Thoughts I am Struggling with Today

As I age, I observe my ideology about a number of things changing. Abortion, a powerfully polarizing issue, is one of those. The other day, I saw an article about a "botched abortion" of a 23 week old fetus that happened to be born alive before the doctor arrived at the clinic to assist the young girl in the procedure. The baby, struggling to breathe, was stuffed in a plastic bag, it was sealed, and the baby was thrown in the trash, where she died. Looking for the article, I ran across one advertising the services of a Florida doctor who will abort a baby up to 24 weeks for the bargain price of $2500-to rid you of that pesky fetus you accidentally created. He even offers deluxe concierge services, like a day at the spa.

I have been thinking about this, intermittently, ever since. I remember my ignorant youth and my uninformed passion about protecting the right of a person to abort whenever...all my NOW marches and feminist leanings, in which I naively defended, unlimited reproductive rights (not to bash either of these things, but to bash my very real ignorance+very real zealous passion for issues I didn't fully grasp). I didn't have the experience of carrying a life, of feeling a baby moving inside my body, of dreaming of the day I would meet the miraculous and sentient being that was my child. I hadn't spent day after endless day praying next to her incubator that she would survive, much less thrive, valuing such a little life above anything I've ever valued in all my days on this earth. I had no emotional connection to the issue whatever, and didn't know what an 8 week fetus versus a 23 week fetus even meant, really. I took my contraceptive pill every day, thankful I had the right to exercise that control over my life, and that was as close as I came to the abortion issue (for what it's worth, I am still thankful I have the right to exercise that judgement).

So, from there, I have come full circle. As I type, I am feeling my 20 week fetus moving. It is riveting, and it is sublime. Since the youngest preemie to ever survive was 21.5 weeks gestation, I am finding it hard not to call what happened in Florida a murder. I find myself thinking that people have some personal responsibility to terminate in the first 12 weeks if they are going to do it at all. I have read Planned Parenthood's take on why people have abortions late in the second trimester (access, expenses, lack of medical resources, etc.)...but, I struggle to justify it even then...life is sacred, isn't it?? Sometimes not?

After 20 weeks gestation each year, about 20,000 babies are aborted. Aside extenuating circumstances (medical necessity, for example), I am coming to feel like elective abortion should be illegal by that point, period. Partial birth abortions are horrifying procedures, luckily fairy rare (though about 3000 a year are still performed in this country), and represent some of the basest medicine that exists. I'm not sure what kind of person could perform an abortion on a child that is viable, especially the kind of brutal extraction required. The rest of the world goes to jail for deliberately taking the life of another conscious (or unconscious) human being, but these practitioners are protected by a woman's right to choose.

Not that I don't think we do have the right to choose. We can choose to be responsible...we can choose to use birth control. We can choose to get a morning after pill when our blastocyte is a handful of cells, with no heartbeat. Personally, I am relieved and blessed to have never had to make a decision like this, but I really struggle, a LOT lately, with this issue. I struggle because I believe we, as women, should lift eachother up. I believe we should be empowered to make good decisions. I believe we should be in control of our lives, as much as possible. But black and white thinking doesn't work when we stop and consider why some women are not empowered to make healthy decisions for themselves (poverty, lack of education, abuse, etc.)... I think, at my core, that I embody a number of feminist ideals, and I support equality and gender neutrality. But, the older I get, my clarity is muddled when I think about reproductive decisions as they relate to the concept of equality. If we push for equal rights for all, where do we draw the line between protecting a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy, and a fetus' right as a human being to live? Those things, at least as far as this debate goes, appear to be mutually exclusive. And I have heard all the many arguments about when a conceptualite becomes a human being-people trying to be scientific about when human life begins in an effort to objectify the debate-but does that matter? Will people ever reach consensus on when life begins? That position appears, to me, to be very personal.