It’s been forty years since the historic court case Roe v. Wade, a case that has – at least somewhat – confirmed and protected a woman’s right to have an abortion.
Today the battle rages on, perhaps stronger than ever. Waves of citizens are standing up and calling foul on conservative actions that attempt to control the bodies of women and what choices they can make with their own bodies. Virginia especially has been at the forefront of this assault, and within the last year made an attempt to pass a law that would require women to receive transvaginal ultrasounds before receiving an abortion.
For those who don’t know what that means, the Virginia GOP tried to pass a law that would require doctors to stick a phallus shaped wand into a woman’s vagina to create an ultrasound that would essentially – and for the men who tried to pass the law, ideally – force the woman to look at the ultrasound, and to form a bond with the fetus. While the original version of the law was struck down, an edited version was recently signed. The edited version allows women to opt for a traditional abdominal ultrasound instead.
I don’t think I need to tell you all how ridiculously offensive that is.
As a man, I have no say in what a woman does with her body. As a matter of fact, I can’t tell anyone of any gender what to do with his or her body. Let me just throw this out there now, because apparently it needs to be said: Anyone who thinks they can tell a woman what to do with her body, and what may or may not be inside of it, is stupid.
I respect the sanctity of life. Too frequently do I find myself questioning whether or not I should kill an ant because it too has a family somewhere. However, I also respect a woman’s choice, as every man should. I refuse to accept the idea that just because a woman has an abortion that makes her a bad person. That, for some reason, having an abortion makes her a murderer.
Review the science: When a man and a woman have sex, there’s a chance of sperm finding its way to a woman’s eggs. When it buries its head into the egg, we call that conception. Up until about four weeks in, the fetus is simply a bundle of cells hanging out in a nice, cozy uterus. Even then, the organs of a fetus aren’t fully developed until roughly ten weeks (and even then, they aren’t completely developed; they still have six to seven months to mature and become fully functional). According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), most abortions occur within the first trimester of a pregnancy. According to the same chart, most occur in the first six weeks. Six weeks into a pregnancy, a fetus has developed an eyespot, a heart bulge, an arm bud, and a tail.
The being growing inside of the mother’s womb is still very much a bundle of undeveloped cells devoid of consciousness and is just beginning to develop a heartbeat.
The definition of what constitutes as “life” is and will forever be debatable. It’s a little deeper than “when does life begin?” and if we want to get technical, individual cells are all technically alive – which makes actions like male masturbation and female menstruation – technically – murder. You’re killing off living beings just by being alive and completing a necessary biological function.
Feels great, right?
Still, we don’t see rich conservative lawmakers going after women for having periods, and up until recently we didn’t see lawmakers pushing to make male masturbation illegal. They’re keen to protect the sanctity of life, so long as it’s something bigger than, say, a human egg (about a quarter of a millimeter in size).
My mother had an abortion. Before she had me, the accident child I am, she had an abortion. If she not had an abortion, I would not be here today. I would not be a college student pursuing a degree in Print Journalism, I would not have the friends I have, and the world would be sans one Dale Lavine. Do I think she’s a murderer? No. She had an abortion during the first trimester, at which point the fetus was a bundle of unorganized cells lacking a heart and a brain. My father, an airman and a veteran of Desert Storm, attempted to pay my mother off to have another abortion – to abort me. She didn’t, and for that I am eternally grateful.
You might think that the events described above would make me a firm pro-lifer, because now I “know the meaning of life”. While thankful that my mother did not have me terminated, as an adult I can fully understand why she would have had an abortion; she was young, and she just wasn’t ready.
What people – men, mostly – seem to not realize is the tremendous physical and emotional toll pregnancy takes on women. They literally carry around something that grows from a bundle of cells to a seven-pound child in them for nine months. And then to top it off, they push the thing out of a hole the size of a coin. I won’t go into the gory details, but sometimes this results in vaginal tearing, blood loss, and can unfortunately even result in the death of the mother.
I’d like to see a man pull that off.
The simple fact is that just putting the child up for adoption is not always feasible. The simple fact is that childbirth and its costs are not and never will be easy. Sometimes, sometimes, abortion is the best option.
If a pro-lifer steps on and kills an insect, is that anymore disgraceful than an abortion? It stands to reason that most pro-lifers would say, “No, abortion is much worse than me killing an ant”. Examine that statement: an ant is born, it matures, it has a role in its own little ant society, and then you kill it. Ant murder. It isn’t a punishable offense, and you won’t go to prison for it (at least not in America). Saying that an ant – which is by all means a living being – holds less importance than that of a bundle of undeveloped cells is not only insanely selfish, but it’s also insanely hypocritical.
Let me be very clear here: Pro-choice does not mean pro-abortion. Pro-choice does not mean pro-murder. No one likes getting abortions. The matter of pro-life versus pro-choice is not a black and white issue, and there are very much a thousand shades of grey between the two stances. No pro-choicer I’ve ever met has said that they advocate the murdering of innocent children, instead their stance is generally that women should have the choice to an abortion if they feel they aren’t fit to be a parent and/or it was a forced pregnancy (AKA “in cases of rape and incest”).
I am a man. I am pro-choice. I do not condone murder. I do, however, believe that women should be allowed to make their own choices, especially when it concerns something as important as pregnancy.