Blog For Choice: Trust Women

I remember being about seven and asking my mum if abortion counted as murder. I don't know where I had first heard the word abortion and was probably really fuzzy about the concept (as you would imagine a seven year old to be) but I know the question was sparked due to a Sunday School lesson on the Ten Commandments. The Sunday school teacher was trying to impress upon us that even if we didn't think we were sinning, we well could be. She used the typical examples of a white lie, she asked if we ever wanted a friend's stickers (OMG guys, do you remember sticker books in primary school? No? Just me?) really badly, she even asked what we did with the rest of our Sundays once we got home from church (although she never really explained what keeping the Sabbath holy entailed...just implied heavily that watching TV wasn't part of the deal).

So it got me thinking. Which other commandments could be violated by otherwise well-meaning people? What about the one about not killing - does it extend to animals? Does it extend to plants? I started thinking about whether it was ambiguous when it came to people, and that must be how I chanced upon abortion.

My mother lit up like a tree on Christmas and enthusiastically took the opportunity to explain that yes, abortion is murder. That god (it was capital-G God back then) was clear on not killing people, and babies even in the mother's womb were people. Not satisfied that her answer was comprehensive enough, she then started telling me about the IUD and how it prevents tiny babies from holding on to the mother's womb (no, seriously, she even mimed grippy motions with her hands at this point) and how that was abortion too. She told me that there was a couple at church (a well-respected couple that I admired quite a bit at the time) who used the device, and that's why their only son was in a wheelchair - as punishment for all the little babies they killed with the IUD.

I'm gonna pause here for a bit so you can appreciate just how fucked up that was.

As amazingly ableist and scientifically inaccurate that was, it was my first introduction to abortion (and contraception, really). I understood that it was wrong, and that there were no circumstances under which it was ok. My mom took the opportunity over the years to use abortion as a method of slut shaming. She told me about how my dad's colleague's wife procured an abortion because the due date conflicted with a planned trip to Japan (and why those godless people were cursed with only one child). She told me tales of classmates who had abortions every other month while bitterly discussing how they were popular anyway and were quite mean to her. She told me these stories with an aim to impress upon me how the world has a dirty, unseemly underbelly, how even people who appear good HAVE ABORTIONS and therefore ARE MURDERERS. Sort of like this:

Slowly, after each of these narratives, after each consequence and moral was revealed, I began to realize that underpinning all of these fables was the throbbing drumbeat that to be a good woman all the choices you make must be externally transparent - that onlookers will be judging you for what you do and blaming your misfortunes on your transgressions. And the worst, the absolute worst action you can do is to kill your "baby" because there is nothing in the world that can justify MURDER. Because there is no one in the world who would give you the benefit of the doubt, who trusts you to make the right decision for yourself and your family. Because if you have an abortion, you are automatically discredited as an active, responsible agent.

Because the world at large does not trust women.

I trust women. I trust that decisions are not made lightly. I trust that women are the only people who can know everything about their individual circumstance and with the information they have can be trusted to make the best call for their lives at the time they have to make it. I trust women and that's why despite my mother's best efforts, I am pro-choice.