There is nothing pro-life about it
Several weeks ago, I was asked to speak at a Bans off our Bodies rally. I didn’t read this verbatim, but this is a slightly edited version of what I wrote in preparation for the rally.
I could talk about a lot of things when it comes to abortion. I could talk about my work as a doula and how banning and restricting access to abortion will negatively impact anyone who gets pregnant or could get pregnant. I could talk about the abysmal maternal mortality rates in the United States. I could talk about racial disparities in health care, which result in Black and Indigenous birthing people dying at rates 3–4 times higher than white people.
But what I actually want to talk about is what led me to being pro-choice.
Because when I was a teenager I was vehemently pro-life. I believed that a fetus was a life and that abortion was killing that life, so it should be illegal.
Like a lot of people, in college, I was challenged to think more critically and exposed to more views on the world than I had been growing up. And a lot of my beliefs changed. But not my views on abortion. Even as my religious beliefs, which certainly informed my beliefs on abortion, changed, I still believed that ending a life was wrong and therefore abortion should be illegal.
It wasn’t until I was in law school that a classmate said something about abortion that I had never previously heard or considered. I can’t remember her exact words, but it was basically that we do not require people to use their bodies to save the lives of others. Her example was that you are not required to give someone a blood transfusion just because they will die without it. You have autonomy over your body. So even if life *does* begin at conception, why would we legally require a pregnant person to use their body to sustain a fetus when we don’t legally require anyone else to do that in any other situation?
We don’t even require people to use their bodies to support another life when it’s relatively simple, brief, and painless, like donating blood. But pregnancy? Anyone who’s been anywhere near a pregnancy can tell you that it is not simple, brief, or painless.
My five pregnancies were extremely difficult. Until I was able to get the right medication, I vomited anytime I moved at all. I lost weight during each of my pregnancies due to nausea. I had two miscarriages, one that required a D&C, the same procedure that is used for many abortions. And one where I had to take misoprostol which is a pill often prescribed for abortions. So, just as a side note, while I’ve never had an abortion, I’ve benefited from abortion being legal. If abortion had been illegal, I would have had to jump through more hoops to get the medical care I needed for my miscarriages, and would have made an already very difficult time even harder.
But the point I’m trying to get at is that pregnancy and birth are extremely taxing on a person’s mental and physical health. And yet, some people still believe that fetuses should be legally entitled to survive off a pregnant person’s body.
Whether life begins at conception or not is a distraction. It doesn’t matter. Because we do not require people to use their bodies to sustain the lives of others. We do not legally require people to give blood. A parent isn’t legally required to donate their kidney to their own child, even if their child will die without it. Even after death, organs cannot be donated from a corpse unless the person consented to it before they died.
If abortion is banned, a fetus will have a privilege that no one else gets. It will have someone else legally obligated to use their body to keep that fetus alive. Banning abortion elevates the existence of a fetus above, not just the lives of pregnant people, but above any other life, while at the same time giving pregnant people less bodily autonomy than a corpse. And there is nothing “pro-life” about it.
