Abortion

I may choose to not publish this page, since it's such a heartfelt topic. I think it's worth addressing, but I'm not sure this is the right way to do it.

I believe that one of the most important gaps we need to bridge, as people who care about women's rights, is the gap in understanding about abortion. We don't need to all agree, but we need to know that the other side aren't monsters, so we can trust them enough to collaborate with them on issues where we do agree.

It's possible to believe passionately that you are right, and to engage in the democratic process to encourage legislation that supports your belief, all while acknowledging that some good-hearted, reasonable people disagree with you. It's also possible to do all of this without believing that every political loss on your side is a failure of the democratic process, or a collective moral failure on the part of your state or nation.

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While I'm writing all this out, I'd like to acknowledge that it often feels offensive to women who support abortion for people to dispassionately weigh pros and cons for whether to take away her legal access to abortion. For people who don't get this, imagine that someone was dispassionately weighing the pros and cons of whether you should be legally allowed to say "no" to sex, or whether you could be legally forced into an arranged marriage with a man you didn't choose. It sort of feels similar.

For women who believe that abortion is the killing of a child, it also often feels offensive to dispassionately weigh the pros and cons of legal abortion.

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Here are some important beliefs and talking points in discussions on abortion. This list isn't meant to be fully objective; it reflects my own biases. (I'd also suggest that if someone gives you a list they wrote of talking points on abortion and claims that it's fully objective, they are full of it.)

To reveal my biases: I am in favor of legal abortion.

- Some women who get abortions wanted to keep the baby, but were pressured to abort by their partner or family.

- Some women who become pregnant are pressured by their partner and family to have the child, and seek abortion anyway.

- Some men are less careful with sex, or feel more free to pressure women into risky sex, because they expect that they can just make her get an abortion if she gets pregnant. For many people who support outlawing abortion, this is one of the scenarios they imagine when they imagine a woman having an abortion.

- Related to this, I've heard anecdotal examples of men becoming more respectful of a woman's sexual boundaries when she declares that she would plan to have the child if she became pregnant, even when abortion is legal.

- Some men engage in "baby-trapping", which is covertly sabotaging birth control in order to get his girlfriend or wife pregnant when she didn't want to become pregnant. This is done in order to trap her in an abusive relationship with him, to tip the balance of power in the relationship in his favor by making her dependent on him for resources, or simply because he wanted a baby and she didn't. For some people who support legal abortion, this is one of the scenarios they imagine when they imagine a woman having an abortion.

- There have been cases in other parts of the world, and in some situations in the US, where legalized abortion has made women's lives worse by making men feel entitled to pressure women into unwanted sex or prostitution. For example, the feminist movement in Latin America has sometimes advocated for banning abortion because it was being used in this way. We should be vigilant about situations like this evolving in the US, and we should take it seriously when people present information to us that suggests this is happening in the US. You can't just assume they're making it up to try to manipulate you.

- It's important for women and men to take sex seriously, regardless of what the abortion laws are in your area.

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I think abortion can be morally dubious in some rare edge cases, such as voluntary late-stage abortion. I also think criminalizing it has too many downsides. The main downside is that there are medical conditions where the only way to save a pregnant woman's life is to perform an abortion, but the doctor knows that he could go to jail if he can't legally prove that this was happening.

There's a big gap between "I'm a doctor, and I can see that this woman's life is in danger, so I'm doing this procedure" and "I'm a doctor, and I can prove in court that this woman's life was in danger when I did this procedure". That gap can result in a doctor going to jail for performing a procedure that she, with her medical expertise, strongly believes saved the woman's life. Doctors are risk-averse, and are usually not willing to take on even a small risk of going to jail, even to save a person's life.

If we want doctors to be willing to save a woman's life in these scenarios, we need them to have ironclad certainty that they cannot be criminally liable for performing the procedure to remove the fetus. Even if their medical staff didn't take proper records; even if information crops up that raises a valid question about whether the procedure was medically necessary.

Menstrual Extraction

Menstrual extraction has been used as a purportedly very-low-risk procedure that can be performed safely by other women who are not medical experts. Some people claim that it is safer than surgical abortion, medical abortion, and hormonal birth control.

It can be used when you are not pregnant to extract your entire period at once, if you don't want to deal with having a period. I'm uncertain whether this helps women who get terrible menstrual cramps. Do you still get cramps and simply not bleed, or does it mean your body understands your period is over, and you don't get cramps?

https://www.womenscenter.com/menstrual_extraction.html

https://www.womenshealthspecialists.org/self-help/menstrual-extraction/

Pro-Life Organizations

Sisters of Life - I have heard good things about Sisters of Life from a feminist woman with nuanced thoughts on abortion.
https://sistersoflife.org