Making abortion illegal will not prevent abortions.

Before Roe vs. Wade (RVW) – which for those who don’t know was the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in the United States – women were forced to resort to all sorts of illicit means of getting an abortion. You may have heard horror stories involving coat hangers, or “black market” doctors who lost their medical licenses but continued to perform the procedures illegally.

Were Roe vs. Wade to be overturned, or were any states to pass anti-abortion laws, the number of abortions would not be likely to decrease. So from the pro-life perspective, which necessarily stems from a desire to “save babies”, overturning RVW would do nothing to help their cause. On top of that it would re-introduce instances of female injury through abortions performed under unsavory conditions.

Perhaps here is a good place for me to state my position on abortion. I am unabashedly pro-choice. However, I do not think that supporting a woman’s right to choose is the same as sanctioning the practice willy-nilly. Where at all possible, I would hope that a woman would choose to keep the child. I would hope that any decision would be made only after a thorough education on all of her options, issues around adoption including the grievous abuses of the foster system and probability of adoption as it corresponds to ethnicity or disability.

Being pro-choice is not the same as being pro-abortion, because I certainly wish that no abortions had to take place, that every pregnancy could come to term and birth a child into a safe, healthy, equitable environment.  The reality, however, is that the world we live in does not often provide such an environment.  The most common argument by pro-lifers it that adoption is always a viable alternative.

Except that it’s not.  At least not for everyone.  For instance, it is practically a given that a Euro-American child of no physical or mental disability has a good chance for adoption – certainly much better than her disabled counterpart of the same ethnicity, or those of other ethnicities.  While there has been a strange almost fetish-like trend of Euro-American families adopting Asian children, no such trend has emerged for African-American children or disabled children.  I do not mean to begrudge those children who were adopted into loving families; I mean to point out all is not equal when it comes to the viability of adoption as an alternative to abortion.

It troubles me when aggressive pro-life propagandists spread messages like “African American children are an endangered species” or suggest that the higher rate of abortions amongst African-American women is reflective of some eugenics agenda by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.  What this does is sensationalize what, for being a very sensitive and complex issue, needs to be analyzed and discussed with discretion and compassion.  Such propaganda glosses over the issue of adoption equity, and attempts to manipulate the emotions of the disenfranchised to serve a political agenda.

Let us make no mistake.  Abortion has become, for many, more a political issue than a personal one.  If you wish to see RVW overturned even when presented with evidence that it will not prevent the “murder of babies” that concerns you so greatly, then arguing for the overturn has less to do with saving children than it does with taking an ideological position.

And for that, you should be ashamed.

It is my opinion that the pro-life and pro-choice positions are not mutually exclusive.  In fact, I would wager that most pro-choice advocates would wish for a world in which all children are able to come into the world safe, secure, and healthy.  None of us rally for more abortions.  All of us want less of them.  But for that, we are not willing to deny a woman her right to choose what is best for her and/or her family, without pressure from pundits and ideologues more concerned with being right, than with doing what’s right.