On Abortion

(from 12 July 2006)

First semester of this past school year (sophomore year) I went to an abortion info meeting, open to the public, with a friend of mine from Animal Science 101 and Chem 104, Kate Anderson. The point of the meeting was to showcase why abortion should remain legal, who the cause's enemies were, and so forth. I'd never been to anything like it and was sort of on the fence about the issue.

To start with, the speaker was absolutely horrible. She had no confidence, even though the room was filled with people who supported her opinion. Her voice was shaky and she had trouble keeping a good sentence going. She was introduced as being an advocate for longer than I've been alive, but she certainly couldn't have been speaking for that long. She always sounded like she was going to burst out crying, and not because she felt strongly about a loaded issue.

Anyway, they told gory stories about illegal abortions gone wrong and such, which dind't reall phase me because I was expecting it. But the one thing that really bugged me about the information presented was when they quoted Hilary Clinton as describing abortion as a "tragic" decision. These women took great offense to this and I didn't really understand why at first. However, they took the comment to mean that the women who chose to abort a pregnancy made a tragic decision, rather than that it was a tragic decisioni to have to make. They took it as Hilary Clinton saying the women had made the wrong choice. I saw it differently.

I saw Hilary's answer as compassionate and very woman. I felt she was describing the state of having to decide whether or not to abort. And she's absolutely right. Being pregnant and not being able to afford the child, having the child as the result of a rape, having a pregnancy where you know the baby will be severely disabled, being too young to safely have one, or any other reason a woman could have to want to terminate a pregnancy, are tragic circumstances. It's unfortunate they are in that situation.

I can't recall ever feeling bad for a politician for having potentially been misunderstood, but that day I really felt that they were not getting the point.

At the end of the meeting the floor was opened to questions and comments. I wanted to share my opinion on the "tragic" issue but didn't.

Something else I found a little weird was that some of the women there seemed to be pro-choice to the point of thinking that abortion was a good thing and that women should do it all the time. Now, believing that women should be allowed to choose abortion is one thing, but thinking that women absolutely should get them is a whole 'nother can of worms that I didn't know existed. It made me a little nervous.

Antother thing that made me nervous was the guy in the hallway whose job it was to sell literature on the subject, pamplets, T-shirts, key chains, etc. He gave me the creeps like nothing else. He acted friendly and intelligent and I seemed to be the only one to notice that something was a little off. I only let him look me in the eye once. It may sound strange and extreme, but I felt he was dangerous and even inhuman. The hair stood up on teh back of my neck. It was all made worse by the fact that Kate, I, and another girl were the only ones out in the hallway with him (we left before the open floor discussion was over). And it was at night in som eobscure corner of the basement of the Humanities building. Eek.

My position on abortion is pro-choice. I doubt I could ever have one myself but I'm not about to think that that decision suits everyone. I believe that my body is my business, and your body is your business. I hope I never have to make that decision, though.