why everyone should be pro-choice, a short essay.

Trigger warning for graphic content, including abortion, SA, and rape.

There is a concept called bodily autonomy, which is generally considered a human right. It means that a person has control over who or what uses their body, for what uses, and how long for. This is why we cannot ever be forced to donate blood, tissue or organs, even if we’re a corpse, or even if our body would help to save 50 lives. Its why people can’t touch you, have sex with you, or use your body in any way without continuous and upmost consent.

A foetus is using someone’s body parts. Therefore, under bodily autonomy, it is there by permission and not by right. The foetus needs a person’s continuous consent to reside there. If the person carrying the foetus withdraws or denies consent, the pregnant person has the right, as a human being, to remove them, and stop the usage. By saying a foetus has the right to someone’s body parts until its born, despite the pregnant person’s wishes or situation, you are saying two things:

– You wish to grant a foetus more rights to other people’s bodies more than any born person

– You wish to award a pregnant person with less rights to their own body than a corpse.

Abortion is a human right no matter the situation. Whether you are preganant accidentally, whether you have been raped, whether you have been married to your partner for 15 years, or if its just not the right time for you. It is your body, your choice. If you think a woman can only have an abortion if she has been raped, you are saying that that she has to be violated before having rights to her body.

I hear very often the idea that its “shocking” to “kill” a foetus because if the foetus could talk it would be begging its mother not to kill or harm it. I’d like to make it very clear now that foetuses can’t talk, or think. They have no concept of existence, let alone death or “killing”. They don’t have desires or dreams or fears. That statement, that whole thought process, is irrelevant. If chairs could talk, they’d ask us not to put our weight onto them. If books could talk, they’d ask us not to bend their spines. But they can’t. They cannot talk or even register situations, so we don’t bother analysing these scenarios.

Here is a very well known test. I am holding a baby in one hand, and a petri dish containing an embryo in the other, and I’m going to drop one. You have to choose which. Now if you honestly believed that an embryo is a baby, it should be impossible to decide. You should have to flip a coin or pick a hand at random. That is how impossible that decision should be if you truly believe that an embryo is the same thing as a baby.

Shot in the dark, you chose the baby. That’s because you’re aware there’s a difference. A baby is defined as a young child. We are discussing a zygote, and embryo, or a foetus. They are not the same.

If you want to get all medical, “life” is about the brain. When deciding whether to turn off life support, doctors measure brain waves. If there are none, the patient is dead. An embryo does not have any measurable brain waves, and that’s a fact. An embryo is not alive. Removing it from your body is exactly like blowing your nose or picking a scab- removing unwanted cells that have no conscious thoughts or feelings.

I speak about this very matter of factly but I think that’s because pro-life people use all this emotive language to try and guilt trip people into feeling bad about making decisions that suit themselves. If you don’t feel comfortable with abortion, if it is against your religion, if you think its wrong, if you generally just dont want to, you dont have to. Pro-choice is not pro-abortion. I’m not trying to convince every pregnant woman in the world to get rid of her pregnancy. But just because you dont want to do something with your body, does not mean someone else can’t.

Abortion is the only medical procedure that we judge people on depending on the circumstance. Drove drunk, got in an accident, and need an organ transplant? No problem. Smoked tobacco all your life, developed lung cancer, and need surgery or treatment? Of course! On the NHS too! Climb a tree, fall, break a leg? Cast on in no time. Had sex and got pregnant when you don’t want to be? Been raped and don’t want to carry the assaulter’s baby? Contraception didn’t work? You got yourself into this situation, you deserve no medical empathy, you must suffer the consequences, and you will be judged for terminating the pregnancy and sometimes even for keeping it.

I think, if we look deeper, a lot of pro-life people do not actually care about life. Abortion is, at its very core, about controlling people, especially women or people with uteruses, and their bodies. That is why abortion bills are made by panels of old white men, and why the church is the one pushing the pro-life narrative, and why pro-choice rallies are shut down by police. These same people do not care about the ‘baby’ that is actually born as a result of an unwanted pregnancy. If they did, we would be campaigning for things like better treatment of the homeless, cheaper housing and bills, more accessible foodbanks, breakdown of systematic racism, better treatment of immigrants. If that baby is born poor, black, female, ‘foreign’, disabled, or under any other marginalised group, these same people stop caring about their life very, very quickly.

Abortion is a human right. Your body, your choice. End of.

*NB – A lot of the arguments used in this essay will be a summation of other essays and political statements, because we are all arguing the same. damn. thing.*