Post for Choice day

[morgan_dhu]

I support reproductive choice.

I support those who choose to bear a child, without reservation, no matter what their social or economic situation may be, no matter what medical issues may exist for the one who carries or the one who is being born.

I support those who choose not to bear a child, without reservation.

In order to make these choices freely possible for all, I support a full system of social and financial supports for those who choose to bear a child, and for children that have been born, so that no pregnant person need go without food, shelter or medical case, and that no child need live without food, shelter, medical care and education. I support universal daycare so that no caregivers of children need choose between work and knowing that their children are safe and cared for at all times. I support complete and intelligent sex education for all young people so they can make decisions for themselves in full knowledge of the meanings and potential consequences of their actions and in full knowledge of how to protect themselves from risk. I support universal access to contraception, abortion and sterilization products, services and technologies, and increased research into new methods that will continue to make these safer and more accessible. I support full access and increased research into medical services that provide persons who wish to bear a child but cannot do so easily or without intervention with the assistance they need to have their chance to bear a child. And I support strict legal guidelines that make it certain that no person will ever be forced, coerced or pressured into any of these reproductive choices.

I support these things because it is the right of every human being to control their own body, and because it is also the right of every human being to be respected and given access to the necessities of life, and the responsibility of society - which is all of us - to ensure that those rights are in fact respected for all.

I have never had any personal ethical struggles with abortion, as many have, at least in part because my belief system is not a Judeo-Christian one. I don't believe, and never have believed, that conception had anything to do with a providential deity or with granting or denying a spirit's one and only chance to be born into flesh. I believe in the immortality of spirit, both before and after birth and death. I believe that the decision of whether to bear a child is a conversation between the one who bears and the one who would be born, and that it is always possible for the one who bears to say "Not now - come again later if you so deeply want to live a life as my child, or go with my goodwill to choose another parent in another place and time," or "No, I choose not to bear a child in this life. May you find the environment you seek elsewhere."

I have had an abortion. I have never born living children, though I have had several pregnancies that ended in miscarriage. I have no regrets, and I would not change my decision were I to be in that time and place again, knowing all that I know now. I have assisted another woman to conceive outside of heterosexual intercourse and joyfully call both her and the child she bore part of my chosen family. I have fostered a young girl without anyone to parent her, and helped her to find her own path in the world. I have had the great gift of being able to make my own reproductive choices in this life, and I am at peace with them.

I long for the day when every person can say the same.

Comments

[evil-macaroni.livejournal.com]

Amen to that -
re: spirits pre-birth:
Oddly enough, as a kid I dreamt of myself as the egg traveling down the fallopian tubes (probably after I learned about Where Babies Came From). Sounds quite silly, but it sort of reinforced the notion that I was the baby destined to be born - I was the wanted child, at the right place and time. I have never had any sympathy for the anti-abortionist's bullshit "what if it was YOU aborted" mind-games. Totally nonsensical: 1) because it wouldn't be a fully sentient Me in the picture and 2) I was the child destined to be born at that time to that mother.
I don't necessarily share your belief about immortal spirits, but agree with the sentiment that there should be no guilt about the what-might-have-been.