I’m sure if you’re a woman—and even if you aren’t—you’ve thought about what you would do given the arrival of an unexpected pregnancy. I know I have. Thankfully I’ve never had to deal with that particular situation on a personal level but I know several women who have. These women have suffered immeasurably and often without support and are still working toward living full lives despite their imbalanced quality.
“Young mothers need to be supported in their choices, whatever they may be,” (Crews, LU, pg.143). This sentence pretty much sums up how I feel about the abortion issue. But so many people today--a striking number of them women--do not see this issue in the appropriate shades of grey and face it only on simplistic terms. A pregnant teenager should not raise her child; she should abort it. Or, on the other hand, a pregnant teenager should never abort her child, but rather give it up for adoption. These are the sides we are forced to choose between when talking about abortion and parenting, and frankly it’s a lose/lose situation.
Women today are not given the freedom of choice they deserve for reproductive rights. I think the saddest aspect of it all is the massive guilt so many women feel after deciding to have an abortion, despite their reasoning. The emotional trauma of discovering an unwanted pregnancy and the decision making process that accompanies it is severely unrated. In Inga Muscio’s Abortion, Vacuum Cleaners, and the Power Within, Muscio talks about how healing is left up to the doctors, that our society is trained to believe that the only way to get better is through another person, usually a man. She says: “Western medicine, that smelly dog who farts across the house and we just don’t have the heart to put out of its misery, is based on a law opposite the one the rest of the universe goes by, namely, Healing Has Nothing To Do With You; It’s Something Only Your Doctor Can Control,” (pg.115, LU). And in our culture it’s true. We are programmed to look outside for help when we really should be looking in. Because frankly, who can tell you what’s best for you other than yourself?
One thing I’ve noticed this semester is how everything we read about can be linked back to some form of patriarchal oppression. Maybe I just feel this way because of all the reading I’ve been doing, but it’s difficult to ignore nonetheless. One example would be from last week’s readings about constructions of the perfect body. We learned in Higginbotham’s Teen Mags that the ideal woman should weigh less than 120 pounds and essentially have no room for her internal organs to function. “Girls are encouraged to love their bodies, no matter what they look like, by magazines with fashion spreads featuring only stick-thin, flawless-faced white models in expensive outfits,” (pg.88, LU). That right there is a form of oppression. If we’re not oppressed by the media telling us how we should look and what we should think, we’re oppressed by society telling us that we can’t be pregnant before we’re 20 or 25, and that if we ARE pregnant we can’t have abortions. It feels like there is no way to overcome this. Which is exactly why it’s more important than ever before to keep fighting for what we believe in.
I have a friend who is 5 months pregnant and a junior at this school that is judged every single day because she is pregnant and unmarried. When I see her I feel strong because she chose to keep her child. And I don’t feel empowered by the fact that she’s keeping the baby, but rather by the fact that she was strong enough to choose and tell the world to back off. It’s for people like her that I have come to support feminism.
~Paige
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