Either/Or (Or Else)

Reading the articles for this week, I noticed something that was present in every article despite each one being about a distinct set of circumstances. In all the articles stripping women of their reproductive rights also served to keep them subjugated in society. Women have been robbed of their confidence, sense of self-worth and basic human rights such as the right to feel safe along with make choices about their reproductive rights. While women lack the ability to exercise their basic reproductive rights they will continue to be second-class citizens.

In “And So I Chose” Allison Crews describes her experience as a teenage mother. As a young, teenage girl Crews was denied the right by those around her to make choices regarding her child. “A couple was approved to adopt [her] child before [she] was even allowed to utter a word of permission” (Crews, 147) because she was a teenage girl incapable of an unselfish decision. This derision, purposeful or subconscious, nourished the “self-doubt and fear” (Crews, 147) she already felt. Crews’ situation mirrors that of other young women, who are denied their right to “reproductive freedom” (Crews, 148) simply because of their age. Her experience shows the self-doubt fostered by consistently negative expectations. After all, are teenage girls or women likely to assert their rights, reproductive or otherwise, when trapped in self-doubt and confusion? Crews overcame her uncertainty and felt stronger for her decision, but many women still have their confidence stolen by naysayers who refuse to grant them their rights.

Crews also describes her experience on the picketing with her mother and other pro-life activists as a child. She recounts the instance of watching a girl several years older than her enter and exit the abortion clinic. “She had a right to feel protected, a right to feel safe...to make a choice for her future without feeling harassed and intimidated. And those rights were ignored because she was young, she was female, and she was pregnant.” (Crews, 145). This girl’s basic right to feel safe and make a choice for her life were ignored because she made a choice about her reproductive life that others didn’t agree with. Women who can get an abortion face harassment and abuse for doing so. By exercising their rights they become a moral leper.

In “Abortion, Vacuum Cleaners and the Power Within” Inga Muscio describes her mission to exercise her reproductive rights using the method she saw fit. Muscio sought a clinical abortion when she became pregnant because she didn’t want the baby and as she put it, “What other goddamn choice did I have?”(Muscio, 113). Even when she was fully able to exercise her reproductive right to terminate a pregnancy Muscio was she bereft of any alternative ways to do so. She was allowed to make one choice and told that was all she could do. The clinical abortion fits within the doctrine of western medicine which goes by one rule: “Healing Has Nothing To Do With You; It’s Something Onlu Your Doctor Can Control” (Muscio, 115). This idea keeps the power other hands; which in the medical profession are still predominantly male.

Muscio found her empowerment again when she decided to choose alternate methods when she found herself needing to end another pregnancy. After successfully having an abortion in the method she so chose: “I felt like I imagine any oppressed individual feels when they see that they have power, and nobody—not even men and their machines, nobody—can take that away” (Muscio, 117). This is the kind of power that women need to realize they have. You don’t have to take just the one choice that the patriarchy gives you to have an abortion, you can decide how. In the choosing is power.


The marked singularity of the most widely known, the professed only way by western medicine, clinical method of abortion is comparable to the hair’s-breadth range of beauty proffered by the media. Women are provided with a very limited range of choices from a patriarchal society. This limited path of action serves to maintain the status of women of second-class citizens. If you don’t want a clinical abortion your options seem to be to carry to term or submit to the method; either way the either/or choice decreases the woman’s self-worth because she submitted to a choice she did not want. In beauty the media evaporates beauty into a single definition; white, young, tall and thin. If you don’t fit the standard the message seems to be try or be considered ugly.

The dichotomies of these two areas keep women oppressed in society. With one either/or choice it’s likely that many women will have to compromise their values to pick one option. This serves to lower women’s self-worth and feelings of empowerment, keeping them in place. The empowerment that women need to regain lies in the choice to reject these proffered dichotomies. There is more than one was to exercise a reproductive right. There is more than one way to be beautiful. By making themselves aware of the diversity of reproductive choice, of the diversity of beauty and rejecting the one way mantra of the patriarchy women can regain their power. Find the third choice, the fourth, the fifth and so on. This is the only way that women will ever upgrade from second class.

~Kristen McBride