I’ll cut to the chase here, depending on region, religion and such – some of you may want to click right off. I’m pro-choice on abortion, and I’ve had abortions that I’m one hundred percent OK with; so that’s that.
It seems like a fact of a woman’s life to me; no more or less.
But last week’s widely publicized, secretly videotaped meeting between an anti-choice group and a doctor who performed abortions was too bizarre by half. Apparently it shows a staff member of the Planned Parenthood Federation describing how affiliates provide tissue from aborted fetuses to researchers.
When that story broke you could hear a million face-palms from the pro-choice side. How could a Planned Parenthood physician be so gullible to have been caught gabbing over a glass of Merlot about fetus parts? That lunch just shouldn’t have been a…well…a lunch. I’d rather hope these things are discussed with tepid Starbucks coffee under the sober, buzzing fluorescent light of someone’s office or lab.
Anti-abortion groups reacted with undisguised ecstasy over having received the world’s best Christmas gift ever, and the Internet lit up like a Christmas tree. It all felt very Christmas-y on that end, and especially so with Jesus’ name being invoked everywhere.
I made what I thought was an innocuous comment on Twitter and spent the next three hours muting and blocking graphic, violent, and misogynistic attacks by Tweeps who apparently represent the most religious among us. I-r-o-n-y!
I don’t work in the medical field, but I’m not a squeamish person. I’m not personally bothered that researchers use human tissue, and people who are pro-choice shouldn’t be, either. How do people think that medical advances are made, anyway? My tonsils were once removed. Maybe they were used later in research, and I’m OK with that. What was I going to do with them, anyway?
And the four-week-old fetuses removed from my uterus? I’m OK if they went to research or into the medical compost. I did want to keep my [much-wanted] babies’ placentas, however, and managed to score one before the nurses whisked it away and into the medical trash.
But the videotaped physician should have had more common sense than to have been caught chatting over wine. I can see how spending 40 hours a week dealing with body parts can make a biologist, nurse, physician, or surgeon eventually completely nonchalant about subjects that horrify regular people; but that doctor should have been cognizant of the politics of abortion in the United States.
Here in Canada this isn’t a hotly debated subject anymore, and most developed nations are finished with the subject.
We’ve concluded that a woman’s body belongs to the woman.
But we read the news from the United States. Did that Planned Parenthood doctor not turn on the TV, or click on a newspaper from time to time? Maybe this particular physician just wasn’t the sharpest scalpel on the surgical tray?
And yet I don’t want to criticize any doctor courageous enough to do that work in a climate of such violence and hate, and in a country where doctors who perform abortions are murdered. That’s the definition of a tough gig.
In the end — in my home anyway — it served a purpose of sorts. I talked to my sons about the whole kerfuffle, and that abortions should always be available for women who choose to have them, regardless of the zealots and trolls.
Liz Sydney is a too-blunt mom raising two boys. She’s had abortions she didn’t hand-wring over, never regretted, and she’s grateful to the physicians who performed them. She enjoys writing on topics unrelated to her blog theme Our Violent Child and she loves joining punny hashtag games on Twitter (and even got on the top-ten list of one once!).
