Lazy Posting: Here's to Scarleteen!

I've embarked upon exam leave recently and so have a lot on my plate, but during a break I came across a great post on abortion over at Scarleteen* (now added as a feminist site, though if you want a more accurate description, it's humanist and pro-life in the truest sense of the word.) It's written from the editor's personal experience.

I was pro-choice before that abortion. I remain so. Thousands upon thousands of women in the past have died to make that choice, before abortion was legal, and then, and now, those who do not support choice, let me make this clear, do not oppose abortion. They oppose a woman's right to make choices for the quality of her life and her children, and that is not supporting life or any quality of life. It is supporting an ideology and dogma that cannot fit something so subjective and varied as every single woman's choices and set of circumstances.

Being pro-choice is not often or necessarily being "pro-abortion." I do not believe it should be used as birth control, for instance: as a replacement for known reliable methods of accessible birth control. I personally believe that as women, it is our responsibility -- if we do not want children at any time -- to do whatever we can to avoid getting pregnant. However, there are times things happen, we make mistakes, birth control doesn't work, natural abortion doesn't work, when we may change our minds about wanting to be pregnant even in planned pregnancies -- and surgical or medical abortion is an option we may consider like any other, and may easily be our best option. There is no need to apologize for that, and no need to demonize that choice or oneself in any way. It is as valid and acceptable as any other.

Being pro-choice, in my mind, is being pro-child. Anyone who tells you that it is in the best interest of a child to grow up without the most basic things they require, reared into a family that either doesn't want them, or who simply isn't ready, or who harbors anger and resentment towards them is not thinking of the best interests of a child. Anyone who tells you that there are thousands of families just waiting to adopt ALL children isn't familiar with the fact that hundreds of thousands of children every year remain without homes and many will never have permanent homes, especially minority or special needs children. Many saying such things are projecting their own values and morals in the larger sense, and the person that benefits most is themselves: not children, not the women who bear and rear them.

Full article here.


*For those who don't know, Scarleteen is an American site offering unbiased (i.e. without religious or societal values) contemporary sex education for teens, and was of far more use to me in many respects than school sex ed ever was. While a lot of it could be considered 'girl stuff' by some, it does its best to run the full gamut from sexuality to erectile dysfunction to religious views on sex.