#abortion is normal

[ainsanepencil]

I will only listen to pro-lifers arguments if they bother about kids in foster- care , mothers mental health, the chances of kids having a good life , babies of rape chances of a good life and if child support can be paid , young mothers home life , support systems for mothers , childcare and if they do their research

[curiousfancy]

{Photo from the time of the events}

In the summer of 2015, I had an abortion. I’ve never talked about it until today. But in the light of the most powerful democracy on earth striking down the right to abortion access, I feel it’s important to share my story.

You see, I didn’t actually want to have an abortion. Yet I’m thankful that I did. It was this one fact that kept me from talking about it all these years - I was terrified that the anti-choice brigade would come across my story and twist it to support their punitive, inhumane views. When I found myself staring at a positive pregnancy test on a July afternoon 7 years ago, my heart sank because I knew that there was no possible way I could have a baby at that point.

Living as an unmarried woman without any family support in India is hard enough, but if I added a pregnancy to that mix, I had absolutely no doubt that I’d be made homeless, again. And having been homeless less than two years ago, I was prepared to do anything to not fall into that nightmare again. Moving to the U.K. to be with Owen was also out of the question as we didn’t yet meet the U.K. home office’s draconian list of conditions for me to enter the country. And since we were both dependent on his PhD stipend for support, he couldn’t quite abandon the only steady source of income we had between the two of us to be jobless and homeless with me in India.

There’s this myth prevalent among anti-choice goons that women who want abortions use it as a form of birth control and practically skip to the clinic in glee. That we never even consider alternatives, so bloodthirsty are we for terminating our pregnancies. My experience with my unwanted pregnancy couldn’t be farther from that myth. After considering all possible options and finding that there were none, I decided that an abortion was the only way forward. I’m lucky that I lived in a country with safe, legal abortion access but even then the attitudes I faced were far from exemplary or even helpful.

Of the family I had left, people who had known me since the day I was born suddenly found themselves unable to look me in the eye or speak to me without scorn. The first gynaecologist I saw tried to convince me that if I decided to abort, I would never be able to get pregnant again as I was too fat and too old (this was a month before my 30th birthday.) When I went online to look for information on 1st trimester medical abortions (which is what mine was and the majority of abortions are) I was greeted with a barrage of anti choice websites filled with images of what I later realised were late stage miscarriages and stillbirths. Even now, thinking of the shameless hypocrisy and bad faith contained in those ghoulish sites makes me seethe.

My actual abortion was the easiest part of the entire ordeal. I took my 4 pills of misoprostol, rolled up some massive joints for pain relief, put on some music and danced to relieve my cramps as Owen stayed on a video call with me. After two hours of labour style contractions, I passed a tiny little lump of tissue into my sanitary pad and the pain stopped instantly. It was very much an undifferentiated blob of tissue, about the size of a small chicken nugget with nothing to distinguish it from say, a surgically removed tumour. A far cry from the images of stillborn foetuses with which those anti-abortion websites had tried to scare me. I was just shy of 10 weeks pregnant.

Do I wish I’d had that pregnancy in different circumstances where I could have allowed it to continue to term? The answer is yes, I do. Do I also feel thankful that I had relatively easy access to abortion care that allowed me to live my life on my own terms instead of pitching me back into the nightmare I’d just escaped but this time with a baby in tow? Abortion laws that allowed me to flourish and grow and eventually become pregnant with my daughter 3 years later when I was ready for a child? Also yes. It’s this choice that’s so fucking important and when you take that away, you take away our right to live life on our own terms.

I simply can’t imagine what my life would have looked like now if I’d been forced to continue with my pregnancy in 2015. For one, I wouldn’t be in the secure, content, and fulfilled place I am in now with my daughter who is loved and wanted instead of being resented as the product of a pregnancy that ruined my life. Striking down abortion access not only plunges the person who’s pregnant into suffering and misery, it also creates a whole generation of unwanted children who carry that trauma with them. It’s inhuman. It’s the worst kind of incursion into an individual’s bodily autonomy. No one who supports this has the right to call themselves human anymore. They’re just ghouls who feed on misery and trauma and thrive on the pain of others.

*although I’ve referred to pregnancy in relation to women in the paragraphs above, please take it to mean anyone with the capacity to become pregnant, regardless of gender. Safe and universal abortion access is a human rights issue, and not restricted to any one gender.

[kittycatlukey]

[sweaters-and-vertigo]

i really hate calling it “pro-life” and i REALLY REALLY hate the signs in my hometown that say “value them both”.

it’s not pro-life!! it’s pro forced birth, it’s anti-choice, it’s anti-abortion. legalized abortion won’t force anyone to get abortions but criminalized abortion might force people to have extremely dangerous abortions or babies they can’t support or don’t want. that destroys life. and don’t say “but adoption is an option” the only people who adopt are couples who can’t conceive. that leaves out hundreds, if not thousands, of children who are not being adopted. that destroys life.

nothing about the “pro-life” stance is actually protecting life. it’s about control. it’s about controlling women and people with uteruses, since all pro-lifers think that a person with a uterus is automatically a woman. and don’t come at me with bible verses, God killed so many people.

[womenruntheworld]

SIGN OUR LETTER TO LINDSEY GRAHAM

Someone needed to tell him to f*ck off!

This absolute asshat proposed a 15 week abortion ban. The bill “includes familiar fallacies about fetal development, and lacks anything resembling a scientific basis.” (thecut.com).

Sign the letter from Women’s March to tell this reeking, wrinkled troll to F*CK OFF.

[erinshhh]

I have not posted in a long time. Here are some stickers I added to my Etsy shop this year. You can get them at artbyerinshhh.Etsy.com!

[alphie-in-the-sky]

stop saying pro-life

[no2everything]