As someone who considers herself a feminist and a fan of civil discourse, I’d like to make a few observations about the article in Monday’s CW titled “Reps discuss anti-abortion bills.”
John Merrill’s single justification for sponsoring the bills that would outlaw abortion (for rape victims as well as women whose lives are put at risk by pregnancy) is a fourteen-word-long Old Testament passage. For those of us who don’t care much for what the Old Testament has to say (some members of the LGBTQ community, feminists, atheists, members of other religions, etc.), this source doesn’t do much for his argument, whatever it actually is.
I appreciate the points put forth by Lisa Lindquist-Dorr, particularly regarding the fact that conservatives do a poor job of protecting babies when they cut all the government funding out from under them as soon as they exit the womb. Apparently, the rights of the unborn supersede literally everyone else’s rights, even those of babies who make it past the fetal stage.
I would also like to point out that as long as women have been procreating, women have been having abortions. Women were having abortions in ancient Greece and Egypt, in the Middle Ages and as far back as 5,000 years ago in China. To further support Lindquist-Dorr’s claims that women without access to safe abortions will seek “unsafe, illegal abortions,” many of the women who sought to end their pregnancies in the past did so using methods that were patently bad for them.
If you lived in China 5,000 years ago, you’d have used mercury to terminate your pregnancy. If you lived in the Orient, you would violently beat your abdomen until you induced a miscarriage. In some cases women would misuse herbs and kill themselves. I read about methods like these and am immensely grateful that modern medicine provides women with a way to terminate pregnancies without causing themselves bodily harm.
Outlawing abortion will not stop abortion from happening. It will only push women into the dangerous position of having to seek help not from trained professionals, but from illegitimate groups willing to take advantage of desperate women. Funny how the people who fail to recognize that truth are often politicians who never have to suffer the consequences of the laws they make.
I didn’t write this letter with the intention of prompting a huge debate in the opinions section of the CW; I wrote it with the intention of opening up some dialogue about this issue on campus. Think, for example, how beneficial it would be for us to get together, talk and maybe realize that nobody, in fact, likes abortions. No matter how militant pro-choicers may be, they don’t like it when abortions happen.
They appreciate that a woman can choose what to do with her body, but they don’t high-five each other when some poor kid in high school makes a mistake and realizes it is too late. In my opinion, it is immoral to celebrate any person finding herself in that situation, just as it is immoral to believe that she deserves it.
My sentiment is that we should stop wasting our time talking about what to do with the fetus after the fact and help educate women about how to prevent pregnancies that they don’t want. Let’s increase awareness of sexual health and contraceptives rather than wait on ignorance to give us something to go to war over.
I’d like it to be said that I can’t imagine anything worse than a woman being placed in the position of having to choose whether or not to abort her baby. That should not happen, period. There is no excuse for that circumstance, not when we have condoms that cost five bucks at convenience stores in practically every town in the state.
Before you condemn a young girl for choosing to terminate her pregnancy, examine your culture, examine its religious values, examine the role that we all play in facilitating this ignorance about sex that seems to permeate the South. Why do we condemn girls who have abortions and turn around and condemn girls who get pregnant in high school or before marriage? There is an inherent contradiction here, one that we as a society desperately need to address.
If you want to end abortion, try a different method, maybe one that prevents unwanted pregnancies. The old method of telling women what to do, aside from being discriminatory, ignorant and futile, has become, like the Hippocratic technique of jumping up-and-down to induce abortion, increasingly irrelevant.
Marina Roberts is a freshman majoring in anthropology.
