Why I'm more careful with birth control now

• I was 21 years old and was pregnant by a one night stand with an ex, an ex who got back with his son's mother the next day and was thus unavailable to me and wouldn't even take my phone calls.  I worked 2 jobs to pay my $275/month rent and still had to use my mom's washing machine because I didn't have money for the laundromat. So I made an appointment, borrowed money from my mother, and went to terminate a poorly timed and insurmountable pregnancy.
  They assigned me a counselor who gave me a prophylactic antibiotic pill and explained the procedure to me.  They would give me a local anesthetic shot in my cervix, dilate me with a series of increasingly large metal rods, and then suction out the cells. I asked the counselor, a bright-eyed college student, how far I'd be dilated and she held up her pinky finger. pointed out that at this stage (11 weeks) the fetus was way bigger than that; how would they suction it out.  She reluctantly admitted that there's a blade in the vacuum that "breaks down the tissue". (Ever see a Roto-Rooter commercial?)  But she assured me that it was just a clump of cells and asked me to not make the mistake of confusing "tissue" with "flesh". I had done my homework and told her so.  I knew that the cells had a functioning heart, the beginnings of arms and legs, and tiny undeveloped eyeballs.  She stammered and gave me the consent form to sign.
  When I backed out, on the table and in the stirrups, the doctor ripped off his gloves and threw them at my exposed crotch. "I have real patients waiting for me," he snarled. I looked up at my counselor, crying, confused, and scared, and feeling a LOT of pressure to make up my mind right this very second no you can't have a second to collect your thoughts we're busy, she stood up and left the room.  Apparently I wasn't pro-choice enough to warrant her services.
  I wonder what would have happened, how I would have taken it, if I'd accepted what they told me at face value and then found out later about the arm buds and "neural tube" spine. I think I would have had a breakdown. They lied to me.  For all I know, they lied to that college girl when they told her what to say to patients.  I assume they did it to lessen the trauma of the situation, as a kindness to me, but they did me no kindness. And so, because I don't feel that they deserve anonymity, I hereby post a link to the clinic:
  http://www.emmagoldman.com/

My secret

I have a secret, one I rarely tell people and avoid talking about. I am anti-abortion. People just tend to assume that if you're a liberal woman, you aren't, so I nod and let them assume that, but I secretly don't approve of abortion.

Politically, as a matter of what legislation I favor, I'm pro-choice. But when people say things like "My body, my choice", I shake my head. And when when they say it's not a person yet, it's a woman's right to decide when to have a baby, women denied abortions are forced to become incubators, I hum to drown them out. Because I really am anti-abortion.

I believe that the reproductive systems of two homo sapiens are incapable of producing anything but another homo sapien, and that therefore any embryo or fetus is a person. I believe sperm and eggs are potential people, but the creatures they combine to produce are people.

I believe that a fetus is not a body part. A parasite, perhaps, but not a tumor or organ, or other body part of the mother. For that reason, I do not believe it's merely a matter of allowing women to do what they want to their own bodies. But even if it were, a transgendered person has to jump through a thousand loopholes just to remove an unwanted penis, which is inarguably one person doing what they want, surgically, to their own body. So it's easier when there's an argument to be made that it could end another life than when there isn't?

I believe that it is very simplistic and short-sided to make it a woman's right when it involves another person. If a pair of conjoined twins exists where one depends on the other for some vital function, does the one capable of living independently have the right to kill the other? No, being physically dependent does not equal being un-alive.

I believe that a woman has a right to choose when to become an incubator, and that choice (like the choice to become a father or not) happens pre-implantation. Birth control, condoms, (or better yet, both), and even the morning after pill, all exist to make it possible to avoid both pregnancy and abortion.

But I believe that I could, under extreme circumstances, seek an abortion. If I were raped, or if I had a reasonable fear that there would be something terribly wrong with the baby, or if some other horrible, drastic, tragic thing happened, I might want to go terminate a pregnancy. It would be ending a life. It would be killing a person (remember, I think fetuses are people, and they don't survive abortions). It would be doing what was best for me, not for anyone else. In fact, it would very much be doing something very bad for someone else (the fetus). It would be selfish. But I believe that I could make that selfish choice, if I felt I had no other option. And as long as I could see myself doing it then I don't believe it's right to declare that no one else should be able to. But I thin they should be honest enough to say that it is a killing (not murder, perhaps, but somewhere up the ladder from killing a bug, which people freely admit is killing), that it is selfish, and that it is drastic. I don't believe it is a right, but I believe I should be allowed to do it if I so choose. There are lots of things I want to be allowed to do that I never plan to do and do not consider a right. Learning to fly, taxidermy, clown college. Not necessarily human rights, but things I don't want to be banned from doing. This is just a little more serious than those.

I respectfully disagree

I recently read this article on Slog (my favorite blog ever) all about how limiting abortion funding is anti-woman and cuts a woman's basic right to decide whether or not to have a child and how to take care of her own body, and about how "conscience" laws are unethical and doctors should have to be required to practice abortions (it even says that conscience laws are only ever invoked about abortion, which isn't true) and that these attacks on women are attempts to push women into the "housewife and mother" role. I have to disagree.

First of all, there are a lot of things you have the right to that the government doesn't have to pay for. I have the legal right to go get a nose job if I want, but the government doesn't have to fund it and that lack of funding doesn't translate to government trying to infringe upon my basic right to decide how to present myself. I happen to disagree with the decision to cut funding for pap smears and birth control just because abortions are performed in the same building, but I'm not going to rant about how great and wonderful and All-American abortions are to make my point.

When I was 15 my gynecologist refused to implant my Norplant birth control due to his Catholic beliefs. This is how such a terrible travesty went down. I went in for my pap, answered the informed consent questions (You're doing this on your own, right? Your mother isn't forcing you to go on it?) and then the doctor told me he was Catholic and couldn't prescribe birth control and he left and another doctor came in. The new doctor introduced himself, asked if I'd read the information packet, and then put in the Norplant. Terrible, right? I do happen to believe that doctors and pharmacists should be able to opt out of personally providing services they object to. But I think that if you are going to take advantage of that ability, you should have to provide a partner willing to perform the services in question. My Catholic pharmacist wouldn't have to personally sell me the morning after pill, but he'd have to have a second pharmacist on duty who would. Yes, it would cost more for him to pay a second pharmacist, but that's the flip side of being allowed to refuse. As for Catholic hospitals refusing to dispense morning after pills to rape victims in their ER, they can either become private hospitals or they can keep one protestant doctor on duty.

I believe abortion is bad. But I can see, however vaguely, circumstances where it might be the lesser of 2 evils, the least bad option. If I were leaving an abusive husband and found out I was pregnant, I don't think I would want to share a child with him. If I were raped, I wouldn't want to carry that violation around for 9 months and I wouldn't want a blend of myself and a rapist to exist. And as long as I could see some instances where I would get an abortion I don't feel it is my place to tell anyone else they can't have those circumstances, too. So I am anti-abortion and pro-choice. Because women should be able to make horrible wrenching choices. But so should doctors.

Stop the extremism, and then off on a tangent.

I hate extremes. Which is odd, since I guess technically I should just strongly dislike extremes, hate being an extreme and all. I'll have to ponder that moderately someday. But anyway....

I am in favor of gun control. I don't want to ban them, but I'd like to think there's a way of keeping psychopaths from buying guns on a whim. I think people should be able to carry concealed weapons, with a permit.

I am opposed to abortion. But I am in favor of keeping it legal because as long as I can see some circumstance in which I might want to get one I feel I have no authority to say anyone else should never be able to get one. That said, I do not think abortion is a right, or merely something a woman chooses to do to her own body. There is, at the very least, a potential for life other than hers involved and that discredits, to me, the "It's my body" argument.

I am opposed to circumcision. Or should I say, to routine infant circumcision. I think it's pointless, needless, cosmetic, and not in a child's best interest at all. But I don't think it's mutilation, because I don't think a circumcised penis has been mutilated. I think a penis that went through a meat grinder would be mutilated, or an amputated penis, or a scarred up with a switchblade penis, but not a circumcised penis. However, I do think that certain forms of female genital mutilation are very much comparable to circumcision, like the ones where they just remove the labia as opposed to removing the clitoris and then sewing the whole thing up. And I think that as long as we say it is horrific and terrible and abusive for Africans to cut the labia off their young daughters so that the girls can a) look like their mothers, b) look more attractive and normal because in their culture all they ever see are vaginas without labia, and c) prevent the formation of smegma later in life, and then continue to circumcise our own sons for the exact same reasons, we are hypocrites and we are idiots for not even seeing it.

I think that when people go all extreme in their arguments the first (and often the only) thing they accomplish is to convince the other side that they are the only rational side there is. As long as the intactivists keep screaming about people mutilating their sons and ruining them, the pro-circumcision side will continue to think that we are all wackos who take this shit wayyy too seriously and that we are too unstable to pay attention to. Also, maybe we should stop ranting on about how much sexual pleasure there is in the foreskin and all that. People don't generally like to think about their infant sons getting off; it makes it harder to deal with the tiny erections that tend to pop up in smiling babies' diapers. When they say they don't want girls to laugh at an intact penis later on, they aren't imagining sex as much as they are imagining 2 people seeing each other naked, which is an important distinction for a mother. When we are tasked with all the bathing and diaper changing, we need to separate the organ from it's future function, or else we can't manhandle it the way we need to. (Baby boys poop all up around their junk, you need to move it around and really get under and around everything to wipe it clean. Laugh if you will, but desexualizing our children is a vital parental coping skill.