I've told this a few times. But it's time to say it again. My personal experience has taught me one thing about abortions:
universal access to abortions, no questions asked, is the only acceptable condition.
I have had two abortions. I used to think I wouldn't have an abortion "just for timing," but it turns out I will, and that timing isn't such a light reason.
My children have never been homeless, have never gone hungry, have never had to wait long for a pair of shoes -- though Frank had to wait over a year for a tonsillectomy before we got medical insurance that would cover it. But there were times in our lives -- notice the no medical insurance -- when we were cutting pretty close to the wire. And there was another thing, which is that I was an elevated-risk mother: not exactly high-risk, but elevated. How elevated? 10% of women experience preeclampsia, but 20% of women who've had it once have it again: and that amount is elevated still further in women with high blood pressure (mine came down to "borderline" a couple of years after my first was born). None of the restrictive abortion rules that have been proposed allow for a woman to choose not to carry a pregnancy for elevated risk: only imminent death, or maybe, sometimes, imminent risk of permanent invalidism.
My first abortion took place when my son was about to turn four, and I was working irregularly. I was temping in factories and subbing in a preschool. We had no medical insurance. I couldn't find a doctor who was willing to try for a normal birth, and I started dreaming about being on a production line to death. The image was from the freezer plant where I used to work: a continuous belt of thick white plastic, rolling into darkness punctuated by glaring lights. I didn't like the gynecologist I picked out (she had seemed reasonable in the hospital when I was recovering from Frank's birth).
I didn't really like having an abortion. I didn't like having a procedure to prevent having another kid -- I did want another kid some time. But I felt so much better afterwards. I was going to live, most likely, and raise my child.
My second abortion took place when my son was ten and my daughter was two. I was looking for work as a teacher, having just got my credential. The baby would have been born in October, a month and a half after school started. Financially, the situation was even more impossible than before. I had student loans to pay off, and two children to help raise, and frankly, my risk level had not improved, even though I'd managed to pull off a healthy-enough pregnancy (with lightly elevated blood pressure this time, and gestational diabetes again) and safe vaginal birth -- I was now over thirty-five, and my blood pressure was still hovering just below the action level. I had no second thoughts. I mattered to my family, and I wasn't going to take unecessary risks to have a third child we'd never planned on. The thought of leaving the nice fellow with a newborn, a toddler, and a pre-adolescent, and all the medical bills and only his wages, was just horrifying.
I've been told a few times that we could have found someone who wanted to adopt the child who would pay all my medical bills while I gestated that baby for her. Yeah, right.
Women who are afraid of pregnancy are generally portrayed as neurotics. However. Worldwide, the chance of perinatal death is 1 in 74. Yes. More than 1% of all women worldwide die in pregnancy, labor, or the immediate aftermath. In developed regions, that drops to 1 in 2800. That's a big difference: some of it is due to better nutrition, some due to cleaner conditions for giving birth in, and some is due to the presence of magnesium sulfate (the drug of choice for preventing convulsions and stroke in preeclamptic mothers). Worldwide, 12% of maternal deaths are attributed to preeclampsia: in the US, 18% (I think the higher number is due to fewer mothers dying of sepsis, hemorrhage, starvation, etc).
When abortion is restricted, what is being said is: your life is worth less than the life of the hypothetical person. This is simply unacceptable. When we say it's about choice, anti-abortionists think we're talking about something frivolous: something like a preference for Birkenstocks or high heels. But that's not the choice. The choice is your whole life: sometimes this means the quality or shape of your life, and sometimes it means whether you will live at all. And nobody has the right to tell you when it's appropriate to take that risk and when it is not.
It's not just cheesy that the soft media like to showcase women who choose to bear children in spite of life-threatening conditions which are exacerbated by pregnancy. It's heavily ideological. It's meant to impart the message that real women, good women, will willingly accept their own death in order to procreate. There have been stories about women who did that explicitly, literally: women who could live if they didn't carry through with a pregnancy, but who specifically doomed themselves by doing so -- women with treatable cancers whose treatment is incompatible with pregnancy, women with heart or circulatory conditions which simply could not survive the perfusion of pregnancy, let alone the stresses of labor. Of course it follows from my argument about that these women hav the right to do this. But it's nnot the right thing to do, any more than it is the right thing for a sixty-five year-old woman to marshall the expensive medical resources necessary to conceive and carry a baby. In both cases the woman is guaranteeing that her child will be an orphan: she is building tragedy into the primary conditions of her child's early life. (the sixty-five year-old may actually live to see her child graduate from college, but she's unlikely to get much further)But these women are made out to be heroes, and women who have abortions are made out to be selfish, even though they generally do it to preserve their ability to take care of children they already have.
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