Thursday, January 20, 2011

We don't need to be reminded of the coat hangers time

There have always been ways for women to deal with unwanted pregnancies. ALWAYS. Just because we have some half-assed attempts at making full bodily autonomy in this country (rapidly diminishing half-assed attempts, I must stress) doesn't mean that women who need abortions outside of the tightly controlled parameters set by the blue suited dudes of state all just suck it up with maternal grace. The very desperate still seek out care that should be safe, legal and easily accessible, but isn't because of the squick factor.

Case in point (trigger warnings- this story is brutal).

Here's the thing the forced-pregnancy blow hards fail to mention- making abortion illegal is what makes the abortion factories they whinge so hard about. If these women had been allowed to seek legal abortions, none of them would have been administered drugs by a teenage and given medical care by unlicensed hacks. And no babies would have been murdered. The second those babies were out of their mother's bodies, they had just as much right to bodily autonomy as their mother's do. Legal, licensed abortions do not involve live births and murder, ever.

The squick factor on this story is high. And it should piss everyone off. But it all could have been avoided if abortion was more legal and more accessible. I fear that the effect will be the opposite though. In our hurry to erase the disgust we feel, more obstacles will be put into place and more women will suffer.

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