RSSIt Sure is Swell to Control My Own Body
Today marks the 34th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. While many bloggers will be partaking in Blog For Choice and outlining their reasons for their pro-choice stance, I have decided to share some thoughts from Phyllis Chesler’s book, Letters to a Young Feminist.
I am pro-choice and pro-abortion because ten years after having first read this piece, the truth of it remains and the lack of progress glares ugly.
Letter Fourteen
“Not the Church, Not the State, Women Must Decide Their Fate.”
NO WOMAN SHOULD BE FORCED to have an abortion against her will. No woman should be prevented from having an abortion against her will.
This is what choice is about.
I believe in a woman’s absolute right to choose whether and when she will have a child. Free choice means that a woman must have access to high-quality, physician-assisted, economically affordable, legal abortion and have the option of keeping the child she chooses to bear without having to pay an inhuman price for doing so.
Inhuman prices include: Children having children, having to drop out of school, having a child alone, without family or community, being condemned to poverty because we have no affordable day care, etc. It is also inhuman to have to surrender a child for adoption. This is a trauma from which many birth mothers never recover.
Abortion is not murder. It is the termination of a fetus. This is my view, and the view of the Supreme Court in 1973, in Roe v. Wade. However, if women do not have the legal right to decide whether a pregnancy is a future baby or an unacceptable burden, then it is women who are civilly dead.
Anti-abortion crusaders are more concerned with the rights of the unborn than with the rights — including the right to life — of the living. Abortion opponents actually champion the unborn at the expense of the pregnant woman and her other living children. Anti-abortionists do not demand that the state invade a man’s body against his will for the sake of his living child — who may, for example, die without his father’s kidney, lung, or bone marrow….
Ideally, a woman’s right to choose an abortion should be a civil, not just a privacy right. A woman must have the right to decide if and when to become a mother — not merely the right to choose abortion when her life or health are at stake.
Abortions have always existed. They have not always been illegal, but when they were, wealthy women had them anyway. Poor women either didn’t, or risked death at the hands of back-alley practitioners….
Americans obtained the right to legal abortion in this country not because feminists fought and died for it, but because a sexually positive climate had been created in which both lawyers and physicians emerged who supported a woman’s right to choose abortion. They had seen too many women die awful deaths from unsafe, illegal abortions. Perhaps, physicians also viewed abortion as a potentially lucrative practice. Perhaps, both men and women wanted women to experience sex without worry, not merely as a way to procreate.
My generation initially focused more on a woman’s right to abortion than on her right to motherhood — or on the rights of racially persecuted women to resist sterilization, or the “ideal” of a small family. We were not wrong, nor were we right; no movement can do everything at once….
Never could I have imagined that, in 1997 [as well as in 2007], abortion clinics and their employees would have to suffer prolonged off-site personal harassment, aggressive anti-abortion demonstrations and endless bomb threats, or that they’d be forced to install metal detectors and help train feminists to escort frightened women into and out of clinics.
Who could have foreseen that so many clinics across the country would be forced to close, would be bombed — not once, but repeatedly — that physicians and clinic workers would be forced to wear bulletproof vests, harassed, even killed so that women could exercise their rights to have a legal abortion….
Yes, freedom for women means trouble. But without such freedom, women would be in even more trouble….
Do I think the Second Wave of feminism worked as hard on obtaining the right to mother or parent under feminist working conditions as they did on keeping abortion legal? No, I don’t. But obtaining the right to an abortion is far easier than redefining the family.
As Americans, we shun collective social solutions to what we still view as individual, private matters. We do so at our own peril.
You’ve inherited the consequence of our failure to redefine the family. The task is yours.
(1997; 95-101)
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