My problem, then, was mine to solve.
My father, matter of fact as he was about everything, would line up a Justice of the Peace and get us married but my boyfriend had already nixed that plan. He had a friend who had a friend who knew about the ‘wire’ plan. We didn’t have the $250 it would cost to pay a bonafide illegal abortionist so the only option was amateur hour. There was no real discussion. The wire became the path we would follow. I was cornered. I knew I was alone with the consequences whatever they would be. My boyfriend could walk away and no one would ever know. He was free. I was cornered.
I grieved and was wild for a full year after that. I broke up with my boyfriend, realizing right away that any man who would advocate the wire wasn’t lifetime commitment material. I drank too much, bounced from guy to guy, and remember not much from that time except long times in the shower crying in grief and guilt. For years, I counted the days and months – how old the child would be if the pregnancy had not been terminated. The guilt was overwhelming. But as I matured, I recognized the decision for what it was – what I believed was right. I accepted responsibility and forgave myself. In the truest terms, I did what I had to do.
But what I had to do was a dreadful thing. The lack of safe, legal, and affordable abortion put me in a dingy motel in downtown Detroit to undergo a risky, unsanitary procedure that could easily have maimed or killed me. That I lived to tell the tale, to write about it on this page, is a small miracle of my life.
Six years later, abortion became legal in the United States. Of any accomplishment of the women’s movement, this one was always at my core. It wasn’t right for women to risk so much in order to be in control of their own reproductive lives. It wasn’t right to punish women who have been cornered by circumstances – unplanned pregnancy, no job, no money, no options – by daring them to find the $250 illegal abortionist in their city or worse. It wasn’t right that women should have to pay for a mistake with their fear, risk their future health and their very lives while men could walk away and be free. I was happy, so happy about Roe v. Wade. At last, I thought, this one thing for women – at last.
Twenty-five years after my abortion, busloads of anti-abortion protesters came to my town. Each morning they would pick a different abortion clinic and turn out by the hundreds to harass women coming for their abortion appointments. The crowds could be enormous with people waving signs with what they claimed to be pictures of aborted fetuses, and singing “My God is an Awesome God” verse after verse, hour after hour. Right away, I signed up to be a clinic defender and each morning I’d get up at 5, pick up a friend, and go lock arms with hundreds of like-minded folks to ‘protect’ that day’s abortion clinic and the women who needed its services. We’d stand there silently while the protesters yelled at us and sang their hymns. They’d call us baby killers and murderers.
Sometimes it would be nose to nose, shoulder to shoulder. The protesters would bring their children, too, and they would be singing “Jesus Loves Me” between choruses of “Awesome God.” We’d all be standing in a giant scrum while morning traffic zoomed by, horns honking in support of both sides. Special protectors in orange vests would shepherd each woman into the clinic for her appointment while protesters surged to scream at her. I couldn’t believe how evil and cruel it was to be screaming at a woman when she was in such a terrible situation, when she was cornered. I wanted to yell at them, “HASN’T ANYTHING BAD EVER HAPPENED TO YOU?
Where is your loving kindness?
And here we are again. Demonizing women. Limiting birth control. Shrinking access to legal and safe abortion. Daring women to go find the wire. All while men can walk away and be free.
It makes my 64-year old soul angrier than almost anything. The extreme hatred for women voiced by politicians, the talk of legitimate rape, the unbelievability of the idea of an ultrasound probe, the intent to demean me/us – it all puts me back on the bus in the dark, by myself, cornered and alone.
It’s so wrong to treat women this way. So wrong. We just can’t go back.
As a woman who grew up with abortion being legal, albeit hotly contested, stories like this make me cringe. They make me cringe because I’ve never been that girl on the back of the bus, and I don’t have to be, mostly at the expense of women before me. Thousands of women in generations older than my own have been that scared nineteen year old, or perhaps worse in the morgue dead after a botched abortion. Those women sacrificed, the vast most of them didn’t make those sacrifices with any sort of political end in mind, but they sacrificed all the same. They sacrificed feeling safe, comfortable, and protected during their abortions. They didn’t know how it would end. They didn’t really have a solid plan if things went south during the procedure. Women of my generation, we’re lucky. We can get an abortion and we know that it’s statistically a far safer procedure than labor and delivery of a child. We can go to the hospital to get it done, where if there are complications, we’ll be ok. Now, it’s a short, easy procedure most of the time, where the doctor usually talks you through each and every step as their doing it and tells you what to expect.
I don’t understand why there are people who think that illegal back alley abortions are a better option to legalized abortion. I don’t get it. Countries that have strict limitations on abortion, or where abortion is illegal have higher rates of abortions than countries that don’t. If you want to really prevent abortions, make birth control free for everyone, not just insured women. Require comprehensive sex ed.
Abortion is bad. I get it. I don’t think abortion is good either. In a perfect world, there would be no need for abortions, but I really want to focus in on one aspect of this.
“His claim about “legitimate” types of rape is not completely foreign to the current Republican Congress, however…”
When you define rape, you need to be really fucking careful. How you define it will impact when and if women report their rapes, if they press charges and if they seek medical attention. If forcable rape is the only kind of rape that counts, then we could very easily have women who don’t report their rapes because they weren’t forcable. Rape is under-reported enough as it is.
“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,”
One more thing before I go. Pretending like his logic behind women, rape and pregnancy is sound, lots of things are really rare, really. HIV has a really low transmission rate compared to other STIs. Does that mean we should stop using condoms because HIV has a really low transmission rate? No. We shouldn’t.
We shouldn’t attempt to put further limits on womens reproductive rights because old white men think they’re hot shit.
““Let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work, or something,” Akin said. “I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.””
So does he only think that there should be punishment for rape if the woman gets pregnant?
What exactly do you call forcing a woman to carry a child that was conceived in non-consensual sex? A walk in the park? And for all you people who think..”well she could give the baby up for adoption…” Adoption is a really shitty alternative for abortion. Pregnancy isn’t easy. When my mom was pregnant with my brother and I, she had a normal, healthy pregnancy. However, her normal, healthy pregnancy included two months straight of morning sickness. She had to completely rearrange her work schedule to keep working. Lots of normal, healthy pregnancies have all kinds of things that turn the womans life upside down. Things you just have to live with, but it’s worth it to live with because at the end of it, you have a baby. A baby you want and a baby you love. If your baby was conceived in a non-consensual sexual encounter- wanting or loving that baby aren’t givens. So all the hardship of pregnancy and labor…it’s for nothing.
I know where Obama is coming from in this picture and I love him for it. But in reality, his daughters will probably never fall into the tax bracket for planned parenthoods services(. For those of you who aren’t familiar with planned parenthood, it’s a free clinic catered towards poor young women, although it serves men, women and everyone in between)
“Receiving regular medical care greatly increases the likelihood that important messages can be delivered to pregnant women….” Actually wanting to be pregnant greatly increases your odds of getting prenatal care. This is such a win-win.
-does a super sexy dance-
Click me.
I 100% agree with this. if you oppose anyone elses rights because the magic sky daddy tells you to, you’re not only crazy, you’re a bigot. You can dislike being a bigot and that’s fine. In fact, I hope you dislike being a bigot, because then it means you might stop being one.
If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get one.
If you don’t like abortion, don’t get one.
Don’t use your ridiculous moral viewpoints to block these rights for everyone who actually wants and needs them.
Mississippi abortion access continued.
It isn’t great news, but it’s good news all the same.
Mississippi is about to become the first state with no abortion clinic in any of its counties.
That’s probably the biggest tragedy I’ve seen on reddit in a while.
No abortion clinic does not mean no more abortions happening. It does however mean no safe abortion which means scary, illegal, dangerous back alley abortions.
Legal, safe, accessible abortions are (and should remain) a right. This is not a success for pro-lifers, as much as they might think it is.
Kink and Other things 