The Feminist Francophile

Technically this was Thursday (about 43 minutes ago), but I fell asleep. Oops:

For Blog for Choice Day this year, we are given the theme:
“What is your top pro-choice hope for President Obama and/or the new Congress?”

Good grief, as though I could pick just one.
I’d like to see the recently enacted “conscience” rule wiped out, for these ten reasons and a few more. That’s one specific issue that clearly relates directly to choice. I’d like to see the Global Gag Rule repealed, and restore funding for UNFPA. I’d like for our laws to allow women to exercise their choice without being subjected to misinformation under biased counseling laws or forced ultrasounds that assume women just haven’t worried their pretty little heads enough about what they’re doing. I’d like to see our discussions of these issues be evidence-based, science-based, instead of agenda-based.

So many other things, though, have an effect on women and the choices they make. I’d like to move away from abstinence-only sex education, so that individuals will be better informed about how to control their own reproduction. I’d like to make pharmacies put up signs indicating whether they will or won’t fill prescriptions for birth control, or dispense emergency contraception. I’d like WIC to include more than a suggestion of fresh fruits and vegetables. I’d like for all people to be able to afford healthcare, including contraception. I’d like our approach to “the war on drugs” to be overhauled so more people can be with their families instead of in jail. I’d like for us not to assume we know who “deserves” to have children, to recognize that choice is an issue of being able to have children, too, of reproductive justice that isn’t just about abortion. I’d like people to make a living wage. I’d like women to be able to talk about abortion without fear or shame, given how common an experience it is across the nation.

But you know, I think that’s all an awfully tall order a handful of days into a Presidency.

By David Katz, MD

The topic of abortion will rear up in rhetoric, and between its lines, throughout the presidential campaign now underway in earnest. It will reverberate in public policy after the votes are counted.

And so I confront this polarizing topic with equal measures of trepidation and resolve to state:

I am emphatically pro choice.

And I am just as emphatically anti abortion.

The first statement from a public health physician with public policy leanings left of center should come as no great surprise. The second might surprise--but shouldn't. It is the second side of the same position. No one is for abortion, least of all the women who resort to it.

I know such women. They are among my friends (and perhaps yours), my family (and perhaps yours), and my patients. No one of them is for abortion. Each of them confronted it as a last resort. Some with equanimity. But some made the most anguished decision of their lives. And some have dreamt in troubled agitation ever since of that life that might have been. (Find answers to your pregnancy questions here).

Yet few would revisit the decision, even after the clarity of retrospection, and the filter of patient reflection. The regret that derives from a last resort is not resorting to it, but needing to; being left with no better options in the first place.

The moral debate over abortion is, in fact, an insoluble distraction. On the one hand are compelling arguments about autonomy, on the other, compelling arguments about competing autonomies, and the sanctity of life. Both sides of the argument inspire passions, but neither persuades. In the end, the war of words is internecine; everyone loses. An opportunity for unified purpose and unified progress is squandered.

Those, like me, who are pro choice might cite the principle of autonomy--that I and I alone should rule the destiny of my very own skin. But ethicists point out that my autonomy is bounded: my right to swing a stick ends where your nose begins. How that relates to the unique dyad of pregnancy, and an entity that is not yet viable on its own, is debatable. The issue of viability, and privacy rights, were central to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But abortion, arguably, puts two noses in play. Autonomy is not an iron clad defense of the right to choose.

The sanctity of life is by no means an iron clad argument against it, either, because it is not a principle we fully honor. We live in a society that sanctions capital punishment, meaning some priorities- punishment among them- trump life itself. The same societal groups that most adamantly oppose abortion seem most adamantly to defend capital punishment, and lethal means of self defense.

We accept that our police are entitled to shoot and kill those who threaten their lives and limbs, and soldiers are entitled to kill those who might pose a threat to our way of life. An unintended pregnancy could very well constitute a far more certain threat to one's way of life than the basis for certain wars.

We even accept, although of course with deep regret, the collateral damage of war--the death of innocent bystanders an ostensibly greater good demands.

The notion that the heavy hands of government might disentangle the delicate stands of this Gordian knot seems very far-fetched. We have historical evidence they can not. When abortion was illegal in the United States, it was nonetheless common--just also unsafe.

According to Planned Parenthood, there are still over a million abortions each year in the United States. That number is much lower than it was during the 1980s and 1990s, but we should be able to agree across ideologies it is too high.

Lowering it will not result from ideology, but rather epidemiology: the public health science of what actually changes outcomes at the population level. Our immediate and common needs are better addressed by data than diatribe.

Whatever changing abortion laws might do to abortion rates, it would do nothing to change the rates of unintended pregnancies, or the transmission of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Posting the Ten Commandments on a classroom wall does nothing at all.

Data show that educational programs that empower girls and convey a sense of responsibility to boys are helpful. Emphasizing abstinence as an option works, too, provided there are contingencies for when it is not the option chosen. Acting as if it always will be is among the most ineffective strategies of all: denial.

Teaching about barrier contraceptive use--condoms in particular--and making such contraceptives readily available is highly effective. And, of course, these interventions are just what is needed to reduce the toll of HIV as well.(Find out why growing numbers of doctors and pharmacists refuse to prescribe or dispense birth control pills).

Current policies in the United States place ideology ahead of epidemiology. Sexual education and contraceptive access are inconsistent; the current administration favors ineffective, abstinence-only instruction. Family planning services are underfunded. Contraception is left uncovered by many insurance policies.

Opposing a desperate remedy while propagating its malady is badly muddled at best, at worst, downright hypocritical. As political positions are debated and policies compete, hypocrisy should not be among the contestants. I dare to hope that whatever our disparate positions, that is a policy on which we all might agree.

Thirty Fiver years ago women were given the option to become more than just the standard baby-birthing, house cleaning, husband submitting wife that was the norm- and no, I don't find that as the ideal. More like sub-standard if you ask me.

Roe v. Wade may have been the landmark decision in America to give women the right to abortions (actually, only first term at the time), but what it has been able to do for women since is something that we have to keep mindful.

NARAL asked those who have blogs to write what Pro-Choice means to them.

Pro-Choice, for me, is about having a better life and opportunity for women, especially disenfranchised women.

Pro-Choice allows women to decide what they want to do with their lives and their bodies. Have you ever asked why are all these men so obsessed with repealing roe v wade? More obsessed than funding education and health care? Because, when one has control of a woman's body, you have control of her life. Without choice, the only thing that women would be able to do is stay at home. She will not be able to reach the highest peak of the corporate world.
Granted the Pill was invented in 1960 over a decade before women were given a choice. But, the Pill fails. Most women are not ready for, do not want, or unsure about children. Children should not be born to a mother that does not want it. Many say just give the baby up for adoption. Of course. Because the foster care center is much to be admired.

I vote Pro Choice because I care about women's health.
No woman in this country should ever at any time be compelled to go to Mexico or use a coat hanger.

I care that although I may never have an abortion that does not give me the right to deny another human being.
What you do with your body is your choice. Why do the actions of others have barring on you? You would never know that a women had an abortion unless she told you.

I'm angry that your religious beliefs must influence the body and life of someone you will never know. If the woman keeps the child, will you help raise it?

I am angry that lawmakers still try to tell women what they should do.
I'm angry that 77% of lawmakers are men and none of them will ever be pregnant.

I'm angry that Women's Rights must still be fought to this day.