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Rantiness ahead.
Nov. 26th, 2007 08:23 pmOne of the tenets of my life is: "Everyone has the right to fuck up their own life in whatever manner they see fit." If I want that right, I have to respect it in others, and I've clung to that right tooth and nail since I was old enough to scream, "You are not the boss of me!" to my siblings.
Pro-life zealots make me want to punch them in the face with a brick. Not pro-lifers - pro-life zealots. The ones who are trying to force legislative measures to make me nothing more than a walking womb. The ones who parrot things their church or pro-life group has told them without doing any research of their own whatsoever. The ones who think that outlawing a medical procedure will somehow turn the earth into a blissful baby-loving utopia. The ones who spout the word 'adoption' as if you can just walk into a used-baby store, say "I want that one" and go home with your new shiny child - as if there isn't a huge waiting list, as if the paperwork and hoops you have to jump through doesn't leave children languishing in foster care and orphanages until they're past prime adoption age.
Man, if they made it as hard to have a baby as it is to adopt one, the birthrate and unwanted child factor would drop like a lead freaking zeppelin. The pro-life zealots don't preach sex education and birth control - because most "contraception" doesn't prevent conception, it just prevents implantation, and thus it's zomg ABORTION! Most especially, I loathe the women who had a safe, sterile abortion, regretted it, and are now trying to make it illegal for any other woman to have the right to make the choice they themselves were able to make - as if removing the legal right to make the choice would ever make the choice unavailable.
Personally, I am pro-life. I think abortion is indeed murder, because it's the willing ending of a baby's life. It's awful, and I think it's the wrong choice to make. However, when I was 19 and pregnant and had to make that choice - I had a choice to make. I chose not to have an abortion and miscarried a month later anyway. Pro-choice doesn't mean pro-abortion. I don't know what I would have done, or how desperate and trapped I would have felt, if I hadn't had a choice. I will fight to the death to make sure that every other woman on this planet retains the right to make that choice for herself. I chose not to do it - that doesn't make me a better or worse person than anyone else - just someone who made a different choice. I don't scorn people or judge them by the choice they make - no, I take that back - the bitches who use repeated abortions as their method of birth control? I judge them and I hate them accordingly, because their choice should be to get sterilized or take better measures to not get pregnant, if they don't want a child to that degree. Most women don't do that - for most of them, it's a single hard choice to make, and they have to live with the consequences and emotional burden of their choice - no matter which way they choose - for the rest of their lives. They have the right to have the procedure done in a safe, sterile and supportive environment. They have the right to non-judgmental counseling, which will also go away if the procedure is made illegal and doctors are forced to report people who've evidence of having an illegal abortion performed. Don't think that'll happen? Go do some history and read about what went on before Roe v. Wade.
Instead of campaigning to make abortion illegal, I'd rather see the zealots campaigning to dump money into effective birth control for men, getting women's birth control covered by insurance medical plans just like Viagra is, funding schools and teachers so they can have comprehensive sex education classes, making elective surgical sterilization procedures available to 21 year old women just like vasectomies are available to men - currently women have to be at least 25 and most doctors won't give them a referral for 'a choice they might regret later', expanding adoption requirements to include single women AND men as well as any gender pairing of a domestic union, creating programs and incentives to keep teenagers from wanting to get pregnant, getting more paternal rights for unmarried fathers, working to get harder and nastier enforcement for deadbeat parents who don't pay child support, and cracking down on foster parents who abuse the system and the kids. I'm pro-life, and that's the kind of things I spend my time on.
Granted, I also have a very liberal view of when that mass of dividing cells becomes a fetus. As a midwife, I tend not to consider anything a baby, complete with rights etc, until the pregnancy's passed the viability threshold - i.e., 12 weeks. Note: Not the baby's viability threshold, the pregnancy's - if they make it to 12 weeks without miscarrying, their chances of carrying to term are significantly higher, and thus I tend to not take pregnancies too seriously until they hit that point, because the risk of miscarriage is so very high. I'm also of the opinion that if someone is going to hate the baby and make the child grow up wishing it had never been born, by all means - kill it before it's old enough to suffer emotional damages. I'd rather have someone abort a fetus than beat a child. Which is where most pro-lifers and I disagree - they see it as the same thing, I don't.
I hate that pro-choice and pro-life have become synonymous with pro-abortion and anti-abortion. I wish the people who fell into those two camps would use the correct label for it. Just because I'm pro-life doesn't mean I'm anti-abortion. Just because I'm pro-choice doesn't mean I'm pro-abortion. Of the two camps, though, the pro-life zealots are the most annoying, and the reason I'm ranting tonight.
Pro-life zealots make me want to punch them in the face with a brick. Not pro-lifers - pro-life zealots. The ones who are trying to force legislative measures to make me nothing more than a walking womb. The ones who parrot things their church or pro-life group has told them without doing any research of their own whatsoever. The ones who think that outlawing a medical procedure will somehow turn the earth into a blissful baby-loving utopia. The ones who spout the word 'adoption' as if you can just walk into a used-baby store, say "I want that one" and go home with your new shiny child - as if there isn't a huge waiting list, as if the paperwork and hoops you have to jump through doesn't leave children languishing in foster care and orphanages until they're past prime adoption age.
Man, if they made it as hard to have a baby as it is to adopt one, the birthrate and unwanted child factor would drop like a lead freaking zeppelin. The pro-life zealots don't preach sex education and birth control - because most "contraception" doesn't prevent conception, it just prevents implantation, and thus it's zomg ABORTION! Most especially, I loathe the women who had a safe, sterile abortion, regretted it, and are now trying to make it illegal for any other woman to have the right to make the choice they themselves were able to make - as if removing the legal right to make the choice would ever make the choice unavailable.
Personally, I am pro-life. I think abortion is indeed murder, because it's the willing ending of a baby's life. It's awful, and I think it's the wrong choice to make. However, when I was 19 and pregnant and had to make that choice - I had a choice to make. I chose not to have an abortion and miscarried a month later anyway. Pro-choice doesn't mean pro-abortion. I don't know what I would have done, or how desperate and trapped I would have felt, if I hadn't had a choice. I will fight to the death to make sure that every other woman on this planet retains the right to make that choice for herself. I chose not to do it - that doesn't make me a better or worse person than anyone else - just someone who made a different choice. I don't scorn people or judge them by the choice they make - no, I take that back - the bitches who use repeated abortions as their method of birth control? I judge them and I hate them accordingly, because their choice should be to get sterilized or take better measures to not get pregnant, if they don't want a child to that degree. Most women don't do that - for most of them, it's a single hard choice to make, and they have to live with the consequences and emotional burden of their choice - no matter which way they choose - for the rest of their lives. They have the right to have the procedure done in a safe, sterile and supportive environment. They have the right to non-judgmental counseling, which will also go away if the procedure is made illegal and doctors are forced to report people who've evidence of having an illegal abortion performed. Don't think that'll happen? Go do some history and read about what went on before Roe v. Wade.
Instead of campaigning to make abortion illegal, I'd rather see the zealots campaigning to dump money into effective birth control for men, getting women's birth control covered by insurance medical plans just like Viagra is, funding schools and teachers so they can have comprehensive sex education classes, making elective surgical sterilization procedures available to 21 year old women just like vasectomies are available to men - currently women have to be at least 25 and most doctors won't give them a referral for 'a choice they might regret later', expanding adoption requirements to include single women AND men as well as any gender pairing of a domestic union, creating programs and incentives to keep teenagers from wanting to get pregnant, getting more paternal rights for unmarried fathers, working to get harder and nastier enforcement for deadbeat parents who don't pay child support, and cracking down on foster parents who abuse the system and the kids. I'm pro-life, and that's the kind of things I spend my time on.
Granted, I also have a very liberal view of when that mass of dividing cells becomes a fetus. As a midwife, I tend not to consider anything a baby, complete with rights etc, until the pregnancy's passed the viability threshold - i.e., 12 weeks. Note: Not the baby's viability threshold, the pregnancy's - if they make it to 12 weeks without miscarrying, their chances of carrying to term are significantly higher, and thus I tend to not take pregnancies too seriously until they hit that point, because the risk of miscarriage is so very high. I'm also of the opinion that if someone is going to hate the baby and make the child grow up wishing it had never been born, by all means - kill it before it's old enough to suffer emotional damages. I'd rather have someone abort a fetus than beat a child. Which is where most pro-lifers and I disagree - they see it as the same thing, I don't.
I hate that pro-choice and pro-life have become synonymous with pro-abortion and anti-abortion. I wish the people who fell into those two camps would use the correct label for it. Just because I'm pro-life doesn't mean I'm anti-abortion. Just because I'm pro-choice doesn't mean I'm pro-abortion. Of the two camps, though, the pro-life zealots are the most annoying, and the reason I'm ranting tonight.