I am pro-abortion, not just pro-choice: 10 reasons why we must support the procedure and the choice

[zazen]

38. this radical feminist believes abortion unique and ends a life, and that mothers get to make that choice

I know where you're coming from, but denying that a pregnancy is a life growing inside of a person is playing into the hands of the right wing.

As Catharine MacKinnon said, abortion is killing, and who says women don't get to make that decision?

Abortion is like no other procedure. We do not need to accept the Enlightenment masculinist frame of the "Individual," based on the male body, in order to have meaningful freedom.

Let's work on imagining a sense of self based on the female capacity to be grow life. That should be encompassed within our definition of the individual, not Thomas Paine or Jefferson or whomever who assume the Male was normal and the female a derivative, with a pregnancy a separate self/man with its full rights. We have a life and capacity for another symbiotic life within us. We get to choose what to do with that symbiotic life. It's not a limb. IT SHOULDN'T HAVE TO BE. When we try to make our fetus like "a limb" so we're as "free" as men, we limit our sense of individuality to the male experience. It is unique to the female sex for a period of our lives, and we get to define it. What if the Female symbiotic individual is the norm against which rights/freedom is judged?

We deny the moral import of our decisions at our peril. Rather than deadening myself to the life inside me or anyone else, I say, I'll keep working on creating conditions where women get to choose whether to get pregnant in the first place, and choose how to handle it afterwards. And creating a world where mothering an infant isn't so crippling a financial and physical (and sole) responsibility that abortion is also her only viable choice, in which case that's also no choice at all.

I'm saying that we can handle the grief and moral import of ending the symbiotic life within us without trivializing it into a bunionectomy. If a woman cannot for whatever reason sustain the life within her, she gets to make that choice.

But I've had babies and felt them alive within me very early. Are we dead to that? Should I pretend that's an appendix? Deaden myself to the first three months of pregnancy because to accept the right-wing enlightenment era definition of the individual means "life=carrying to term/murder?"

I know you mean to stop shaming of women, but I feel you're playing into the hands and frame of the right-wing. They're forcing us into the position of saying it's not life in order to justify our freedom to choose, based on their old notion of the "individual" based on a male's experience.