Pro-choice = Anti-woman

I believe we are all equal, all of us, as people. That should make me kind of a feminist, right? But the abortion issue has always been the major stumbling block for me. I just can't sign on to a philosophy that says it's ok to kill people because they are helpless and inconvenient.

People laugh at "feminists for life", but to me, any other attitude towards abortion is not just unspeakably cruel to the children involved--but a backhanded way to infantalize women.

The first thing you realize, as an adult, is that the shit you do today has consequences. If you forget to pay your mortgage, if you don't brush your teeth, if you stay home from work to play nintendo, whatever, it's going to bring down some negatives on you. As an adult, that means that nobody's responsible to bail you out of your own mistakes; you live with them, or you figure out how to not make them again, or they screw up your life, but it's all yours to handle.

It's a scary proposition, maybe, but it's also exciting. Being a grown-up is great--just ask a kid.

Kids know, instinctively, that adults get all the respect. They get the good stuff that comes with being an adult. They don't realize, until they're adults themselves, that a lot of that stuff is just work, responsibility, and no summers off.

That's my point, though. As a kid, you can make some real boner decisions, and still squeak by. Mom and Dad can cover for you, pay your fine, bail you out, send you to another school, whatever. As an adult, when you screw up, there's nobody to fix it but you. Not really.

By the time you're interested in sex, you know it's more than fun. SHOW me a sexually active teen who hasn't yet heard that that's where babies come from. I dare ya. If you're having sex, you have no room to pretend that you didn't know pregnancy was a possibility.

And if you get pregnant, if you get somebody pregnant, that is not the time to decide that you're really not ready for all this adult stuff, and you want to back out and be a kid again. You can't call do-overs on the big stuff; you really can't.

If you want respect, if you want to be an adult, you have to take stock, think hard, and move forward. Easy access to abortion says for women, "in this area of life, we are not able or willing to handle the consequences of our actions. If our actions create negative consequences, we are not required to handle them." Why would any adult sign up for that?

We as women are capable people. We can handle life. We can handle reality. We can handle the consequences of our actions, even if they are catastrophically hard and lasting. We don't need to cede our maturity when the going gets tough.

Oh, and just get me started on how "choice" for women seems, so much of the time, to really mean "bullying", by her boyfriend, her parents, her inlaws, even her boss. But, hey, let me get back to silly crap for a while, before all my friends stop reading my blog...