How I Became Pro-Choice

In the last few months I've been reading a lot of feminist blogs and I've been slightly surprised by how much I agree with them on an issue I had been uncertain about before - abortion.

This post is about how I became pro-choice, and I really did make a big flip. As previously noted, I grew up in a large, evangelical church and had a period in my life where I was a little bit fundamentalist. I was definitely against abortion; I even wrote a paper about why it should be illegal when I was a freshman in high school. My teacher was Catholic and gave me an A, although growing up in rural Ohio I didn't even think to worry that someone would disagree with me.

My opinions on the matter stayed the same through college, but as I noticed my opinions on nearly everything else changing, I wondered if that would too. I came to the conclusion that there are times when it really makes sense - rape, incest, and when the pregnancy risks the mother's life. Otherwise, bad!

Then I came to grad school, met my boyfriend, fell in love, and lost my V-card. And discovered that not only did I not want children, I was incredibly terrified of getting pregnant. To the point that I convinced myself, multiple times, that I might actually BE pregnant, and then proceeded to have anxiety-induced breakdowns. Now, I worked a lot of that out with a therapist and it turns out that some of it was my predisposition to irrational fears, which I have also dealt with. But the fear that was involved in the possibility that I could get pregnant, even though we were usually using two forms of birth control (and were never without the pill), was staggering.

It was at that point that I realized that if, by some pretty unlikely chance, I did get pregnant, I might abort. Which...made me think that I probably wasn't as pro-life as my 14-year-old self was. After getting over the fear of pregnancy, the anxiety problems that made me think I was pregnant, and the church-taught horror of abortion, I began to read more and evaluate my opinions.

I don't think my opinions on abortion now are revolutionary, but they are for me. I realized that I am not entirely sure when I believe a fetus becomes a person, but I am not sure it's at the second of fertilization, when it's really just a blob of cells. I know I am not ready for a child now, and I don't know if I ever will be. My boyfriend and I don't intend to have children, really, and I am ok with that. It's my choice.

It's also the choice of every woman to decide if she wants to have a child or not. The woman who is pregnant is the only one who can feel and experience the full brunt of the responsibility - physically, emotionally, financially, and socially, possibly for the rest of her life. Children are too important to be thrust upon someone who isn't willing and ready to have them. And women should have the right to not have their lives dramatically changed by a child if they don't want them to be.

There are thousands of other reasons to be pro-choice, some of which I am just starting to understand. In the meantime, of course I think there are limits and negatives to the debate - I don't want to see abortion replacing birth control or safe sex, and I would love to see improved services for women who are pregnant and want real alternatives to abortion. What I would love to see the end of, though, are things that I was nearly involved in at one point - people who protest abortions by making women feel shameful and evil and by displaying those horrible aborted fetus posters. That helps no one and only hurts people.