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Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/books/item_id/2044345-Louise-is-Elizabeth-Hykes-blog/day/7-14-2022
Rated: E · Book · Writing · #2044345
Writing about what I have been reading and encountering in the media.
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I comment on things I am reading, thinking about, encountering in media, and spiritual issues. I hope you will find something interesting. PS. I love feedback...
July 14, 2022 at 1:39pm
July 14, 2022 at 1:39pm
#1035196
Some time ago, I had a long Facebook exchange with a young friend who takes care of homeless people who are excluded from homeless shelters due to problematic behavior. He does this in his home. We discussed the issue of abortion. I presented the metaphor of someone moving into your body without your permission and the state saying you must keep them, and they need care for several years from someone. His response is that he would take them in even in his body because that is what he does. Following is my response:

You would react to that differently! ☺️You do welcome intruders. However, those intruders are there because you welcome them. Therefore, they aren't intruders. When you invite them, that changes their definition. When you invite a child into your body, it isn't an intruder. My experience with grief over losing my fertility, after 15 years of deliberately not conceiving, taught me some things. Since no one else grieved my lost children, I came to realize they were imaginary. I concluded that children come into being when you imagine them, when you decide they are a child and this happens at different times. There was a law, around the time of Roe v. Wade, in another state, that said a woman could get an abortion if two doctors agreed that her health was at risk if she continued the pregnancy. Sometimes, it took so long to get through that process, the pregnancy would be into the second trimester. The mother could have died in that time, or the fetus could be decaying in her body and poisoning her. This stopped with Roe v. Wade. Now, states are putting up so many barriers, women are back in the same position in some states.

The whole thing seems to me to focus on who gets to decide what that tissue in that woman's body is. When someone else decides, the outcome is very different than if the woman decides. What if the police decided that your guests are intruders and just came and rounded them all up and hauled them off? That would be the state deciding rather than you deciding. Or what if the state decided you had to let anyone in and let them do what they want taking away your control of the situation? What if they rounded up everyone they could find and hauled them in and dropped them at your place with no provision for meeting their needs and said they must stay on your property and you must meet their needs. It would be a whole different experience, wouldn't it? The issue is not should someone get an abortion. The issue is who decides who will carry a child and give birth.

Pro-lifers want the state to decide. Pro-choicers want the woman to decide with advice and support from the people she chooses to help her. The Pro-lifers can befriend her, can give her support, can offer to love and raise the child, one on one, in person, and make a difference in the outcome. Instead, the Pro-lifers have all been herded into a social ghetto and have decided that pro-choicers are their enemy and their enemy won't even listen to what pro-lifers are saying.

The community can support a process that defines that tissue as a child in each individual woman by welcoming the women even when they don't agree with what they believe or think and make a difference, just like you are doing with the people you are choosing to help. However, pro-lifers shoot doctors and harass pro-choicers. I feel hated in my own community by people who have never asked what I think. I feel very unsafe around pro-lifers because they have expressed so much hatred and vitriol. Hatred just makes it harder for women to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. Why aren't those pro-lifers joining Planned Parenthood and helping reduce the number of abortions through prevention? Because they have become pawns of people who care less about the issue than getting power for themselves.



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