I Don’t Care About Your Anti-Abortion Beliefs

The only person who gets to decide if they stay pregnant is the pregnant person

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

I understand your beliefs about abortion are sincere. I understand you find abortion distasteful. Maybe you find it immoral or disgusting. Perhaps you even think it’s murder.

Respectfully, I don’t care.

You know what I find even more immoral and disgusting? Forced birth. In fact, for me, and many people I know, there’s no comparison between abortion and forced birth. Abortion is a right. Forced birth is a gross violation of the rights of an actual, living, breathing, human being who exists in the world.

Some forced birthers try to insist a fertilized egg is a person, deserving not only of equal rights, but rights above and beyond all the rest of us, which is absurd. You’ll never convince me a fertilized egg is a person because that is nonsense, and you know it. But let’s say for the sake of silly argument a fertilized egg is a person.

Guess what? No other person has the right to someone else’s body, organs or blood. Not without express permission. You can try to insist sex is “permission” for pregnancy, but that’s ridiculous. No one expects to become a parent every time they have sex. No one.

Pregnancy is dangerous. Pregnancy can kill the pregnant person at any time, and it can happen very quickly. Pregnancy is always a threat to the life of the pregnant person, and childbirth always causes injuries. Always. Generally those injuries are permanent. Every woman and girl has the right to protect her health, her body, her life and her future, and you will not take that right away from my kid. Ever.

You can try to shame me and call me every name in the book, but I won’t be moved. You can call me a whore, or tell me I’m going to hell, or warn me I’ll have to face God someday, but you’ll never, ever convince me my daughter should be forced by the state to carry and birth any pregnancy she doesn’t want to, for any reason.

You can believe with all your heart and soul a fertilized egg is a person with rights but you’ll never convince me of that, no matter how long we argue. (And anyway, I’m pretty sure you understand a fertilized egg isn’t a person…