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railentheI occasionally jump in on things that my friends on Facebook have weighed in on. Today, a person was lamenting that their now ex-girlfriend has apparently gone on birth control (referred to hereafter as BC) when she apparently wasn’t before. The original poster seemed to be, to put it bluntly, rather butthurt about the whole deal: he bought into the conservative fallacy of being on BC = promiscuity.
In all likelihood, the odds are she was on it in the first place, so I took a devil’s advocate position on the whole thing, explaining that hormonal contraception is used not only for contraception, but also a form of HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) for reproductive issues.
I for one went on birth control around the time right after seeing my now on-again first boyfriend: mostly because it would give me relief from the migraines. (What they don’t tell you about it? YOU GET MOAR BEWBS.) The fact that it gave me free license to jump his bones (didn’t happen, I kept getting cockblocked) was a bonus.
The point is, there’s more than one reason to go on BC. And that decision should be up to the woman in question. NOT a bunch of white-haired old men who think that the body has ways to shut down unwanted pregnancies as in the case of incest and [trigger word redacted]. The fact is, most of the government trying to regulate what we do to our bodies are men—who therefore have a barely-working knowledge of how making babies work in the first place—Todd Akin, anybody?—and don’t seem to bother with science at all. Look at the conservatives’ positions on the subject, and you see a lot of DIVINE VIRTUE and GOD’S WILL and ABOMINATION AGAINST NATURE and AGAINST THE HOLY WORD!
You don’t see…what’s it called—oh, right. SCIENCE. You don’t see the medical experts’ views. You don’t see doctors. You don’t see internists. YOU DON’T SEE WOMEN. Or at least, you don’t see women when you’re not looking inside of Mitt Romney’s infamous binders. Pretty much, the one segment of the population that has anything to do with this whole thing is being silenced. The right to do to our bodies what we want to do, even in cases of improvement of our own health, we’re stuck under the thumb of conservative pols and the damn Church.
And I’m not comfortable with a bunch of old men who won’t let girls join their club trying to tell me what to do with my own huevos internales at every chance they get.
An ancient institution should not be taking the place of a trained medical professional. Church, I don’t turn around and tell you how to massage your prostates. Don’t tell me how to make my ovaries behave, and DON’T go around sticking lighted wands all up in the Promised Land just because you think that a cluster of cells that has not yet even developed a rudimentary nervous system should have sole control over what I do.
That isn’t pro-life. That’s pro-birth. After the birth, where are these people? “Oh, we’re not going to provide assistance to you, you should have known better than to get pregnant in the first place. Oh, and spermicides and condoms and stuff like that is also the devil so no you can’t have it unless you want to go to hell and you don’t want that now do you, silly woman?”
We’re not baby machines. Stop treating us like baby machines. Get out of our laws. For fuck’s sake, start treating women like PEOPLE, you old dustbags. Until then, I’ll just travel about until I can get the medical help I need for my hormonal issue.
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I could not sleep so I decided to check LJ at 5am...
Date: 2013-03-21 05:47 am (UTC)The BC issue led to my mother giving up Catholicism - her mother (a devout catholic) used BC because she had 2 daughters and knew she didn't want anymore children but because she took that option, she felt she was unworthy of taking communion. My mother couldn't stand that her mother was being punished by her religion for making such a choice and ultimately reasoned that she could not continue to stay with such a repressive church so at the age of 16 she left. (She still has her faith but not with the Catholic church.) Knowing how much my grandmother loved her religion I have to admire her bravery at taking the pill because it could not have been an easy decision to make. (This is the woman who may have secretly baptized me when my parents weren't in the room...) The sad truth is that children are a huge responsibility: emotionally, physically and financially. And my grandmother knew she did not want more. This isn't to say she didn't love the children she had already but like all people she had her limits.
I don't think babies that are going to be unwanted should be forced to be born. It's not fair to the mother, to society and most of all it's not fair to the baby itself. I don't think abortion should be used casually either (i.e. as an alternate form of contraception...) but I think it should be allowed as a practice because sometimes accidents happen and women can't let their lives be dominated by it.
My mother told me that during her pregnancy she underwent a whole series of tests to make sure I was not going to be a special needs baby (I was her first and ultimately only pregnancy and she was 39-40 at the time) and that if I were...well she would have got an abortion. This wasn't out of rejection for a flawed child but because she had worked with special needs children (she'd made a program about them right before her pregnancy) and knew that it would be a horribly complicated life not just for her and my father but also for me if I had been born with difficulties. She didn't want to give her baby a life of suffering. This is why I am pro-abortion because I believe that children deserve to be born into a world where they're wanted, loved and given the opportunity to make the most of their lives. Abortion can be for the unborn child's sake too and that's an argument that almost never gets heard in this debate.
Sometimes I get a teensy bit political, eh?
Date: 2013-03-22 12:02 am (UTC)birthlife crowd revolves around the wishes of a big invisible dude in the sky, it doesn't treat women as people! (Then again, the big dude in the sky in question came from a region that didn't treat women as people either, for the most part.) I say to them, stop trying to legislate my fricken uterus.no subject
Date: 2013-03-21 11:53 am (UTC)And of course, these 'pro-life' people seem to make a remarkable fuss about unborn children and absolutely nothing at all about what happens to said unborn child after it's born. Which always gets me.
(Incidentally: single mothers here used to get less support from the government than children with both parents. They recently changed it after realising it was punishing the child more than it ever punished the parent, and ffs: it's hard enough raising a child with two parents, do they actually think a little bit more cash is incentive enough for all the difficulties involved in single-handedly raising a child?! Governments sometimes...)
It makes me want to stabbity things.
Date: 2013-03-22 12:05 am (UTC)(You got a GOOD point there. That's the best fuzzy logic in the history of ever, not counting the Peter White/David Benoit double album of the same name. Sometimes I think that working in politics has a requirement of having failed a certain number of classes in school.)
OMG
Date: 2013-03-21 02:00 pm (UTC)I'd say more but my mind is currently overloaded by the awesomeness of this entry.
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Date: 2013-03-22 12:08 am (UTC)SURE TOTALLY MIND IF I BRING A THIRD AND WE BUILD A TRICYCLE?
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Re: F*CK YEA OMG
Date: 2013-03-22 04:00 pm (UTC)Depends. Who's the third?/shot by e-tech SMGRe: F*CK YEA OMG
Date: 2013-03-23 04:01 am (UTC)LET'S JUST SAY HE CAN KEEP UP ME FENCING AND ALSO HE'S GONNA TROLL ME IF HE FOLLOWED THE COMMENTS BUT OH WELL *SNIPED WITH INCENDIARY RIFLE*Classification cheap-tablets
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