Reminder: it is called pro- CHOICE, not pro-DEFINITELY-GETTING-AN-ABORTION. it is about allowing women or couples to CHOOSE what happens with their own bodies. It is about the fact that maybe *you* would never get an abortion, but still not shaming the fact that other people might choose to have one. It is about the fact that *you* might get an abortion but not shaming other women about deciding to go through with the pregnancy even if they are young, unmarried, or not in a condition *you* would want to have a child in. It is about choice, and respect that we all have different opinions and morals.
Abortion clinics nationwide face significant threats of harassment, intimidation, and violence, according to a new report showing that threats of violence against abortion providers have doubled since 2010.
The survey of 242 abortion providers in the United States found that there has been significantly higher levels of threats and targeted intimidation of doctors and staff in recent years. The report comes as widespread intimidation tactics were deployed against clinics during the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision affirming a woman’s right to choose an abortion.
More than 500 plastic handcuffs placed inside “care packages” were reportedly delivered to abortion clinics throughout the country last week, according to The Christian Post. The packages were sent by the anti-choice organization Pro-Life Action League.
Trust Women is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing abortion access by opening clinics in underserved areas. They recently opened a clinic in the building where Dr. George Tiller, a doctor murdered by an anti-choice fanatic, worked.
These pictures were taken by Julie Burkhart from her front window.
“Our bodies are sacred and so are the decisions we make that honor each of our circumstances AND our beliefs. To ensure that people have healthcare they need is just and moral work and so is making sure people can get a safe abortion!”
TW: discussion of abortion, mistreatment of women, rape, abuse
Following the closure of a UK abortion clinic in July of 2015, women’s charities and sex positive charities have been calling for buffer zones to be established outside abortion clinics.
But it’s a free country! I hear you cry. Indeed, we are incredibly lucky to live in a country where each woman is free to choose, whether that be to choose abortion or to choose to disagree with abortion.
However, the flaw in this “free country” argument is that yes, this is a free country, until you use said freedom to encroach on another’s.
For hundreds of years, and still today, women’s bodies have not been their own. They have been treated as incubators, sold like cattle, gawked at, and been abused. In the UK, we now (for the most part) have the right to make our own decisions concerning our own bodies, “own” being the operative word. A woman down the street may not make the same decision as me, nor may I make the same decision as my best friend, and that’s just fine.
It saddens me to see women restricting the rights of other women, when we have fought long and hard to be able to take back ownership of our bodies.
I am not suggesting that everyone be pro-life, it is entirely your own decision, but please, don’t force your opinions on anyone else. Should you wish to protest, do it elsewhere!
You have no idea the amount of time, thought and emotion that may have gone into the decision to go to the clinic that day. There are a multitude of reasons why a woman may have to or want to get an abortion, and, quite frankly, they are none of your damn business. The woman in the video below articulates this point exactly:
So take a breath, take a step back and reflect on what you’re actually doing. You’re using your freedom to protest someone else’s freedom to choose. How can that mean that we are all free?
The idea of the buffer zones is that we can all keep our freedom.
I suppose I should probably start by explaining what I mean by “Pro-choice = pro-life”, before you condemn me as an uneducated idiot. Pro-choice is the school of thought that says that the decision to have, or not have, an abortion is the decision of the individual pregnant woman in question, and pro-life is the idea that any fertilised egg counts as a human life and to have an abortion is equivalent to murder.
“So how can you say they are the same thing?” I hear you say. By removing a woman’s right to choose, you are often condemning her to a life she does not want. I am by no means suggesting that a woman who continues with an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy will despise her child, because often she won’t. But she will live a life that she did not want, which isn’t exactly pro-life, is it? So maybe we can start to use pro-life to mean pro-female life, a stance which seeks to value women’s lives and choices.
We are lucky in the UK to live in a country where attitudes to abortion are comparatively modern. It is legal and free for a woman to have an abortion (yay). This doesn’t mean that everyone is pro-choice, and there are still plenty of barriers to this choice (you can read more about this here), but compared to the 74 countries (yes, 74!) where abortion is illegal, except in extreme circumstances, we are pretty lucky.
These countries are:
RED COUNTRIES ON THE MAP: ABORTION ILLEGAL IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES OR PERMITTED ONLY TO SAVE A WOMAN’S LIFE.
South America:Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Gustamala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nigaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Venezuela,
Middle East and North Africa:Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabi
Asia and Pacific:Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand
Europe:Poland
El Salvador has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the world, partially due to the fact that 67% of sexual violence victims are under the age of 17. The men who commit these crimes can be sentenced to 6-10 years in prison. The victims who choose to seek out illegal abortions to liberate themselves from some of the consequences of these crimes could be sentenced to up to 50 years in prison, five times the punishment of the man who forced her into the situation, if new legislation is passed.
Before you stop me and say “but she chose to get rid of her baby, she could have just kept it, so she’s just as bad”, many of these women are too young to care for a baby and/or not in a position where they could financially care for a baby. Few women, few people, would choose to bring a child into a world where they know that that child will go to bed hungry every night, won’t have clean water to drink, and will never have the chance to go to school, if they knew there was another way.
By introducing these increased penalties, not only women who choose to have abortions, but also the innocent victims of obstetric emergencies, will be punished. Women have already been imprisoned for allegedly attempting to have abortions, when actually their babies were still-born. Perhaps one of the most painful experiences a woman could have, topped off with a jail sentence. As if she hadn’t suffered enough?
If you’d like to try to block this new legislation in El Salvador, and support a woman’s right to choose, please sign this petition, and show you’re pro-(female) life.
White Evangelical Christians are on the front-lines of America’s ‘pro-life’ movement. But not so long ago this group was disinterested in abortion and largely apolitical. They’re a crucial faction of Donald Trump’s base, motivating him to further restrict abortion rights across the country. So how did it all change?
The human embryo is simply one of the earliest stages of the natural developmental life cycle of EVERY human being, after the zygotic stage at conception. Other later stages of the natural human devlopmental life cycle include, fetus, new born, baby, infant, child, pre-pubescent, adolescent, teenager, young adult, middle aged, menopausal, geriatric etc. Regardless of what stage of our natural human developmental life cycle we are at, we are always human.
Human beings as a species have many natural human abilities and capacities, such as manual dexterity, having oposable thumbs, fine motor control, being able to walk upright, talk, sexually reproduce, higher functioning intelligence, AS WELL AS greater level of self awareness, rationality and consciousness, than any other life form on earth. We naturally HAVE to go through a very long juvenile period of approximately 20+ years before we are considered FULLY grown and developed to be able to do all the things that our species is know for being able to do, such as walk upright, talk coherently, develop full rationality, self awareness and consciousness.
At the embryonic stage of the natural human developmental life cycle, JUVENILE humans are not SUPPOSED to have consciousness in the same way that an OLDER fully grown ADULT human being does! In the same way, a human baby is not SUPPOSED to be able to walk and talk like the rest of us, and a teenager is not SUPPOSED to have the same level of rationality, self control and perspective as a grown ADULT human!
It is patently absurd, not to mention utterly discriminatory and unfair, to pick a random ability such as consciousness, out of the many myriad abilities that are natural for members of our species, and then expect very young juvenile humans to just HAVE that ability, BEFORE they have had a chance to grow and develop it!
We wouldn’t ever dream of denying a baby, infant, child or teenager, the right to life based on the many human things they are currently unable to do, because of their developmental age. So why do some people think they can deny a human embryo or fetus the right to life based on a random ability such as consciousness, which they are not even SUPPOSED to HAVE yet?! Why is the standard of human value consistently ableist?
Its also very interesting and beyond hypocrisy, that this absurd and discriminatory demand on juvenile humans, is being made by ADULT humans who have had all the time in the world to grow and develop full consciousness, and yet they would happily deny the same opportunity of time and protection from killing, that THEY have benefited from, to OTHER humans who are simply younger and haven’t HAD the full benefit of being alive long enough to even develop the human capacity for consciousness yet!
Abortion is literally age discrimination of the most deadly kind.
Holy use of buzzwords, Batman.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but just to hit the overarching point:
The “right to life” doesn’t include the right to survive using another human’s body without their consent.
If it did, things like blood/tissue/organ donations wouldn’t be voluntary. But, they are. Someone can decide not to donate, even if it means multiple other humans could die as a result.
Remember that people who aren’t women also need and want abortions. Include and protect trans and intersex people in this conversation. Keep watch for terf rhetoric and dogwhistles. Terfs will use this as ammunition.
And when we push for gender-inclusive language in legal and healthcare contexts, it’s not just because being called the wrong word makes us feel bad. If the language of a healthcare law or regulation uses specifically gendered language, that creates a loophole that can be used to deny trans people coverage. Ask any trans man who’s had to try and find gynecological care, or any trans woman who has ever needed a prostate exam. Yes, it is difficult and often humiliating to be called the wrong words, but what we’re mostly worried about is losing our access to the healthcare we need alltogether.
Being “okay with abortion but only when the pregnant person’s life is in danger” is a nonsensical belief.
There’s no such thing as a pregnancy that’s 100% safe. So what’s the threshold for chance of death that should be required for an abortion? 10%? 50%? 99%? And who gets to decide that?
1) Supreme Court draft opinions do not leak. Ever. It is unknown and unprecedented. It just does not happen.
2) Supreme Court clerks are generally right-out-of-law-school graduates and if whoever did this gets caught they will never be allowed to practice law. No state bar is ever going to take them. Their legal career is done for. This person risked their entire future.
I hope the court can’t prove anything. May we never know their name.
the supreme court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is not official yet. someone leaked a draft of the opinion that the members of the court have been circulating and revising (the draft was created by justice samuel alito).
which is insane by the way. it’s the first time that a draft of a supreme court decision has ever been leaked in the entire history of this country.
it makes perfect sense to feel grief or panic or dread or sadness or anger or whatever you’re feeling right now. this is fucking terrible and scary. just for the sake of avoiding misinformation, i wanted to clarify this because i think a lot of the headlines have been misleading, and the info gets even more misconstrued when it’s rephrased on social media and stuff
I’ve noticed that when I remind people that “women’s issues” affect men too- periods, pregnancy, abortion, higher sexual assault, etc- they react very dismissive. Like, “oh yeah, trans men too, i guess.” And it’s because they don’t view trans men’s issues as men’s issues, they view them as a subsect of women’s issues. People, including many, many allies, just straight up do not conceive of trans men as men. They certainly may believe us when we say we identify as men, but in their minds we are always just a different flavor of woman- and I know this because I have gotten this point of view in my own head, where I have to remind myself that my issues are, in fact, men’s issues. Not women’s. Not “non-men’s.” Abortion is a men’s issue. “Pink taxes” are a men’s issue. These are things that affect men.
Ask some people that question, and they will probably say something simple like “It’s a procedure used by doctors to terminate a pregnancy.”
Ask someone else the same question and they may scream back something like, “It’s the murder of an unborn child.”
Others heatedly deny it’s murder, because it’s “the woman’s body” and she has the right to terminate the unwanted “fetus”.
Besides that, it’s legal, ruled so by the U. S. Supreme Court itself.
End of story, right? Well…maybe.
Let’s see what Webster has to say. “1. Induced termination of pregnancy before the fetus is capable of survival as an individual. 2. Any fatally premature expulsion of an embryo or fetus from the womb.”
So, it seems even Webster dodged the point, except to call the life within the woman a “fetus” or “embryo.” No mention of “human life.” Although, Webster does use the term “fatally.”
In my opinion, “fatally” refers to the death of someone or something. Or to kill someone or something.
Others may view it differently
Which brings on the question: Are you pro or anti-abortion?
As for me, I have to go with the antis. The life in a pregnant woman’s body is indeed “human.” How can you say otherwise? Life is life.
And as for the old adage that “It’s the woman’s body and her right?” No. No. No. There are two bodies involved – the potential mother and the baby she carries. Or fetus if you prefer.
The great Supremes can rule it lawful until the cows come home, but a life still has been taken and violently, or “fatally,” as Webster would have it.
However, there are several exceptions to my stand on the subject. I believe in cases involving sexual assault – rape – or incest, and where the mother’s life is in possible danger, the woman has the right to to get an abortion if she so desires. Forced to have a child in such circumstances could have dire consequences in her future.
Otherwise, the Pros can jump up and down and do back flips to the moon and back. But, when it all settles back down, a death or deaths do occur.
A pregnant woman is not unlike one of our apace ships. The lives of the crew on a spacecraft depend solely on their ship.
Food, shelter, clothing, air, water. The whole nine yards.
The same applies to the mother to be.
She is the spaceship for that life growing within her body. It depends totally on her natural bodily functions for its food, shelter, air, etc.
Abortion “violently” interrupts that process, killing the life inside her. That is the gospel. You can take it to the bank. No court ruling, No “It’s her body” claim can be justified.
I am not advocating overturning Roe vs Wade. I am just insisting that abortion be labeled for what it really is: The violent taking of a human life.
Stop playing games, Pros. If you want to kill your babies, then go right ahead. But do it with the full understanding of what you are truly doing,
That’s all.
I’ve seen anti-choicers compare pregnant people to all sorts of inanimate things, from houses to boats to life-support machines.
Some moral dilemmas are interesting. I saw a post comparing abortion to a blood transfusion. The example goes as follows:
Person A is in need of a super rare blood type and will die if they don’t get it.
Person B is the only person with that blood type who is available within the limited time frame.
It is up to Person B as to whether they give some of their blood to Person A, as both have bodily autonomy. Person B does not have to give blood.
I find this interesting. While on one hand, I do not believe Person B should be forced to give their own blood, I do think it would be immoral for them to not do so. Evil even.
I feel this situation fails to argue for abortion, but a major reason it fails is I am not sure how to handle the situation. Not to mention, in deploying this situation they are acknowledging that the fetus is a human being.
I dare say, I probably am in favor of some kind of negative action being taken against Person B if they let Person A die. I am unsure what that punishment should be, but I think I do support one.
You can’t force someone to donate blood. There is no ethical way to punish them for not donating blood even if you think it’s immoral. There could be MANY reasons why they choose not to give blood. You might think it’s immoral for them to not give blood, but so is forcing them to.
And just because you think something is immoral doesn’t mean it should be illegal.
And here we see more evidence that the anti choice crowd actually doesn’t understand what the word choicemeans.
Funny though, considering that the pro life attitude in these same situations is usually “you shouldn’t have had sex then”.
Except for foster kids. Who y'all like to trot out on parade to “prove” how abortion isn’t necessary. While ignoring actual fostered teens/adults who are telling you to stop because fostering/adoption has massive issues inherent in the system.
Almost like none of you actually know what you’re talking about. But we knew that already.
Daily reminder, life is a continuous process that began at least 3.5 billion years ago and anyone who says otherwise is preaching religious doctrine and not objective facts.
You don’t have to be religious to be pro life or to not acknowledge science. I personally think from liking science that living things were around far beyond 3.5 million years ago when we consider the study of dinosaurs and sea creatures. A single creature or human is created when our own life begins at conception. (I am speaking of when the sperm and egg join as one, for clarification).
I said 3.5 billion, not million. Important distinction. I realize that not everyone who is against abortion is catholic but they’re still following catholic doctrine whether they like it or not. Also, why start at conception? Isn’t sperm already a living thing? Why not say life begins at ejaculation? Oh right, because this is actually about controlling women’s bodies.
#Repost @probikersforlife ・・・ FEAST OF THE HOLY INNOCENTS ❤️ Dec 28th HOLY MASS, CHURCH OF THE HOLY INNOCENTS NYC Bishop Peter Byrne Celebrant
TODAY we honor the HOLY INNOCENTS, the young boys who were killed by king Herod. Hearing of the birth of the Infant Jesus, Herod issued a decree massacring these children in a vain attempt to destroy the Savior, whom he feared might grow to be a rival king. Today, we honor these tiny martyrs and pray with them for all the children in the world.
#Repost @jeffreybruno ・・・ Faithful. Courage. - Fr, Fidelis CFR steps between the police and protesters as he leads a group in prayer for all of those effected by the Roe V. Wade decision in Soho, NYC. @cfr_franciscans
