Says You.

The line-in-the-sand that separates my body from your concerns

Image by melodiustenor for Pixabay

Let’s go back in time with a few what-ifs and hypotheticals in order to view the conversation from multiple angles.

You have concerns for the unborn life inside me: the life that has been put in my charge, via nature not creating life that can sustain itself without me.

Maybe I choose to enjoy an alcoholic beverage while pregnant. Should this be illegal? Of course not. What if I enjoy one every day? Or two? Should that be illegal? “No” to that, too.

What if I choose to take illegal drugs? Should this be illegal? It already is. Should I be punished additionally for taking illegal drugs while pregnant? This, too, has already been adjudicated: no. I am not guilty of child abuse until there is a child, and a fetus is not a child under the law — both human law, and nature’s.

Let’s now say that I find out I’m pregnant. While the circumstances need not be heroic or totally cleansed of personal accountability, I want to make it easier to consider this point of view; I find out I’m pregnant to my utter shock, because we had carefully discussed and used birth control. It failed. I didn’t take the morning-after pill, because we used contraceptives. They failed. I did not run to take a pregnancy test on the earliest of opportunities because I thought it was the flu, stress, Covid, you name it. I now want to have an abortion.

You want to protect the fetus. You want to control how far the decisions I make for my body can go, if those decisions affect the life of the fetus, and especially if my decision is to terminate the pregnancy. There are harsher phrases we could use, (and opponents always do) and I don’t have to tap dance around my words in order to reckon with my decision.

As far as I can tell, you don’t care about my eggs, you don’t care about his sperm, yet as soon as they come together, you care very much about the fetus. Then, if I did proceed with the pregnancy and deliver a living child, you would go back to not caring so much about my child. To spank or not to spank, to feed junk food or nutritious food, to enroll in Pre-K or not to enroll in Pre-K, despite all the science behind any of those decisions, you’ll leave that decision to me. And if I need financial assistance to raise this…