All the Other Good Reasons to Have an Abortion

Image attribution

My first year of college my roommate and I had a conversation about abortion. We were both politically pro-choice, of course, but were both also bothered by the idea of personally getting an abortion. We both casually agreed that if we were to have an unintended pregnancy, we would carry it to term and put the baby up for adoption.

Ah, the naivete of youth.

A few short months later, she had a boyfriend, fell in love, lost her virginity, and got pregnant. She also got an abortion as fast as she could find a clinic.

When she told me about the abortion, I could tell she was afraid I would morally judge her due to our previous conversation. But within minutes of taking it in, I realized, I (who by that time was also in a relationship and sexually active) would have done the exact same thing.

I would have done the same thing for probably the same reasons as my roommate (and several other women I know who have had abortions under similar circumstances); our lives were great! We were 18 and out on our own for the first time. Being in college was exciting and challenging; there were so many interesting people to meet, so much to learn, so much to do. Sure, we were in love, but we weren't planning any weddings. (And neither of us married those boyfriends.) We had nothing, but also nothing weighing us down. We were free to explore a multitude of opportunities.

Nine months of pregnancy followed by the birth of a baby would take it all away. Such an event would change the course of our lives forever. Neither the opportunity to become a young mother dependent on her parents, nor to be a human incubator for someone else's adoptive child were the least bit appealing. Nor were all the health risks of pregnancy.

Of course I didn't feel that my roommate had done anything wrong. Any more than I feel it is wrong to be a sexually active woman. Even if we take precautions, unintended pregnancies happen. In fact half of the pregnancies which occur are unintended. During the early stages of pregnancy (when 90% of abortions are performed), an embryo is nowhere close to sentience or viability. Early term abortions are generally safe (posing less health risks than seeing a pregnancy through) so why should any woman be ashamed of choosing to abort an early term pregnancy?

The answer is, she shouldn't.

Typically in debates and discussions over abortion laws and regulations, pro-choice advocates bring up rape and incest. In other words, the most extreme circumstances under which a woman is morally justified in getting an abortion.

I understand why this rhetoric is used. It makes the point that when push comes to shove, most of us agree that the woman's health, life, rights, and dignity surpass that of an embryo or fetus.

But while it might be politically effective to highlight rape and incest, it has the unintended consequence of giving the impression that abortion, even early term abortion, needs a moral justification beyond that the woman simply doesn't want to be pregnant and give birth.

I can't help but think that the emphasis on rape and incest as a justification for abortion contributed to the naive feelings my roommate and I had about abortion before the issue hit home.

Anti-abortion activist Kristine Kruszelnicki, apparently suffers from the same sort of naivete. Except she takes her naive conclusions and puts them into trying to rob women of our reproductive rights. In her guest post on Friendly Atheist, she writes:

If we all work together to come up with real choices for women — better birth control, better maternity leave, subsidized daycare, a living wage, flexible work schedules, better schooling options, more attractive open-adoption and temporary foster care options, etc. — abortion may roll itself into the world of obsolescence, regardless of its legal status.

(As an aside, don't let that "regardless of its legal status" line fool you. Kruszelnicki's organization Pro-Life Humanists works to limit access to abortion at any time for any reason. They want abortion to be seen in the eyes of the law as equivalent to killing a toddler. Just scroll down to the subheading "Personally pro-life, but don't change the law?" here to read just how extreme and threatening their cause is to women's basic reproductive rights.)

Even if every social reform Kruszelnicki lists were achieved, countless women would still choose abortion because we don't want to be pregnant and have a baby. We should have the right to that choice.

About half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy, and more than a quarter will decide to have an abortion at least once in our lifetimes.

Given those staggering numbers, it is obvious that abortions are not only chosen by women who are low-income, poorly educated, scared, or alone. They are chosen by women of all walks of life.

Abortion is for  the musician working a day job to pay the bills while spending all her free time in rehearsals, concerts, and promotion.

Abortion is for the dancer who trained for years and has just achieved her dream of being accepted to a prominent company.

Abortion is for  the newly trained doctor fulfilling her first residency (where the cap on hours is 80 per week.)

Abortion is for the ambitious lawyer working insane hours as she eagerly aspires to make partner before she even considers starting a family.

Abortion is for the archeologist who is about to travel to Africa for an excavation.

Abortion is for the woman in a crappy relationship, and for whom an unintended pregnancy was just the wake-up call she needed to face the fact that this guy is bad news, so walk away.

Abortion is for the married mother who has decided with her husband that their family is complete, and that adding more kids at this point could very well fuck up the good thing they've got.

That last example applies to me. And also Elyse of Skepchick, who so eloquently offers this statement:

If I were to get pregnant today, I wouldn't have to think about it. I would have an abortion. It's not that I'm "not ready" to be a mom. It's not that I'm waiting for the right time. It's not that I'm single. It's that I simply detest being pregnant and I don't want more kids. And my husband (quietly) detests when I'm pregnant and doesn't want more kids. There will be no crying. There will be no hand wringing. There will be no thoughtful contemplation. There will be no more kids. Not in my body. 

My sentiments exactly.

I shouldn't need to have been raped or gotten knocked up by my uncle to get an early term abortion. The truth is, any reason a woman has for getting an early term abortion is a good enough reason to defend our right to make that choice.

A Rocky Start for Skepchick's Grounded Parents

Back in November a friend of mine posted a link to an announcement: Now Hiring Parents! Skepchick was seeking writers for its new sister blog Grounded Parents. 

I'm not naive; I know most blogging "jobs" only pay in exposure. However, some do pay, even if it is just a token amount. I'm not looking for a full time career. Just a little something to help pay for dance lessons and this killer-winter's heating bills. Since nothing in the notice mentioned it being volunteer, I went ahead and applied. 

I was soon emailed for a "call back" and asked to submit an article. I wrote and submitted A White Mom Talks To Her White Kid About Race and was promptly "hired." 

I expected maybe a contract to follow. Instead I was added to an email discussion list, instructed on how to use gravatar and sign up for WordPress and there was a flurry of casual introductions and chitchat. After a week, the administrators submitted a rough draft of the "guidelines", where it mentioned this was an "unpaid gig." 

After another week (and before the site's launch) I resigned, including this paragraph: 

As an artist, I stopped entering juried exhibitions that charge fees 8 years ago because I felt the practice took advantage of artists. In graduate school I refused to do unpaid internships on principle and still find the widespread practice of them unethical and giving advantage to young people from more affluent families. If writing was a hobby, I would do it. But I've been paid for my writing and I'm currently in the process of trying to sell a book. If I'm going to take myself seriously as a professional artist and writer, I just can't give it away. 

(And just in case anyone thinks I'm giving it away here on my Humanist Mom blog, I'll have you know that I earned $3.00 on Google ads last month.) 

Grounded Parents launched on December 17th. After being introduced to the diverse and interesting group of people who were hired to write for the site, I began reading. 

Like most blogs, there's a lot of personal memoir. Indeed, memoirs can be enlightening if they are well written (or performed, as with Jenny Splitter's F#@*ck the Birth Experience) and tackle meaty topics. Some posts on Grounded Parents (such as Splitter's), accomplish this. Others came off to me as a bit self indulgent and dull. 

Several of the articles offer parenting advice or descriptions of what they think is superior parenting. When such advice comes from writers with no professional credentials in childhood development, cite little to no research to back it up, and/or employs vague platitudes and generalizations, it is meaningless and unwarranted. In other words, writers writing because they love the sound of their own prose and get a zing out of comments praising them for their insight. This sort of mediocre writing is common on blogs, but it is disappointing to see so much of it on a high visibility skeptic website. 

There was also this bump in the road; just two months in, Grounded Parents had to fire one its bloggers and issue a public apology for the person's inappropriate behavior. The poor ethics of this blogger-in-question was exhibited previously in this post (a rather shitty argument in favor of standardized tests) where she admits to giving a student a worse grade than he deserved because he was "a pain in the ass." 

The shit really started to hit the fan for me with Chris Brecheen's post Grounded Midwives, which is a personal story about how his partner attempted a homebirth with Certified Professional Midwives (CPMs), and how the midwives alleviated his fears of their woo with their actual good sense trust in real medicine. It is clear by the end of the article that he's unaware of the controversy over CPMs being even allowed to practice midwifery, seeing as unlike Certified Nurse Midwives (CNMs) who receive a high level of medical training, work with hospitals, and abide by standards set by the medical establishment, CPMs are lay midwives certified by a separate organization, are often not covered by insurance, and fail to meet minimum standards of training to practice midwifery in most other developed nations. The moment in the article when Brecheen stops worrying and begins to view the midwives as his skeptical allies is when one of them admits that there is no science to back the notion that eating placenta has any benefits. Kind of a low bar for skepticism if you ask me. 

Next there was the English professor who claimed in Against Marriage that "The solution to poverty is to encourage all our children to avoid marriage until they are at least twenty-five." Because after all, people under twenty-five's forebrains are too underdeveloped to make adult decisions about getting married and being parents, nobody with a high school diploma has a complete education, and anyone can earn a living wage if they just wait long enough to have kids. I ended up being so pissed about this ignorant piece of crap post that I felt compelled to write Harming Young Mothers With Stereotypes in response, just to balance out the blogosphere. 

Then, for whatever reason, Grounded Parents decided to feature a guest post by "Skepchick's resident stats junkie/guru" Jamie Bernstein, titled Homebirth Safety and Risk. In the article, Bernstein looks at two very different reports on this study of home birth outcomes: first that of the Midwives Alliance of North America (MANA) and second that of Skeptical OB Dr. Amy Tuteur. Bernstein concludes that while MANA is guilty of downplaying the dangers of high risk home birth (as they celebrate the supposed safety of low-risk homebirths), Dr. Tuteur is manipulating data to make home birth look riskier and fear-mongering. 

To put it another way, a skeptic blog smacked down a skeptic of good repute who is fighting a war against reckless lay midwives who put women and babies at risk, and gave a slap on the wrist to the organization that supports those same lay midwives. What the fuck? 

Dr. Tuteur went on the offense, pointing out Bernstein's errors, clarifying where Bernstein was confused about Tuteur's analysis, and chastising Bernstein for not contacting her first for clarification about the points where she was confused. You know, like a journalist would have done. But this isn't journalism. Not even amateur journalism. This is bad blogging. Of course Dr. Tuteur also asked for an apology. 

Instead of an apology, Grounded Parents published a follow-up guest post from Bernstein which criticizes statistician Dr. Brooke Orosz's analysis of the study as presented on Dr. Tuteur's blog and promoted by iO9. This second article starts out with errors, such as describing only one of the study's authors as midwives (and that therefore iO9's title is misleading.) In fact, three of the six authors were midwives and five of the six had ties to MANA. And regardless of the article's title, iO9 refers to the study authors as "PhDs and midwives" in the body of the article. 

Bernstein's big message in this second post is that Dr. Orosz failed to construct a well-enough matched cohort when comparing the MANA stats to CDC numbers, and therefore her and Dr. Tuteur's conclusions are a misrepresentation. Dr. Orosz herself appears in the comments to explain (actually to reiterate) that she deliberately selected a cohort that would likely favor home birth. She writes: 

My hospital cohort ISN’T a good comparison. I did not attempt to construct a matched cohort, because, as you noted, that would be very complex and subtle and open to interpretation and misinterpretation. Instead, I selected a cohort that could not possibly be LOWER in risk.

Ultimately Jamie Bernstein comes off as if she's nitpicking any bit of minutiae she can to discredit Dr. Tuteur out of personal vendetta. 

And this when (as Dr. Tuteur points out) homebirth advocates are linking to Bernstein's articles to spread their message that homebirth is just as safe as hospital birth. 

In the time since Bernstein's first guest post was published on Grounded Parents, Dr. Amy Tuteur has debunked a study that claims that c-sections cause obesity, and has unrelentingly continued to report on the unnecessary death of Gavin Michael that happened because instead of strongly recommending transfer to a hospital, the midwife crowd-sourced advice on facebook. Because that's what a great skeptic blog does. 

I had hoped for more in a parenting blog geared toward freethinkers. But, as they say, you get what you pay for.