Pro-conversation
The other day, a friend of mine took to Facebook with a post that read, “I don’t see why you can talk about your support for abortion but I can’t tell you abortion is wrong.” Naturally, my friend is a guy and in reward for his bravery, he was showered with ten hate-filled comments in the span of an hour. Most of them included personal attacks, none of them had any real discussion points. All of them included a phrase like ‘keep quiet’, ‘stop’ and ‘shut up’.
I couldn’t help but feel bad for him. I also couldn’t help but like his post.
Abortion is a hot-button, high-emotion topic that gets everyone so stirred up that its mere mention has become even more taboo than the activity itself. In order to keep peace and harmony, or just to avoid the erratically misplaced attacks of others, most of us don’t talk about it. When backed into a corner, we choose our words carefully, knowing full well that they may be held against us later. We watch who we take into that confidence more carefully than we disclose our address and teach our children to do the same. I admit I have, and that’s a frightening thing for someone who values self-expression the way I do.
Reading the comments posted from his anti-fan club only reinforced the message of don’t ask/don’t tell. They were filled with insults about his intelligence, his compassion and his gender. Many challenged the validity of his religion although he never mentioned it. His political affiliations, personal philosophies and mental fitness were also called into question. It was a lot of damaging information to draw from one sentence. And with every one of them came the thinly veiled threat to stay down and avoid friendly fire.
I was ready to heed the warning when my friend reached out to me and thanked me for my support. I was the only one who stood up for him, he said, and even though it was only a tiny thumbs up that took me a fraction of a second to push, he appreciated it more than I could know. But I knew. I knew…no, I know that he is right. So without further ado, let me introduce myself to the masses and invite any bomb-throwing to come my way:
My name is Jennifer Ritter and I have had an abortion.
My relationship with abortion is quite complicated. I was raised in blended families with a liberal mother (a nurse who fancied herself a born-again hippie) and a father (who to this day avoids topics regarding lady-parts like vaginas are contagious). Like most people whose adolescence coincided with the emergence of Ricki Lake and Kurt Cobain, I was educated under a system that took a scientifically casual approach to the subject. Abortion, although never presented as a lifestyle or political view, was never seen as anything more than distasteful. It was merely a surgical procedure to group of cells. That always made sense to me. I had lots of experience with surgeries like that, having struggled with endometriosis my entire life. By the time I was considering having an abortion, I had already been cut into multiple times to remove other invading cells that caused an equal amount of inconvenience and discomfort. Describing abortion as no more serious than removing ones tonsils made the choice very easy.
The event that precipitated my abortion was a common one-unprotected sex with a boyfriend. While I felt I was not ready to take the relationship to a legally committed level, my boyfriend and I were certainly not opposed to putting ourselves in a situation where we could create another person. My home life at the time was terrible and to come home pregnant would have put me at risk for violence. I was certain I would have no support and no way to provide for a child. I remember panicking when I told him of our situation and my quick decision to surgically make it all go away. And on his part, he didn’t bat an eye, repeating the same adage of the fetus being no more than a group of cells and offering to make the trip with me. I had the abortion in a local hospital where my UAW insurance paid for the entire thing. It always struck me as odd, that my father’s autoworkers medical insurance covered the complete cost of an abortion when performed in a hospital. They didn’t cover birth control that well. I paid for The Pill every month. After the abortion, I wasn’t even charged a copay.
As time went on, I put the abortion behind me but not the memory of the lost child. It has been nearly 30 years. The child would have had their own family by now. But that boyfriend (Liam) and I did stick together and eventually married. We even felt comfortable with our decision because we knew our marriage was not just for the sake of a child. That child would have seen us divorce years later and perhaps even seen irony in the fact that we remained in a failed marriage for years for the sake of the other children. That child would have also seen me go through nearly a decade of infertility problems-spurned on by the endometriosis as well as the advancement in education which allows students to see fetuses as they develop instead of just a random bunch of cells. Now as an adult, the child would have been privy to the revelation that Planned Parenthood sells the fetuses it collects instead of disposing of it like other medical waste. I wonder what conversations we would have had about it?
What I would like to say, if I had ever given the child a chance to hear me, is that I question the decision I made all the time.
And that is because all available information about abortion is skewed, colored and distorted by politics and religion and good old fashioned spin. The decision, the procedure and the resulting consequence is dripping with so much emotion that it is next to impossible to make any kind of honest decision at all. Both the pro-choice and pro-life sides engage in a high-pressure winner-take-all battle, neither is truly interested in the woman’s best needs, the unborn child’s or the family’s. If they were, we would see a dramatic change in the way we view conception, pregnancy and post-pregnancy options. But neither side is noble, all they are after is power, control, and a quick buck.
Take the pro-choice side, the one that provided me and countless others their primary education on as developing fetus. For decades, members of their team have been responsible for a public marketing campaign that put abortion on the presidential ticket as a vital issue right up there with national security. They described the gestation process in the coldest terms and they alone decided when a generation of men and women could consider a beating heart a sign of life. While publically calling threats to their funding a threats to women’s health in general, some big names in the abortion game try desperately to hide the fact that they sell surgically collected fetuses to the highest bidder. The mother (or tissue donor) getting nothing. And about that whole ‘women’s health’ scare? There are plenty of free health clinics that do not provide abortions and they do not seem to be hurting for it.
But let’s not forget the pro-life side, which is happy to guilt trip the women electing to have an abortion, but don’t do enough to help support these families taking care of another child. Lower and middle class families are struggling, divorce is still prevalent, countless other social struggles are still very real, and this club expects the woman to keep her toes tapping with one more child. That can be a very unfair burden to ask. Yes, adoption is an option, but it is often complicated and filled with social pressures themselves. Where is the pro-life side when the mother needs them later? Off at another rally to pressure more women.
Don’t get me started with politicians on either side of the aisle. I cringe at the idea that any of these Bozos should have a say in my medical choices when they can’t even pave roads!
I think that everybody with a financial interest needs to be pushed out of the examination room and let the patient and doctor have a talk. I think that an abortion should be considered and handled as the serious procedure it is-at the very least it should involve the same kind of counseling and education we require for bariatric surgery. And why is that so horrible? We are talking about more than a couple extra Big Macs, you know. I also think it is perfectly okay for a woman to consider the ramifications of that particular solution to her short-term problem. Why shouldn’t she consider whether or not someone else should die as a result of her actions? That’s exactly what happens when you climb in those stirrups!
On the other side, I think that very few women make the decision to have an abortion recklessly and certainly do not need the unsolicited advice of strangers. No matter your faith, it is difficult to ignore the fact that most organized religions had their roots set deep in a male-dominated society where women didn’t have the ability to refuse intercourse much less the option of carrying a child. So no matter how righteous and peaceful your intentions are, unless you actually have a relationship with the women in question AND attend the same church, I don’t think you should force your calling on her any more than you would with the woman in line ahead of you at McDonalds. Of course, if your McDonald’s happens to be like mine on a Saturday afternoon and you happen to make friends with the people in line, talk about it. I assure you, I’ve had weirder discussions than that!
And that brings me back to my Facebook buddy. He may be a few friends lighter than he once was, but he’s right. We should talk about it, and anything else that we want to without fear of threats and intimidation if someone we barely know (or maybe not at all) disagrees. As long as we have had the ability to speak, we have had the ability to disagree. Me, I have never found anyone with whom I agree on everything, but there is no need to start a Go Fund Me page just yet. Just take the time to listen to each other. We may discover we are not that far apart after all.
I’m Jennifer Beck and I’m Jenuinely Jennifer.
Writer, Researcher and probable target!
