Discharging about Abortion
Recently in my women’s support group, we worked on abortion. Three of the four of us had had an abortion. One of us had had an illegal abortion before Roe v. Wade (a 1973 U.S. law making abortion legal). Abortion rights are being attacked in the United States. We worked on how we need the right to have an abortion, given the sexism in our society. And we have to be clear that the fight for control of our female bodies is not over and cannot be taken for granted.
I’d like to hear from others who are working on this topic.
Freeport, Maine, USA
I led on the topic of abortion in a recent women’s support group. There were nine of us, diverse in age and in how much we had thought about abortion. Because we came to the topic from several angles, I asked a simple question for discharge: “What is your relationship with abortion?”
Our experiences included being pressured to have an abortion but not having it, struggling with infertility, working as an abortion counselor, thinking about abortion as a Catholic, and intending to have an abortion but then having a miscarriage.
I said that a fetus is a human life and that abortion is a loss of that life but also that we need to defend the right to have an abortion.
Systematic oppression is the underlying cause of unwanted pregnancies. The right to abortion does not end women’s oppression, but there are many reasons to defend it:
- It is sexist to take into account only the life of the fetus and not the life of the woman.
- As females, when we’re growing up, we are offered little or no attention to think about what we want in terms of sex.
- Women often have unwanted pregnancies because they’ve been coerced into having sex or brainwashed into thinking they must please a man.
- A woman who might otherwise want to continue a pregnancy might choose not to because it endangers her livelihood or forces her to stay in a bad relationship with a man.
- There is rarely, if ever, enough support for a woman to raise a child and also have a full life for herself.
- Women targeted by racism, unmarried women, poor women, and young women are often more harshly judged when they have an unwanted pregnancy.
By discharging on abortion, we are fighting for a piece of intelligence that is critical in caring for the environment. When we can think clearly about reproduction, and are empowered to act on our thinking, we can decide the shape of humanity.
Chaplin, Connecticut, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail
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