Cartoonist Lauren Weinstein was told that the child she was carrying had a high (1-in-4) chance of carrying the cystic fibrosis gene to such an extreme degree that it might require a lung transplant before age 5. Weinstein tells the story of her nerve-wracking three week wait to find out if this would be the case in her story "Carriers" (parts one / two / three / four / five).
Major Spoiler: It has a happy ending and her daughter was born disease free.
Many reading her story will rejoice, but say to themselves, "If it had been me, I would have never even thought of terminating my pregnancy."
Good for you.
Seriously.
I mean that.
I want you to have a choice.
Just like I want Lauren to have a choice.
Just like I want billions of other women to have a choice.
Because nobody knows what is best for a woman and the pregnancy she is carrying other than that woman herself.
She gets to make her own decisions.
Just as you get to make your own decisions.
She's certainly entitled to seek medical advice and/or moral support from others, but in the end, she is the one who has to either see it through to a live birth or terminate it.
It is, quite simply and quite literally,
NOBODY ELSE'S FUCKING BUSINESS
And I drop the f-bomb very deliberately & in its sexual context to get the point across:
Not your uterus, not your problem, not your responsibility, most certainly not your business, not now, not ever.
If you're serious about wanting to reduce the number of abortions in the world today, see to it that birth control is reliable, available, and inexpensive (free would be best; we can pay for it with the money we would otherwise spend incarcerating unwanted/abused/neglected children who grow up to be addicts and/or felons).
See to it that sex education is universal, pragmatic, sensible, and easy to understand. Wishful thinking, no matter how devoutly inspired, does not trump science or the realities of human nature. Be prepared for and compassionate to people who make messy mistakes; there but for the grace of God...
See to it that no mother ever has to worry about affording a safe place to raise her child, or how she will feed her child, or pay for her child's health care, or her child's education (you can slice a fraction off the defense budget for this; we can somehow squeak by with only 999 new jet fighters instead of 1,000).
Pony up...
...or shut up.
.
.
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thanx to Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter, for the tip off