Recently, Alabama and other Southern states in the U.S. passed a bunch of extremely restrictive laws that stopped women from getting abortions freely and horrifically it means in the case of an 11-year-old rape victim, she has to carry a baby to full term pregnancy. Understandably and rightly, there was outrage from the whole world and plenty of people have said how it is essentially a war against women. As someone who identifies as a feminist, I found it disgusting there were laws that were passed by a bunch of old, white men dictating about women’s bodies. It reminded me of a few years back, when I was younger and could not have been more pro-life in terms of my views on abortion.
I remember, being heavily against abortion because I viewed it as one of those things that were just straight up evil and it was something that would be traumatic to the baby and the mum and that it was plainly immoral. Over the years, my views shifted from being a staunch pro-lifer to being one of those who ideally believed in keeping a pregnancy unless it was life-threatening/a product of rape. I naively didn’t think abortion was a possibility that would ever cross my mind and it took a pregnancy scare that terrified me half to death to turn me into a solid pro-choicer.
In American Horror Story: Asylum, there’s a scene where Sarah Paulson tries to get rid of her rapist’s (who’s also a notorious serial killer in the series) baby by trying to put a coat hanger into her womb. I remember, when watching that scene for the first time, I was horrified at how she had to resort to doing something as primitive as that just because she thought it would be emotionally damaging to carry her rapist’s baby. But then again, what she did in that show is something girls who can’t have an abortion (mainly due to the restrictive laws) but instead of using a coat hanger, they use broken glass and knitting needles and risk getting sepsis. Criminalising abortion to the point where a rape victim who wants an abortion is more likely to go to jail than her rapist doesn’t stop abortion, it just brings back the ones where women have to throw themselves down a flight of stairs or go to a dodgy backstreet doctor where they’re essentially butchered.
One thing that makes me laugh constantly about the religious pro-life activists is that they say an alternative to abortion at six weeks (which at that point the fetus is literally the size of a grain of rice) is giving up the baby to foster care. They never seem to acknowledge that the foster care system (especially in America) is completely broken and it’s almost a cruelty essentially giving up an unwanted baby to an unstable future. It always tends to be the same pro-lifers who claim in an uproar that abortion is basically murder but then tend to ignore things such as the inhumane treatment of Mexican kids being put into the cages and then being separated from their parents.
Personally, I believe that children should be wanted and when they actually do come into the world, they’re considered a blessing, as opposed to punishment and that nobody has the right to tell a woman what she can do with her own body. Fingers crossed that the backward lawmakers sooner or later listen to the pro-choicers.