Reproductive Bodies – abortion rights work
When I wrote my master’s thesis, I took a lot of heat for not being feminist enough. In fact I was charged with having “misplaced priorities,” by the then director of the program. At the time, this was incredibly painful to me. I’ve mentioned before that this charge felt like such a betrayal to my activist and very feminist roots beyond academia. And while I was writing my mater’s thesis I was newly re-married, struggling through the nightmare of a ridiculous custody battle for the ePrince, and at the end of my studies learned that I was pregnant with my second child. I was writing about Roe v. Wade and experiencing a high-risk gestation.
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| from NYTMagazine |
And then I read this article last week in the New York Times Magazine. It seems that the first wave of female doctors, providing abortion procedures and reproductive rights services to their patients, are also dealing with the embodiment of the reproductive rights argument themselves. One doctor has been widely criticized for expressing her feelings in providing an abortion to a woman with the same gestational timeframe of the fetus she was also pregnant with and very much wanted. The doctor, described the experience as being, “… an overwhelming feeeling – a brutally visceral response – heartfelt and and unmediated by my training and pro-choice politics.” My point in writing about my personal experiences through my thesis work, was to expose the fallacy that there is no conflict in abortion provisions, even for the very people who strongly believe that abortions should be safe, legal, and available to women who feel that they need them. Like the conclusion that the doctor and many of her colleagues have come to, I myself continued my activist and academic work in the area of reproductive rights to ensure that women who wanted babies could have them and that women who did not want to rear children could make their own choice.
Many of the initial comments to the NYTimes Magazine story reflected the same sentiments from other mothers, like the following:
Like Sue, the writer of the comment above, I really think we need to expose the material and emotional concerns of would-be mothers to care for and love their children so that those individuals whose bodies and lives are on the line can make fair and informed decisions about whether or not to proceed with a pregnancy. The division of resources is a factor here, but also the psychological, emotional, and social toll of raising children is a difficult prospect for some women, at some points in their lives. The parties responsible for the consequences of their decisions to carry a pregnancy to term should be the very parties who are deemed responsible enough to make that decision. I believe that if more pro-choice mothers, like myself, are given a voice in the feminist or the reproductive rights activist community, the overall societal concern about abortion might be somewhat assuaged.
the Bitch in the house 
for abortion rights has changed. I answered, “absolutely not.”
The fact that I had the material and emotional means to care
for and love my child is irrelevant to the principle of abortion
rights–that the individuals whose bodies and lives are on the
line should be the ones to determine the course of their
bodies and lives. Now I am expecting my second child,
and that belief stands firm.