Life Begins with the Choice

Let’s make one thing clear from the start. Pro-choice isn’t a euphemism for “pro-abortion.” No one wants to have an abortion. Sometimes it just so happens that one needs one. And if that’s the case, one must have such an option. I am pro-choice, yet the necessity to have an abortion is one of my worst fears.

Because I know that this decision is tough and has immense implications.

Because I am repulsed with surgeries.

Because I would have to weigh two absolutely different futures against each other and choose one.

Yet I want it to be my choice. I cannot imagine someone taking it away from me. I want all the choices to remain legal.

We do have common ground.

Pro-life rhetoric often sounds as if pro-choice women “can’t keep their legs together” and are getting abortions on a whim to continue going around enjoying irresponsible sex. Yeah, let’s punish women for having sex. So untrue and annoying.

Supporters of the abortion ban also appropriated the word “life,” which is beautiful, powerful, complex, and… too big. It handily casts their opponents as “pro-death,” which we are not. Instead of demonizing pro-choicers as blood-thirsty murderers, how about finding common ground? It’s so simple.

No one enjoys abortion. No one wants more abortions. We all want them to become obsolete. Everyone wants all pregnancies to be planned and all children to be wanted and loved. How about we work together on that? How about age-appropriate and comprehensive sex education? How about accessible birth control? That’s something on what we all could work together, isn’t it?

Legal abortion doesn’t mean that vulnerable wavering women are forced into the termination of their pregnancies. They simply have this option—among other options. This choice must be 100 percent personal, safe, and informed. Pro-life people can have consultants at clinics offering advice on job opportunities for mothers or adoption service—that would be so much more effective (and kinder!) then harassing and name-calling.

Instead of shaming and banning, how about educating young men and women, so they won’t later regret their choice (whichever that is).

Because life doesn't begin at conception. It begins with the choice.

I once heard a pro-life woman (let’s call her Christine) saying that she is the perfect example of why all abortions are evil. Her mother wanted to terminate the pregnancy, but later decided against it and gave birth instead.

That only proves that life begins with a choice. Christine’s mother chose to have her, raise her, love her, care for her. Years of nurture and dedicated parenting created this confident person, who now stands denying choice for others—not the moment of conception.

If Christine’s mother didn’t want her and was left with no other option but to have her, if she were frustrated with the load of motherhood forced upon her, if she didn’t want and didn’t care for the child, would the child grow up to be the same person? I doubt it.

Because life begins with a choice—whether it’s a choice to have unprotected sex with the intention to create life, a choice to keep an unplanned pregnancy, a choice to have in-vitro fertilization.

Some lives begin with the choice to abort. How? Mine did. My mother had an abortion several years before having me. At that time, my parents had no money to support two children. They lived in a cramped flat with my grandparents, my aunt, my great-grandmother and my older sister—their first-born.

They never planned to have more than two kids. My mother’s intention had always been to tie her tubes after the second child. So you see, if she had that child, I wouldn’t exist. Someone else would—a male child, born in 1983, not a girl born in 1986. That was my mother’s choice—to wait for a better moment for her second child.

So you see, Christine’s life began with her mother deciding not to have an abortion, but mine began with my mother’s decision to have one.

The choice is my own.

I, more than once, heard an opinion that pro-choice and pro-life must meet somewhere in the middle and have a discussion. That pro-life, is, in fact, “moderate” stance on the problem, and that recent blanket-bans are “moderate pro-life legislation” (no kidding). If that’s moderate, what’s extreme? Prison sentence for wet dreams? I don’t call forcing a woman to give birth against her health, her will, her wellbeing because of your own moral stance “moderate.” Is it really about protecting life? Or is it about controlling one?

At least when I say I am pro-choice, I’m being honest. If a rape victim decides to keep the child, I will admire her ability to forgive and love regardless. If a woman goes through with pregnancy despite life-threatening complications, I will cheer her courage. What makes these women worthy of such praise? Their choices. Which only qualify as choices when there are other options available.

Abortion is also a choice—a deeply personal one. Sometimes it’s a kinder option in a devastating life situation. Sometimes it’s the least self-destructive option available. It mustn’t be leverage of political influence for a man who will never face this dilemma, or a topic for unceasing paper writing for students to practice eloquence, or a source of hot headlines for journalists to exploit. It’s a personal choice that must stay available. Period.

So if you call yourself "pro-life," here are some questions for you:

Why don’t you care about children already born? About children neglected and abused? About children born into a life of suffering because of fatal fetal anomalies or because they weren’t wanted?

Wouldn’t it be more pro-life to make health care affordable, to introduce paid parental leave, to subsidize daycare, to make birth control more accessible? Wouldn’t sex education that prevents unwanted pregnancies from ever happening be more pro-life? Only if you help parents and nurture those already born will I believe that you are pro-life and not simply anti-abortion (read: pro-control).

Why is medical science only praised when its advancement means saving fetus on earlier terms of miscarriage? Is it because thus it extends the period of “viability” and serves the pro-life cause to blanket-ban all abortion as immoral? Why does science suddenly become “morally wrong” when we talk about contraception or in vitro fertilization? (As if “test-tube babies” aren’t real babies and their lives aren’t real lives?)

Why don’t you care about the lives of women who will be inevitably maimed or killed as a result of illegal back-alley abortions, which will go rampant should safe and legal abortions be criminalized?

Why do the lives of the women with high-risk pregnancy weight less than the lives of their fetuses? Aren’t their lives worthy of protection?

If you are an anti-abortion woman, don’t have an abortion. If you are a man who is anti-abortion, always wear protection unless you have sex with a woman who explicitly said: “I want to have your baby.” How difficult can that be? And leave people alone to have their own choices.