Podcast: Episode 5 – Abortion

Really great podcast. I have had countless debates both online and off with pro-lifers (or as I call them, anti-choicers, because if they were truly “pro-life” then they would stop bombing abortion clinics and trying to kill doctors who perform abortions) and every time I find myself speaking with these messiahs of double talk, I find that like you both said in the podcast, there are a certain number of arguments you can use in the abortion debate, but it truly comes down to if you believe life starts at conception or not.

As far as the whole adoption option goes, it really shows that the pro-life population only cares about the fetus inside of a woman’s womb and as soon as it is born, no one gives a fuck. I went to the Bloomsburg Fair last year and got into a debate with a pro-lifer in front of her monstrously large pro-life tent and this woman told me that she did not care what happened to any child whose mother contemplated abortion. As long as that child was born, it did not matter what happened to it; if it ended up in an already overcrowded foster care system. It did not matter if that child aged out of the foster care system and wound up on the streets without the proper education or a clue as how to live their life. I told her that she should be ashamed of herself for telling women to give birth to unwanted children. If you are going to be pro-life, then truly be pro-life; give a fuck about the life you cared so much about saving in the first place.

As you also mentioned, many pro-life people take a moderate stance on the subject, saying that they believe that abortion should not be legal in case a woman was raped or was impregnated through incest. That way of thinking does not help protect the women who conceive children through rape and incest in the least because our society consistently shames and blames women for the pandemic of sexual assault. Currently, many people believe that a woman is asking to be raped if she is wearing a low cut shirt or a short skirt or if they happened to be drinking or they were picked up by a guy at a bar. When women press charges against their abuser, many women are forced to undergo lengthy, traumatic interrogation sessions as they were the abusers themselves. Women are most often not believed when they report a rape and it is for that reason that more than 80% of sexual assault cases in this country alone go unreported. By this statistic alone, if abortion were legal strictly for women who have been violated, who’s to say that they would receive the treatment they are entitled to if no one even believed that their abuse happened, or what if pro-life officials took it even a step further and made the law so that only women who were not drinking or under the influence of something and who were wearing ski suits and chastity belts could receive an abortion after a sexual assault? By only allowing women who press charges against their attacker to receive abortion services, you are casting off the 80% of women who do not report their abuse and you can’t even assume that all abuse survivors want to press charges against their attackers, another facet to the ‘only in cases of rape or incest’ debate.

Sadly, we live in a society that not only condones, but encourages blatant shaming of women, in all aspects of a woman’s life and body, not strictly on the abortion issue.

In country’s where abortion is illegal, over 70,000 women die every single year as the result of botched and illegal, back alley abortions. If this country turned into a country without the freedom of choice we would see more actual, already living and breathing human beings lose their life as the result of an unwanted pregnancy and a country that would have made it apparent that it did not give a shit about women.