I’ve sometimes heard pro-choicers claim that second-trimester abortions only happen in cases of a threat to the physical health of the mother, or in cases of a non-viable infant.
That’s not always true. In some cases, the fetus is disabled but viable (there’s been some discussion of this on “Alas,” for example in this post). In other cases, the woman may have needed months to save up the money and put together the resources (transportation, days off, etc) required to have an abortion; this is particularly the case in states where pro-forced-childbirth forces have successfully put limitations on abortion access.
And sometimes, some woman are simply ignorant of how their bodies work, and may not even realize they’re pregnant until they’re in the second trimester… or until it’s for all practical purposes too late to get an abortion.
What puts this in my mind today is this must-read post by Angry Black Bitch. ABB isn’t talking about why second-term abortions happen, but I still think it’s relevant. Here’s a sample:
Freedom of choice requires freedom of information. The anti-choice movement has steadily been restricting access to reproductive information for years. Most of my current disgust at the advocates of anti-choice policies stems from that fact.
See, a bitch would like abortion to be rare as a motherfucker. Safe is followed by legal, which is followed by rare. My ass is one of millions of Americans who works diligently to educate my community…both men and women…on the various choices they have and options available that will assist in lowering the number of unplanned pregnancies. And a bitch averages at least 5 women per 6 month class session who have no fucking idea how their reproductive system works, what the real health risks and advantages are associated to contraception and what family planning is.
An average of 5 women…usually out of a total of 10 to 15…have to be educated about their reproductive cycle, how sex may result in pregnancy, what contraceptive methods are available to them and/or how to choose the best method. And Average of 5 women per class cycle relate misinformation about contraception…feel that using the pill may make them unable to have a baby in the future…believe that the pill may protect them against sexually transmitted diseases…feel that it is inappropriate to ask their sexual partner to use a condom because it ‘assumes that they are sick’…strongly believe that they can not contract a sexually transmitted disease from oral sex…think the withdrawal method works…think that you can ‘tell by looking at someone’ if they have a sexually transmitted disease…and do not feel that they need to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases until they are pregnant because they ‘feel fine’. […]
The sad reality is that anti-choice advocates are creating more unplanned pregnancies through their ignorance is bliss policies…and those of us in the trenches are shoveling in a downpour. A bitch struggles to understand the logic and finds that there is none.
Go read the whole, it’s worth your time.
I try to see the best in everyone, including folks who are pro-criminalization on abortion. But their policies don’t make sense if what they want to do is reduce abortion. No one whose primary goal is reducing abortion should be opposed to sex education, or to contraception.
But it’s a perfectly sensible policy if what they want to do is make sure that women can’t have sex without having children.
Curtsy: Brutal Women.
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In my dreams, I have established a women’s health business that would include classes for girls before they reach menarche. By the time that first blood spills, they would know the whole physiology of how and why it comes and then they could sign up for my next class series on cycle charting and family planning, including the full spectrum of contraceptive technologies. When someone was ready to consider becoming sexually active, we would talk again so she can make concrete plans and get supplies.
The key, though, to making such a program work would be getting parents on board.
Good idea. I would totally support that.
I have to stand up for some of the decently smart pro-lifers. Being pro-life, for the most part, I am all for sex-education, teaching abstinence, and informing people about different methods of contraception (because we know that they are going to have sex anyways). There isn’t much other way to do it. I would think that the only way to avoid people feeling pressure to get an abortion is by not having them need it in the first place.
Not all pro-lifers are totally stupid.
Anon:
I agree that there are individuals who call themselves “pro-life” who are also pro-contraception. But do you know of *any* organization or group that is both? I’ve been asking around, and only the sound of crickets chirping is to be heard.
I haven’t found any yet. A major issue in forming a group that would have any real impact would be money. Who would you get funding from? Most liberals would prefer to support Planned Parenthood, while most conservatives lean more toward the anti-contraception, Christian-values-for-everybody groups.
Perhaps this is slightly off topic, but the question of how much women do and do not know about their own sexual biology, reproduction, sexuality, etc. brings to mind a discussion I had in one of my classes around ten years ago in which a discussion of sexual harassment and rape became a sort of mini-lesson in male sexual biology.
I do not remember the precise reason why, but I was confronting a man in the class who had said something along the lines of, “Well, if a woman wanted to rape me”–(or maybe it was, “If one of my female professors wanted to sexually harass me”)–“it would depend on how good looking she was.” My response had something to do with getting him at least to acknowledge that he didn’t really understand what it meant to be powerless in a situation where someone wanted sex from him or was planning to use him sexually against his will.
He and I were talking about this, when one of the women in the class remarked that it didn’t really matter because it’s impossible for women to rape men. I asked her what she meant and she said something like, “Well, if he doesn’t want to get hard, he’s not going to get hard and so she can’t rape him.” I asked her a couple of other questions and it became clear that this woman, along with several other women who chimed in after her, believed that erection is an entirely voluntary response that men can control at will. This disturbed me enough that I left the rest of my lesson aside and devoted a good portion of the rest of the class–maybe the entire rest of the class–to explaining to her that she was wrong. I teach an English class, but it didn’t seem right to me to let those women leave my classroom with that particular bit of ignorance in place, and I left that day with an awful lot of questions about sex education and where students get it and how it is given and quite thankful that almost all students at the community college where I teach take the health and human sexuality course we offer. It is thorough and explicit and very progressive, and you have to make a real effort not to do any of the work to leave the class misinformed.
(As a side note, the episode I described almost got me accused of sexual harassment; a senior observer in the class suggested she might report me because I was getting my rocks off by talking so explicitly and embarrassing such “impressionable”–her word–young people.)
How do you know, if they don’t have any alternatives?
If people *truly* believe abortion is murder, then they should be promoting contraception.
Unless they believe nonreproductive sex (by women, at least) is worse than murder.
Some conservatives certainly do believe this consciously enough to say so, but most don’t. So why don’t they have the courage of their own hypocrisy, and *pretend* they think murder is worse than sex?
Thinking about it a little more, it’s possible that I shouldn’t have said “most conservatives.” I don’t read or listen to that much conservative opinion EXCEPT for those conservatives who talk almost exclusively about abortion. Go to prolifeblogs.com and you will see a majority there who are not ashamed to say that it would be against their principles to encourage contraception either for unmarried people (Protestant view) or for anyone (Catholic and/or “full quiver” philosphy). Maybe there are other conservatives in the broader population that would be interested in supporting a pro-life, pro-contraception group, but if so it doesn’t appear that reproductive issues are currently on their front burner. I’ve so far found much more interest among pro-life liberals.
I’ve been asking around . . .
Are you asking around because you yourself are a pro-life liberal? If so, you are welcome to check out our relatively new and pretty non-influential online group, Pro-Lifers for Peace and Justice. We have a web ring and an email list.
No, I’m pretty much the usual pro-choicer. But I’m trying to come up with ways to reach people in the mushy middle.
Even at the price of more abortions=murders? I mean, on other issues they’re willing to go with the lesser of two evils, to support things they find uncomfortable for the sake of the greater good. Why aren’t they willing to do so on this issue?
Do you think it’s that they are not aware that more contraception leads to fewer abortions in practice? How many of them really feel deep down (though they may not realize it) that sexual activity is worse than infanticide?
You’ve got to remember that most Conservative Christains (and I’m speaking mostly Protestant here) also view current fashion, movies, television and society in general as being the cause of the country’s “moral decay”. They don’t want to promote contraception because that acknowledges the normalcy and acceptance or premarital sex.
Of course, they also want to ban Will and Grace and Queer as Folk and anything else that doesn’t fit in with their world view. I used to be forced to listen to James Dobson and Pat Robertson, and there are legions that listen willingly.
Having said all that, I do think there are those (like my Mother) that fall into the pro-life but very pro-contraception. And she is Catholic, so there are those people that don’t support abortion but do support, advocate, and give money to those that promote the use of contraception and make it available to women. I just don’t think that these people loudly proclaim their positions. In my Mother’s case, she isn’t against abortion altogether, but just thinks it makes more sense to prevent pregnancies in the first place.
Just my two cents worth.
They don’t want to promote contraception because that acknowledges the normalcy and acceptance or premarital sex.
But is premarital sex worse than the Holocaust, which is how they describe abortion? Or would they just deny deny deny that more contraception leads to fewer abortions until their heads explode?
I’m against pre-marital sex, but I still totally promote contraception. The world is getting overpopulated as it is. And there are too many people who are too immature to have children. And there are the people who don’t want to have to deal with getting pregnant in the first place. And there are some other reasons that contraception is cool. So it is very very possible to promote both contraception and still not accept pre-marital sex.
I know quite a few people who think this way, now that I think about it.
I think some people have a utopian idea that they can achieve it all, that they can reduce abortions by actually convincing everyone to walk the straight and narrow. They don’t think it’s necessary to “compromise” one principle in order to achieve another. They also feel that if enough energy is put into anti-abortion laws and law enforcement then even if there are tons of undesired pregnancies, the overwhelming majority of women will still continue the pregnancy rather than seek out a butcher. Some of them even feel that a person who is of the general opinion that abortion shouldn’t be legal but thinks that it makes more sense to focus on the root causes of the problem instead of pushing for legislation is a half-hearted pro-lifer.
I’m anti-abortion and I must say that not all people that are pro-life are against teaching women about their bodies. I am all for comprehensive sex education and think that the Bush administration policy of only giving money to countries that fund abstinence-only programs is an exercise in stupidity. I disagree with funding abstinence-only programs here in the US too by the federal government. If you want to teach your children that the only appropriate arena for sex to occur is within marriage then that needs to be taught at home, it is not the schools responsibility to teach children morals.
I also feel that more anti-abortion groups such as Feminists for Life need to talk more about funding comprehensive sex education and raising the self-esteem of girls and women so that they can make responsible, fully-informed choices.
But this is not the case. They’re willing to say war is sometimes necessary, right? So obviously they’re willing to do pretty grim things for the sake of the greater good.
And clearly this *is* the case if the Pro-Life movement is really the Anti-Sex League. I think this is in fact true of the leadership, but I’m betting there’s a substantial proportion of the followership that doesn’t hold that, and another proportion that can be persuaded to honor the logic of their hypocrisy.
SBW:
Thank you for mentioning Feminists for Life, I hadn’t heard about them before. Having paged through their site, I smell a front group. You’re not a feminist unless you’re for empowering women, and on this issue that means giving women more power to control whether they get pregnant in the first place. FFL is only different from other anti-abortion groups in being officially neutral about contraception.
Doctor Science,
I’m not sure what they would say when asked about premarital sex versus the Holocaust. But I can say from what I have personally experienced from the evangelical right is that their position is that their’s is the “only right path”. Period.
They leave no room for compromise and or discussion of comprehensive sex education nor reproductive rights. These are the same people that are against SSM and GLBT adoptions and anything else that doesn’t fall into their narrowly defined concept of “right”.
These aren’t the majority by far, but I’ve found that the extremes are the most vocal and often overshadow those in the middle that are willing to compromise to achieve a reduction in the overall number of abortions, etc.
My father used to say that “the squeaking door gets oiled”, and in this case that is true. It does not help that the evangelical right has been growing in numbers for the past ten or so years either.
So, I”m not sure what the answer is to this issue. I advocate for complete sex education, safe abortion access, and total access to birth control for both males and females.
Mendy – I’m glad you qualified your classification of the “evangelical right” further down in your comment. My “sterotyping” alarm was about to go balistic.
I am certainly on the “evangelical right”. I go to an “evangelical” church (meaning it is not mainline protestant and if classified in political terms it is very conservative from a policy standpoint). But my stance on sex education is much more like what you describe as in the middle. So, I am happy you recognize that those you describe as “evangelical right” are the ones we on the evangelical right would describe as “extreem ‘head in the sand’ isolationist evangelical right”. Most of the Christians I know, and I know many from many different denominations and political affiliations, recognize that proper and accurate sex education is integral to bringing up safe and healthy kids. Our main beef is two fold. First, who should be the primary teacher of this sex education. Most believe it should be the parents. Second, when the school does intervene, what are they teaching. If it is straight biology, no problem. If it delves into social or moral territory, we typically would say “not with my kids you don’t”.
I just posted a question in christianforums.com about this topic. Although and true “head in the sand” and isolationist Christians would probably be scared of revealing their real attitudes, I still found the results so far to be encouraging. Most if not all the responders were (or plan to be once the time is right) very proactive in their children’s sex education. That included discussing things with their kids like contraception and abortion.
Another thread has just started over there that should also prove interesting. The title is “Is contraception inherently evil”. Apparently, the poster got quite a hostile response when posting this in the “Catholics” sub forum. I suspect, now that they have posted it in “Morality and Ethics”, they will get quite a different response. We shall see.
p.s. The subforums I frequent in christianity.com and christianforum.com are open to all. We have many liberals and feminists posting along with the dreaded evangelical right Christians.
An afterthought. To be truly honest, there is one area where the evangelical right is almost in lock step. Mendy and several others here have pegged this one correct. We seem to think that the best case scenario for God and country would be if we could simply legislate all the things we feel are morally correct. This position has me dumbfounded and my resistance to it puts me in the sights of many who are otherwise my allies (including my wife at times). Not only is it a horrendously bad idea to legislate any particular theological morality, it is completely against the ideas America was founded on. Christians argue with non-christians all the time about how many of the founding fathers were themselves Christian. What they completely miss in the debate is that the founders felt it essential that they put their religion to the side when drafting the documents that would govern the country.
So many Christians don’t understand what a real blessing it is that our government was set up the way it was. I could go on and on but it just gets me mad so I’ll stop. Truly, many, many Christians just don’t get what a bad idea it is to engrain religious morality into the law.
Truly, many, many Christians just don’t get what a bad idea it is to engrain religious morality into the law.
So true. Sometimes I hear some of my own church people talk about how the government should stand up for Christianity. I want to grab their lapels and remind them, “We’re Pentecostals! If America had established a state-approved religion, it would not be ours! We would be heretics having church services underground!”
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