Abortion

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.

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.

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. It sort of feels similar.

Here are some important beliefs and talking points in discussions on abortion.

- Some women who get abortions were pressured into it, and this is a grave injustice.

- 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.

- Some men engage in "baby-trapping", which is sabotaging birth control in order to get their 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.

- 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 casual sex, or prostitution, and then pressure them into abortions. 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.

Menstrual Extraction

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

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

https://sistersoflife.org