Abortion

I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again:  a pregnancy is the business of the mother. Period. In a perfect world, it would be the business of the father, as well; but we don’t live in a perfect world where every child is raised and cared for equally by both parents. And since that is the case, and since it’s almost always the mother who bears ultimate responsibility for the child, it’s the mother whose business it is.
While I would like to be able to tell pregnant women not to smoke and not to eat sugar or drink caffeine or take any kind of drugs or do anything that might possibly deny their future child every opportunity for a sound and healthy start to life, it’s none of my business.
Here’s what I believe:  until the fetus is old enough to live on its own outside the uterus, it is the business of the mother. We can only hope that she will do everything she can to take care of herself and her body and to make wise and loving and well-informed decisions.
I have never, ever, for one minute ever been pregnant. I have never, ever once had sex without birth control. Ever. My belief about family planning is that everyone should do it. PLAN. There should never be any accidental pregnancies. When I say I used birth control, I mean that, before I ever had sex the first time, I did research and found out what I thought I needed to know and went down and got on the Pill, which was what we thought was the best option, and I took that sucker every night at 7 p.m. for the next 7 years. When I “missed” a pill, it meant that I didn’t take it until, oh, maybe 10:30 or 11 that night. After 7 years, I had a tubal ligation.
Because:  I did not want to get pregnant. That’s what I believe everyone should do if they do not want to be pregnant:  do everything in their power not to get pregnant.
Alas. That’s not the way it works. Things happen. Things go wrong. Birth control fails. There is rape. All kinds of things happen that result in an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. And just like it’s none of my business what pregnant women do while they’re pregnant, it’s none of my business if they choose not to be pregnant. It’s nobody’s business. We think, somehow, that a pregnancy is society’s business. Why is that? Why is it that strangers feel perfectly entitled to walk up and put their hands on a pregnant woman’s belly? Is it a holdover from the days when the continued existence of the tribe was tenuous and every pregnancy was a bit of hope for all the people of that tribe?  I don’t know, but that’s certainly not the case now. We are more likely to survive with fewer pregnancies, rather than more.
All I know for sure is that the way to end abortion is to end the need for abortion. You can’t make people stop doing something they believe they need to do, for whatever reason. You can only make them stop doing it by eliminating the need for it. And the way to eliminate the need for most abortions—not those that are the product of rape, of course—is to provide safe, effective, easy birth control to everyone who needs it. Everyone—male, female, of any age. And it has to be easily available—they shouldn’t have to lie to get it or sneak around if they think they need it or answer a lot of questions about why they want it. It has to be there, ready for them, any time they need it.
That’s the way to end abortions. What I can’t understand is why the legions of The Anti-Choice aren’t funding birth control with every dollar they can raise. Why they don’t support research for even better birth control, and why they aren’t out there making sure it’s so easy to get that no one ever goes without. They should be the ones wanting to hand out condoms in the public schools and in the malls and the parking lot at the football stadium. Education, access, counseling. Where’s the effort?
It kind of makes you think there’s some other motive behind all the vehement anti-abortion rhetoric and those heinous vigilante actions, doesn’t it?