Choice vs. Life

The pro-choice vs pro-life debate is peppered with extreme clashes of fundamental values, emotionally charged circumstances, and socioeconomic inequity. Stir into that a little political power and demographic overpopulation, and you’re reaching into a really sticky issue.

 Often thrown amidst the mix of why we believe in life over choice come thoughts of our own birth, or the birth of people we cherish. If I had not been born? If they had not been born?

Certainly, I think it’s unfair to regret and grieve for something that did not happen. And, even in giving women the choice to give birth, it will continue to be that those who are, are and those who aren’t, aren’t. No one can know what would’ve been. I think by questioning this, we lose sight of our reality. Our own birth was never a question, because we are here.

I feel for the women who undergo an abortion and must defend themselves till the end, sometimes in their own heads as it is constantly rubbed in their faces in visually gruesome pro-life campaigns. Can they not grieve for a child they never wanted? Perhaps the child that they could not afford or the one they were not allowed, they need not rationalise it. The aborted foetus never was and never will be.

And furthermore, to force a woman, as in the past, to carry her child to term and give it up for adoption seems to be an even crueller sentence. Knowing that she cannot keep it and will not keep it, to go through the process of pregnancy and the intensity of birth, she will grieve doubly but will not be permitted to show it because she wanted to get rid of the child.

To be born unwanted from your mother does not mean unloved, nor does being the product of a violent encounter. But women, being the only half of the population to be capable of doing it, need to be able to make an empowered choice, un-coerced. Once that choice is made, they need immense support. Regardless of the outcome, I believe that both lanes are dark ones, to keep the pregnancy or to lose it, I feel the women lose a piece of themselves. She is the only one who will live with her choice, no one else may feel it the way she does.

And when she is put through the intricacies of visualizing unborn foetus’ eyes or limbs, you throw salt in the wound and impose her body as a reproductive machine. It is not her alone that is upholding the survival of the human race, and if a man can’t give birth than why should she?