Cross-posted from my blog Shut Up, Sit Down.
This year’s topic: Why is it important to vote pro-choice?
A favourite piece of anti-choice rhetoric is “What if your mother had aborted you?” This question always elicits an eye roll from me, because had I been aborted, I would not now be alive to worry about it, so it’s a non-issue really. Aside from that, I have to ask the person questioning me; don’t they love their mother? They generally look surprised and splutter “Of course I do!”
The follow up from me is of course, “well if you love your mother, why on earth would you want her to be forced into carrying a pregnancy to term based simply on your moral opinion?” I love my mother greatly, and I would hate to think she had birthed me, or my younger sister, simply because she had no other choice. She carried us and gave birth to us because she wanted us to exist, not because she felt it was her duty to do so.
On the other side of the coin, when I fell pregnant a couple of weeks shy of my nineteenth birthday, there seemed to be a consensus that I would probably abort the baby. After all, as a young girl I couldn’t possibly be ready for a baby. As an intelligent young woman with real prospects in life, why would I want to burden myself with a baby?
But you see, I had a choice, and I (and my son’s father) decided that we were capable and willing to raise a child. So I continued with my pregnancy, and Orion was born. I am always loathe to mention my love for my son in pro-choice posts lest someone think I am trying to convince them that childbirth is the way to go, but truly he is the greatest thing in my life. One of the reasons for this is that I know he was, and is, a truly wanted child. We chose to have him; not because someone was telling us it would be the moral and right thing to do, not because we had no other option, but because we genuinely wanted him to exist.
If, upon finding I was pregnant, I had felt I was not equipped to raise a baby, I would have sought a termination with no shame. I look at my beautiful boy, and I know how difficult it is to raise a child. I remember being pregnant, the toll it took on my health, mental and physical. Pregnancy, birth and the raising of a child are not easy things to do. Any woman who has done these things will tell you that. These are things which no human being should be forced into doing.
And that’s what the anti-choice movement seems to find difficult – seeing women as human beings as opposed to walking uteri. The pregnant woman is expected to give up her bodily integrity whether she wants to or not, in order to go through the most painful and potentially dangerous time of her life, in order to birth a child which she is expected to either raise or give to another person or couple to raise.
Like I said, I have been pregnant. I know what it’s like to conceive, to carry a foetus in my belly, to feel that foetus develop into a real baby as it is born. It is so, so important to me that throughout that process I was treated like a human being. The people around me treated me as a person rather than a walking incubator for the creature growing inside of me. Even more important to me is that I did it all by choice.
I am terrified of one day living in a society where the government, the people who decide the laws which control the lives of each and every one of us, no longer sees me as a human being. I am terrified of living in a society where I am reduced to a uterus with legs. For me, the most important thing a government can offer is that it will treat every single person with dignity and respect, not just the 50% of the population lucky enough to be sans uterus. If my government will not treat me as an autonomous human being, how can I trust them with any other aspect of my life or my son’s life?
Today my uterus, tomorrow – what? My heart? My brain? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” I will only vote for a political party which agrees unconditionally to treat me as free and equal in dignity and rights. I will only vote for a political party which will allow me complete freedom of choice over my body – my entire body. If they will not do that, they are telling me that they do not value me as a free human being.
I would not accept a dictatorship, I will not accept an anti-choice government. Without my freedom I am nothing.
