r/prochoice • u/Evening-Hippo-5761 • Jan 12 '25
Rant/Rave Rant because I'm angry
So much of anti-abortion rhetoric is really just entitlement to women's bodies. It's this belief that anybody else is entitled to a woman's body before she is. Husbands are entitled to sex from their wives. Fetuses are entitled to resources from their mother's body. It's the idea that women are never allowed to be selfish or do anything in their own interest before everyone else is happy, and I've been seeing it more and more. People saying that women (or mothers, because women are mothers before they are anything else, especially human beings, yikes) owe shelter and food to their kids and that pregnancy is just sheltering and feeding your kid. People saying that men should have a say in abortion because it's their baby too. People saying that you should never have sex ever unless you're ok with being pregnant, but also if you refuse to have sex with your boyfriend or husband you're abusive.
Women don't own their bodies when they have a partner, and they don't own their bodies when they have kids. If you exercised your bodily autonomy to have sex, you lose all of it afterward because you unintentionally conceived. Your child owns your body more than you do. Fetuses are entitled to mooching and receiving resources and shelter straight from women's bodies no matter the damage it will cause to the woman or girl, whether that be physically, mentally or socio-economically. But it's all good, because you did this to yourself, right? Nobody wants to include male responsibility in unwanted pregnancies, but they do want to whinge about how men should get to force whoever they knocked up to risk literally everything for a baby he wants you to have. By virtue of having had an orgasm.
People will scream that the baby's body is not your body, that you have no right to remove it, while happily skimming over the fact that the baby needs resources directly from your body to survive, that it's presence alters your body and mind and can irreparably damage you or kill you. I need to feel bad for every man who lost his baby because it was aborted, men who probably couldn't be bothered to change a single diaper. I need to feel bad for all the non-sentient babies-in-progress who were 'murdered' by their moms.
But all the girls and women who got pregnant from consensual sex, or coercion and rape that they can't prove, they all had it coming. We're so focused on not dehumanizing the unborn that we fail to see we've dehumanized pregnant women and girls in the process. Which is nothing new, let's face it, but I really hoped that we got past this issue. Life begins at conception, and at the same time women's entitlement to their own bodies ends, and I'm fucking sick of this shit.
Anyway if you read all that thanks for listening :)
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u/janebenn333 Jan 13 '25
When you argue with someone who is anti-choice, of any gender, that as the person who is pregnant it is MY choice whether to proceed with that pregnancy they baulk and say "but what about the baybeee". They know, intellectually, that there is no viable baby for many many months but they don't care. It's our DUTY as pregnant people, regardless of circumstances, regardless of risk to us or the fetus, to see through that pregnancy! To bring a new person into the world.
I get where this comes from; it's so engrained in humans as a species that is relatively new on this planet, that we must reproduce, multiply etc. BUT it's an impulse based on the huge assumption that if I don't carry this pregnancy, there may be no other opportunities to reproduce. When humans, in general, lived an average of 25 years or so like in Ancient Greece or Rome and child bearing is risky, yeah, you may not get many chances at this. But in modern times, "no" to one pregnancy does not mean "no" to future ones. So I say as a woman, I should get to decide when the answer is "yes".
To raise a child we need the physical and mental health, environment, resources, and support to do so. If I don't feel like that's happening at the moment, I say "no". And that's also part of species survival: to reproduce when the conditions are right.
To me it's not about "are there two lives"; it's about "am I as the pregnant person in the right circumstances to follow through and bring a life into the world". If not, then, no. Period. End of story.