Lies We Tell Women
About 24 years ago I walked into a Planned Parenthood looking for help. I was nearly the quintessential hopeless woman the abortion industry loves to exploit.
I had a long history of trauma including child sexual assault, rape, and physical abuse. Living in my car, I was an addict in a domestic violence relationship. Sanctioned with the state's blessing, the medical provider gave me two pills so I could undo my reproducitve health and murder my child.
Guess what didn't happen. Despite claims of the reasons women need abortions, I wasn't lifted out of poverty. I wasn't cured of addiction. I didn't escape the abusive relationship. On the contrary, I sunk into a deeper hole of depression, anxiety, addiction, and unhealthy attachment to a dangerous man.
It took years of hard work and help from others to set me on a path of sobriety, health, and stability. Abortion didn't do any of that. It is insulting to me and the years I spent fighting for my life to suggest abortion saved me.
So, next time you start to repeat the slogan, “what about rape and incest,” as a reason women need abortion, consider the fact that abortion does nothing to stop, undo, or cure the trauma of a rape. Perhaps, you can be a part of the solution to rape by passing laws that require rape kits be processed at least as fast as the Covid tests governments cared so much about. Perhaps you could pass laws that require harsher sentences than the for rapists and the abysmal 18 months for predators who sexually abuse children. Perhaps, rather than hold women's reproductive systems and children responsible foe the actions of violent and despicable men, you could focus on holding those men accountable for violating women and children. Perhaps, rather than suggest a rapist has any ownership the human growing inside his victim by referring to an innocent secondary victim as a “rapist’s baby,” you could pass legislation that terminates a rapist’s parental rights and require any money he makes in prison be sent to help support the child left without a man worthy of the title Father.
Next time you begin to suggest women in poverty can't possibly be mothers, you will remember that abortion doesn't lift women out of poverty, but you can. You could pass legislation that gives tax breaks to any company, organization, non-profit, college, or university that offers insight childcare to employees and students. You could pass legislation that allows any professional whom works with parents or children to write of from taxes any hours they give probono to their clients or patients. You could pass legislation that incentivizes companies to offer parental leave, excellent pre and post natal health coverage, mental healthcare, and flexible work hours and job sharing for employees with children.
Perhaps next time you consider suggesting a women with medical complications during pregnancy or a baby with a fetal anomaly would be better of being deconstructed, you could remove barriers and incentivize providers to offer pre and post natal care, perinatal hospice and palliative care, and mental healthcare in places women are experiences healthcare deserts. I attempted to bring such an organization offering whole health and wrap around care to women and children in the healthcare desert in my area. Government chose not to fund the endeavor.
Perhaps next time you consider positing that women can't have a career or be successful when pregnant, you will remember it is not women's biology or their offspring that are the problem. Perhaps you will instead attempt to pass legislation that gives tax credits to companies and institutions of education that offer onsite childcare as both a means of access for mothers and educational credits for students working there. Perhaps you will pass legislation that makes it illegal to bypass a woman for a pay raise or promote based solely on her reproductive status. Perhaps you will pass legislation that gives tax credits to companies and educational institutions that offer flex spending plans to cover the cost of childcare like HSAs do for medical expenses. Perhaps you will pass legislation that would make it illegal for federally funded institutions of learning to penalize (by way of forcing her to take a whole semester off thus cutting off financial aid she is receiving for school or by failing her if she is part of the way through a course rather than letting her pick back up where she left off the next time the course is offered) a woman who takes time off of classes to give birth and recover.
There are plenty of things you could be doing rather than scapegoating women and children for harm men have caused and good work politicians have perpetually failed to do.