The Scarlet 'A'

“Wait, so you’re pro-life, so you don’t vaccinate, right?” a friend says to me on the playground.

“No,” I say back.

“So you’re pro-choice?” my friend guesses.

“I’m ‘I’ve never been 15 and pregnant,’” I respond.

“Fair enough,” she says.                

I am neither pro-choice nor pro-life.  I am Pro-Wanted Children.

I know that life begins at conception.  I don’t believe, I know.  I have carried two children and I know when that life begins.  I have also wanted every single one of my pregnancies.  I don’t know what it’s like to carry a life that you don’t want to have.

I don’t believe that Roe vs. Wade will ever get repealed. 

I also don’t believe that abortion is a legislative issue.  I believe it is a sociological issue.  Abortions happen when a woman is carrying a child that she doesn’t want.  When she feels that she cannot afford that child, either for monetary, sociological, or psychological reasons. 

The US has one of the highest infant mortality and maternal mortality rates of developed nations.  One of the factors that plays into that is that women of childbearing age often do not have proper healthcare available to them.  That’s right, they don’t have health insurance.  So a 22 year old woman falls pregnant and doesn’t go to the doctor because she can’t pay for it.  It is well proven that good prenatal care equals healthy moms and babies.

Often people turn to the issues of rape and incest to allow for abortion, that doesn’t solve the problem.  We still have a woman pregnant with a child she doesn’t want.  How do we solve the problem of rape or incest?  We need to look to the men who are doing the raping to solve that problem.  From what I understand rape is a power issue and not a sex issue.  Why are the men in the US feeling unempowered, why would they seek an act of violence to feel powerful?  In developing nations it is often because their economic power is nonexistent (women are oppressed, but men are depressed).  What is the cause in our nation?  Is it violence in the media?  Is it poor outlets for male aggression?    

We pat ourselves on the back because there aren’t many orphans in the US.  Most people in the US that have babies choose to have them because they feel that they can take care of them; in some nations where abortions aren’t available those women have those babies and abandon them for adoption. In 2008 approximately 1.21 million abortions were performed (some states will not release their statistics so this is based on those that would), can you imagine if all those children had been born?  We would be facing a whole new set of sociological issues. 

And we would be facing the same issues, women are still becoming pregnant with children that they don’t want. 

If we vote to make abortion illegal I think we miss the point.  We would be trying to plug a geyser with a wine cork.  When we vote for ‘life’ we need to think of the whole issue, not just the act of walking into a doctor’s office and asking for an abortion, we need to be before that.  When we vote for ‘life’ we need to vote for society as a whole.  We need to vote in family friendly legislation, universal health care, and other laws that will make us stronger as a whole.
When it comes to abortion we must dig.  As I've said before there is more here but it's underneath.  If we are stop abortion it will not come at the polls.  We need to go to our people.  Love and empower our boys so they will not rape.  Love and empower our girls so that they will not look for love in all the wrong places.  Love and empower each other for so many reasons.