Want Less Abortion? Support women.

Everyone just wants to be right when it comes to abortion

For the love of Baby Jesus on a bicycle, why is access to healthcare such a dumpster fire in the U.S? And why do Americans continuously want to make the lives of women such a nightmare?

If you haven’t heard, the U.S Supreme Court is set to overturn Roe v Wade, the right to have an abortion. Abortion is as old as pregnancy. That’s just the facts, people. The oldest recorded abortion was in 1550 BCE. The abortion debate has only become “a thing” in the 20th century when Republicans needed a new platform to galvanize their base- read all about it here. It’s fascinating. The American Medical Association and conservatives and religious folk alike all viewed abortion as a private, medical matter between a person and their doctor. It’s ALWAYS been this way, only until the 1970s.

So what the fuck? It seems the only thing we might be able to agree on is that no matter where you stand on the issue, we ALL want less abortion. Right? I want to increase the number of abortions said NOBODY! I don’t care what you’ve read or what you “heard” about abortion, it is a medical decision made between a woman and her doctor and nobody makes this decision lightly, either.

If you genuinely cared about the lives of children, we would be doing everything possible to ensure fewer abortions. Seems pretty logical. Do you know what leads to fewer abortions? Improving the health outcomes for women and children, that’s what.

1. Affordable healthcare. We are the only developed nation without Universal Healthcare. Pregnancy is a medical condition.
2. Access to contraceptives, which is healthcare. Outside of free clinics and clinics like Planned Parenthood, there is no universal program for contraceptive care. Employers can even opt-out of covering it.
3. Men get a vasectomy- a reversible outpatient procedure done with local anesthesia and is more than 99% effective. Men are the only beings capable of getting someone pregnant, so why does the burden of NOT getting pregnant solely belong to women? Men, cross your legs and stop getting everyone pregnant!
4. Affordable childcare. Childcare is crazy-expensive and means that having a child from an unplanned pregnancy is out of the question.
5. Living wages. We have 12 Million hungry children in this country! In this country, we demand birth, yet for the most part, care very little about what happens later.
6. Improving pregnancy outcomes for women. Pregnancy is a medical condition and is painful, and often very dangerous for so many of us. We rank LAST of all the industrialized nations.

Restricting access to life-saving medical procedures like abortion doesn’t make abortions disappear; they make them more dangerous. So, do you care about children, or do you care about being right? Unless you’re interested in addressing the above 6, get out of my face with your moral righteousness. Nobody has the right to use your body against your will, even to “save a life.” You can’t use my body against my will for war, sex, slavery, or to bring a fetus to full term. Period. You can’t even harvest the organs of a dead person without written, explicit consent. Thousands of people are dying every single day, yet we don’t force people to use their bodies to donate blood and organs against their will to “save lives”.

It’s that simple. Stop forcing women to carry a fetus against their will. If you are genuinely interested in saving lives, I suggest you take up arms to improve women's and children's lives. So go forth and get to work.

PS: For context, I am pro-life. Pro-life is the practical sense that I believe in improving the lives of children and women full stop. I have never had an abortion, but my mother has had two. She was married with one child already. She was pregnant twice before she had me, but both pregnancies were trying to kill her. Had she been forced against her will, she would be dead. I wouldn’t have been born. I am thankful she could make this choice with her doctor. I share this only to highlight the many reasons a woman/family might need to make this difficult choice.