Why I Am Pro Choice

First of all, I am going to state that, other than being a figurehead, a president does not have any power over abortion rights. That is determined by Congress and the Supreme Court. A president opposed to women’s rights can veto an abortion rights bill but otherwise does not make these decisions. 

This is a divisive issue, I understand. However, I am not one to shy away from politically divisive issues. For too long, we have had so-called “leaders” who either evade divisive issues or make those divisions even worse for the sake of capitalizing on existing divisions. The role of a leader, especially a president, is not to seek political capital for himself or a certain party. It is the role of a leader to lead, to unify, to educate and to heal divisions. 

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I am a staunch advocate for women’s rights, as I am with all human rights. For the record, I have done volunteer work with a battered women’s shelter, which was later renamed as a family violence shelter. As I write and record this, I am also a corrections nurse. 

There are very clear reasons I am in favor of women having a right to choose their own bodily autonomy. It goes beyond anything physical. In most cases, some of the worst damage done is emotional. The physical aspect typically lasts a much shorter time than the emotional damage.

By taking away a woman’s right to choose, rapists become empowered. A rapist gets to choose who the mothers of his children are going to be. 

Rape is not a sexual offense, it is a violent offense. The goal of rape is not sexual pleasure but subjugation. One of the greatest pleasures a rapist can achieve is knowing that he impregnated a woman. A rapist wants a victim to suffer long after the rape has occurred. 

The mother is not the only one to suffer. 

If the child is given up for adoption, there will be no father listed on the birth certificate. Once the child learns they were given up for adoption, they have lost both mother and father through no fault or flaw of their own. 

If the mother keeps the child, no matter how much they love that child, there will still be no father listed. The mother will always remember how the child was conceived. When others ask who and where the father is, the mother will lie or evade answering, feeling shamed for being a victim. That includes when the child will inevitably ask that question. 

This means the suffering caused by the rapist lasts for a minimum of two generations. That harm can last much longer. The child will, without question, wind up with unresolved emotional issues for the rest of their life, no matter how well they may adjust to or assimilate the pain. If they are unable to adjust well, they may suffer depression, be prone to addiction, anger and anxiety issues. They may become sexually promiscuous or extremely inhibited. They are more prone to remaining in abusive relationships because of fear of abandonment. 

If that child has children of their own, it will affect how they interact with their own children in some way. This is a given and not up for debate. In some cases, their emotional scarring will actually make them have a stronger bond with their children. In other cases, it can lead to them being more distant or even abusive to their children. 

In other words, that abuse has now directly affected three generations. The mother, the child and the grandchild. At minimum. 

How many of you have traced your family trees? Now imagine a blank space in that tree. How would it make you feel? What questions would you have? What heritage would this give you? 

Assault is not the only form of violence. If a mother is forced to give up a child for adoption because of poverty, which is rising rapidly in this country, this also traumatizes the mother and that trauma will eventually extend to the child when they learn they were adopted. The child may have very loving adoptive parents but nothing can take that trauma away completely. It will always be there. 

If a mother is addicted to drugs or alcohol, something else which has reached crisis proportions in the US, the chances become extremely high that the child will be born with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) or other neurological disorders. These conditions will definitely affect that child for life. In many cases, they will be learning disabled. This can be so bad as to leave the child institutionalized for life. I know this first hand because my first nursing position was working with learning disabled adults, many of whom came from these conditions. I cared about them very much but they will never be able to function independently in society and must be provided for by society. The mother will always know that the child exists. I saw many mothers and families come visit the (now adult) child. They often left with tears in their eyes. 

Even if not disabled to this degree, these conditions are often marked by an inability to control anger because of the neurological damage. They may be considered legally competent but their anger issues can often lead to jail and prison. Again, they become dependent on society to provide for them. I have seen this up close and personal in the corrections system. This is all aside from them being more prone to substance abuse.

In some cases, these offspring become, in turn, rapists. 

I absolutely disagree with court decisions which have declared girls as young as 12 to be too immature to decide on an abortion. These decisions condemn that girl, too immature to decide on an abortion, to take on the responsibility to raise a child, which takes far more maturity. These court decisions can be handed down even in the face of incest or sexual abuse. Again, incest has an extreme risk of deformity and physical or neurological disability. Even if the sexual contact was allegedly consensual, girls that young do not have the maturity to make such a decision, meaning that alleged consent was not valid. In most of those cases, the girl was already raised and probably still living in an emotionally and socially unhealthy environment. 

I could keep going on situations which lead to abortion and the direct effects but won’t. This isn’t meant to be a book. 

The point I am making is that abortion is not a decision which is made frivolously. I have known a number of women that have had abortions, usually many years prior to my meeting them. They opened up to me. They carried deep emotional scars because of their decisions, even having dreams and nightmares. Yet nearly every one of them still felt they had made the right decision. 

A woman having the right to choose having an abortion does not in any way mean forcing a woman to make that choice. This is something which should be decided on an individual and personal level. It is generally an extremely painful choice which carries consequences. However, most of those consequences are not nearly as severe as forcing a woman to give birth to a child which is unwanted at that time, for whatever reason. As I have explained, forcing that birth to occur carries severe consequences which can be carried for numerous generations. It is not as simple as the pro-forced-birth contingency wants to believe. While they have not in any way considered the negative consequences which I have just explained, the fact is that even most of the pro-choice contingency have not considered all the things I have gone through here. 

I view things in an exclusively human context, while also having the awareness of the long term economic effects of large scale social biases. Before reaching any conclusions, I remain objective until gathering enough knowledge to come to a conclusion on a subject. I understand the purely emotionally driven side of the pro-life movement and don’t really hold any animosity toward most on that side of this issue. I just know that they generally lack context, mostly due to being unwilling to hear an opposing argument. Personally, I have had both the privilege and the burden of having a diverse life experience. 

One thing people should understand is that the forced birth movement in this country does carry a heavy economic and social price tag. With our current and deteriorating economic situation, coupled with the rising substance addiction environment, enforcing such conditions on society as a whole is a disastrous trend. It will result in increased governmental dependency with related economic expenses and social disruptions on a scale which has not been examined. The same people who favor forced birth also favor increased incarceration, which carries increasing expenses. These decisions are already helping to lead to increasing violence and social isolation. These conditions, allowed to continue, will spiral out of control to a level not yet foreseen. Yet I know not many will make the correlation between all of the above. The complexity of a multitude of factors will allow this to be obscured too easily. 

Before anyone tries using this argument, nothing I have said means that I endorse late term abortion except in cases where a pregnancy places the mother’s health or life at risk. Those are the only conditions under which I support late term abortion. 

Lastly, making abortion illegal does not stop abortions from occurring, they only make abortions far more dangerous. It gives rise to back alley abortions performed with coat hangers or similar instruments. These lead to permanent injury, hemorrhaging and infections, which often lead to death. Such results directly oppose the claim of a person being pro-life.  

When I take all of this into consideration, there is no emotional or rational view which makes sense but to be in favor of a woman’s right to choose their own autonomy. It goes far beyond an immediate individual choice, when placed in the proper and appropriate context. The one thing I could do as president is advocate strongly for women’s rights, which I would absolutely do. Any Congressional bill which sought to place limits on those rights and reached my desk would be immediately vetoed with no hesitation or compromise. 

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