I have been wanting to address this topic but it’s such a HUGE conversation that I haven’t known where to start or what to say or if it matters if I even speak out about it.
What I landed on is that, like mental health, health issues of all types can be cause for embarrassment or feelings of shame or likely to be judged and therefore we often times don’t talk about them.
Abortion is likely the most divisive healthcare topic in the United States and it has everything wrapped up into it: Access to medical care, links to poverty, also expands across all social economic groups, guilt, shame, judgment, fear, secrecy, depression, assumptions, lack of responsibility, blaming one sex over the other, political implications, moral implications, religious implications, family support or lack there of, access to birth control, sex education that includes teaching girls to watch for signs in their bodies including types of vaginal mucus so that they have more knowledge because knowledge is power, myths, lies, false information, lack of information, lack of facts….I could be here all day long on this part alone!
What is the most ironic part of all this religious clutching of pearls is that I didn’t have an abortion at 16, you’d of thought that all those sitting on thrones of judgement would have thrown me a bone, a little “ atta girl” but even though I wasn’t called a killer I was definitely stilled called a sinner and a whore. My church community vanished. My extended family vanished. My grandparents made me vanish off of their walls. Took down photos of me even as a baby. Shunning. It was the beginning of the realization that people don’t care if you do or don’t have an abortion, they care about using the subject as political leverage. Or moral superiority.
Either way you’re a sinner and a whore.
Out of the top 10 states for number of abortions given each year FIVE are red states. #2 is Texas # 3 is Florida.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Coincidentally, the states with the lowest literacy rates are #3 Florida and #4 Texas.
Number one in the country for the lowest amount of residents covered by healthcare? Texas. Pulling up not far behind is Florida at # 4. Oklahoma is # 2. Georgia is #3.
States with the highest teen pregnancy rates: #1 Mississippi #2 Arkansas #3 Louisiana
States with the highest poverty rates #1 Mississippi #2 Louisiana
If Republicans actually cared about children, beyond the fetus, then why are they consistently the worst states to live in? Why don’t they have the highest literacy rates? Why aren’t they throwing money into education? Why don’t they welcome any clinic that will provide access to birth control? Why don’t they boost their minimum wage to keep up with inflation? Why don’t they seem to want families, women, children to thrive? Because then they’d lose a political whipping boy. God forbid they help any woman who might be having premarital sex.
One in four women will have had an abortion by the age of 45 years old.
ONE IN FOUR.
Now, I want you to stop for a minute.
Think of the women you know well, the women you work with, the women you go to church with, the women in your neighborhood, now imagine that one in four of them has had an abortion. Do you like these women, respect these women, love these women? Which ones would you condemn? Which ones would you yell obscenities to? Which ones would you call a whore or a sinner or a killer?
You don’t know who they are. You don’t know which Sunday school teacher, which pre-school, grade school, junior high school, high school, professors, have had abortions. Which doctors, nurses, cashiers, choir members, bank tellers, mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, have had abortions. Which of them will you picket tomorrow? Condemn? HATE?
Common sense will tell us that if one in four women have an abortion and the top two out of three states for abortions given are red states, then statistically speaking, not every women having an abortion is a liberal. Conservative women have them too but they are much more likely to keep it a secret because of their community. They are much less likely to receive support of any kind for an unplanned pregnancy or even a viable pregnancy with a child that has a condition incompatible with life, often forced by their peers to continue with a pregnancy that will end in death or severe birth defects.
I have been surrounded by conservative women my entire life and I have driven one to get an abortion and had several tell me their stories of abortion because they knew they could. I am in no position to judge.
Religious beliefs should have no bearing on our laws as a nation. It’s fundamental to our rights to be free of legal religious prosecution and to be free of religious beliefs dictating morals through laws.
Imagine the slippery slope of one day having a religion, that doesn’t line up with yours, dictating laws. Should we then cover our heads? Refuse blood transfusions, be restricted from eating seafood? These things are held tightly as beliefs that one must follow or it’s a sin against God. Is that then justification for new laws? Will conservatives not only sit quietly by but fervently push for religious based laws regardless of the religion or only if those laws a Christianity based laws?
Men. Where are the men, besides insisting on taking away our rights? What are the consequences for getting a women pregnant? What laws will be in force to make them be a parent? Don’t tell me about child support laws either because that’s laughable. They don’t work and they have no bearing on what a human body goes through to carry and birth a child. Where’s the equivalent for men or, are we as a society, simply never going to move past the “ Sinner and Whore” complex we see women in the primary role of? Or “Madonna and Whore.” Why is it solely the women we focus on. The women we see?
Where are the men who are husbands, boyfriends, brothers, fathers of these one in four women who have abortions? Where are their voices? Why aren’t they just as loud as the women they profess to love? Where? Their silence is deafening.
Am I pro choice? First, there is no such thing as pro abortion and that is simply idiotic to say so, so, pro choice. I hate abortion. There are some women that having had an abortion is not traumatic, but the majority of women will never be the same. The emotional damage far outweighs the physical damage of LEGAL abortion but it haunts every day. There are very few women who have had an abortion that don’t think of themselves as those names we are called. Society can’t do or say anything to me that I haven’t done or thought to myself. If I’d had my way During my second pregnancy, the one in which I’d had an abortion, I wouldn’t have gone through with the procedure, I’d have that child to this day. But, to be very very honest with you, with my first pregnancy, I had no business having motherhood forced on me as a teen. If I’d been given the option by my parents who had control of my access to healthcare, I can not say that I’d have become a mother at 16. I was mature for my age but I really, really, did not grasp the reality of what was happening. I am pro-it’s your decision. I wouldn’t have been able to make the choice to have another abortion, so for myself I was never going to consider that an option again, but I have no right to dictate what choice you make. It’s not my place. It’s above my pay grade. I can only empathize.
Will the silent fathers of babies that have been aborted speak out? Probably not. Not unlike those women, their lives have gone on and they probably don’t want anyone to know. Unlike the luxury those men enjoy, we HAVE to because it’s women’s rights at risk.
This shouldn’t be a political volleyball. It has no business in politics. It’s personal. It’s private. It’s no Politicians business what goes on between me and my doctor!
I’d love to see men come out with their stories. Support the women they know and love and future women as well. That is my hope.
I might tell part of my story next. We need to start talking about them. I need to do my part in speaking out… It’s just….. difficult.
Tracy
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