British Pregnancy Advisory Service

Things Anti Choicers Say: “Every Pro-Choicer Has Already Been Born”

Aoife O'Riordan, , , , , , 10 Comments

I was planning to write about roller derby today. I’m afraid, though, that you’re going to have to wait a little longer for rhapsodising about the joys of knockin’ people over on eight wheels. I’m letting you know this because just as soon as we sort out reproductive rights for all and dismantle the kyriarchy, everyone will get to blog all day long about their favourite things. I’ll turn this into a food and derby blog, write reviews of my favourite books, and yarnbomb my balcony. I’m not sure what you lot will do, but it’ll be great.

In the meantime, though, we have to keep doing this. Sorry ’bout that. Might as well get to it, though, eh? In the wake of my post the other day on antichoice responses to BPAS in the Irish Times, I’ve had a few conversations here and on Twitter. This morning I woke up to this in my inbox:

There are a lot of flippant responses I could give. Let’s take a look at the premises behind this one, though, and see what comes out of it.

1. That we would be horrified at having been aborted ourselves

This reminds me of another thing I hear a lot from anti choice activists. A few years ago, I was out at a pro choice counterdemo to an anti choice march. Someone came up to me and, after calling me a murderer a few times, shouted in my face, “Aren’t you glad your mother was pro life?”. (Of course, my mother was standing a few yards down to me, carrying a massive “Keep Your Rosaries Off my Ovaries” sign.)

What this is about, though, is the idea that pro choice is a fundamentally selfish position, and that pro choice people have never considered the possibility that we might ourselves have been aborted. Additionally, it’s about the idea that the choice between abortion and carrying to term is something other than a deeply personal decision that a person makes.

Don’t think so? The result of my mother having aborted me would be that I would never exist. I rather like existing, so I can see how the thought of nonexistence would disturb people. I’ve had a sleepless night or two in my time contemplating my inevitable future nonexistence, and I’ll bet you have too. Abortion, though, is only one way of many that I or you could have never existed at all. We might have been miscarried. There might have been something good on TV, or an important errand to run, when we would have been conceived. Any one of our twenty-greats-grandparents, making the tiniest change to a single day of their lives, could have caused our entire families to never be.

Sure, I’m glad that I wasn’t aborted. I’m also glad that my billions-of-years-old newly-vertebrate ancestors didn’t get eaten by anything before they could lay the eggs of the next generation of our ancestors. When it comes to abortion, though? Knowing that my pro choice mother made a choice to carry me to term and be my parent is deeply comforting to me. The existence of any of us, both as individuals and as a species, is the result of innumerable trillions of chance events and meetings. But at one point, at the very end of that scale, someone decided that I should exist. That I was wanted and loved.

I am pro choice now. Give me a time machine and a chance to meet my mother when she was pregnant? And I’d still tell her to make the choice that was right for her. And if that meant I never existed in the first place? It’s just one chance of many.

2. That being born before we make our minds up only applies to pro-choice people

Here’s something that it took me a while to get, when people accuse pro choice supporters of all having already been born. Yes, we were born decades ago. So were the people we disagree with. So has everyone any of us has spoken to, met, passed on the street, seen on TV, or read about in history books. Sure, it was a thing to shout at people. But it didn’t make any sense.

Unless you give agency to fetuses. If a fetus could think, desire, understand and fear, then maybe it would seek to continue to exist.

There’s no evidence- or reason to believe- that fetuses can do anything of the sort. A fetus doesn’t know what life and death are. It doesn’t know that there is a world outside. It has never eaten, cried, or even taken a breath. There’s evidence that fetuses sleep through their entire gestation (yes, even when they’re placing well-aimed kicks at their parent’s tenderest vital organs) due to a combination of their blood oxygen levels and sedating hormones produced by it and its placenta. Even if awake, though, a fetus couldn’t have an awareness of what an individual is, of it being one, of what life and death and the future and other people are- the most basic kinds of self-awareness don’t really start to develop until a baby is a year or so old.

Yes, every pro choice person has been born. So has every anti choice person, and every person with the most basic idea of what that sentence means in the first place.

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Things Anti Choicers Say: “Every Pro-Choicer Has Already Been Born”
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Advertising Abortions In The Irish Times

Aoife O'Riordan, , , , , , 28 Comments

Waking up this morning, I flopped over in bed (almost exactly like how I imagine a sleepy walrus would) as usual, and picked up my phone for a bit of a browse of some news until I felt ready to face the world. I can’t be the only person who does this, can I? Somehow reading news articles in bed feels almost like I’m doing something productive. Almost.

This morning, I was treated to news of an ad in the Irish Times today. Doesn’t sound like news to you? Check this out:

bpas

That, my friends, is one hell of an advertisement. It’s more than an advertisement. It’s a gauntlet thrown at the Irish government to get their act together, grow a pair (of ovaries), and start providing women with the healthcare and bodily autonomy that are our rights. And it manages to simultaneously give essential information to people with crisis pregnancies. I’d have put a hat on just to take it off to them, if I weren’t, as I mentioned, still under my duvet at the time. It was a chilly Saturday morning- I wasn’t getting out of there before I had to, especially not to tip my hat to people who weren’t in the country, never mind the room.

Then I read the comments. I know- don’t read the comments. Unless they’re the comments on a blog with a silly name that seems somehow related to tea. You should read those. In those comments were a few things that I think deserve to be talked about.

What had the charming anti-choice masses of the internet to say?

You’re all a bunch of filthy murderers, tearing babies apart limb from limb

Ah, this old chestnut. The charming characterisation of pro-choice people as slathering, bloodthirsty hordes who love nothing more than dismembering innocents. I imagine that we also take the time to perfect our evil laughs before an entertaining evening spent kicking puppies, stealing sweets from children and then chopping the heads off their favourite teddy bears, yes? Oh, and we never use our indicators, always hold our umbrellas at your eye level, and turn the volume on our headphones up so loud that you can sing along to our earworms from the other side of the bus.

While all of that is of course perfectly true, there is one factual inaccuracy here. It’s the bit about “tearing babies apart limb from limb”. You see, while Irish people have abortions at about the same rate as our UK counterparts, there are a couple of important differences in how it happens, both of which can be traced directly back to the Irish abortion ban.

Irish women have abortions later. And we have more surgical abortions.

We have abortions later- two weeks, on average- because travelling to the UK for a medical procedure is not a simple process. Finding money. Finding a clinic. Finding money for flights- ever had to book Ryanair on short notice? Booking flights and other transport. Can you afford a place to stay? Have you friends to stay with? Getting time off work. Have kids or other dependants? You’ll need to find someone to care for them. Oh, and remember that bit about the money? Time is ticking, and the cost of an abortion is rising with every passing week.

Even when Irish women manage to have abortions early, though, we still end up having surgical abortions far more than our UK counterparts. Why? Medical abortions- that’s the abortion pill- take more time than surgical. Those pills take time to work, and controlled miscarriages can be as painful as natural ones. Despite the fact that many women would prefer medical abortions to having surgery, they often simply can’t afford even more time away from home, as well as the cost of days of accommodation.

So let’s get something straight: if anyone is encouraging women to “tear their babies limb from limb” (a description that is as unpleasantly graphic as it is, in the vast majority of cases, inaccurate), it’s the people who force Irish people seeking abortions to have their abortions weeks later, and to endure more invasive procedures than they need. That’s anti-choicers and the Eighth Amendment, by the way.

But let’s move on, shall we? I have a couple more chestnuts to get through. How about this one:

noplane

Who do BPAS think they are, sticking their noses into Irish business?

On the face of it, this seems legit. Us pro-choice activists are always banging on about how certain anti-choice groups active in Ireland seem to be a little.. further West.. than most of the rest of us. Y’know. A fair bit west. The kind where you set off from, say, Kerry or Galway, point yourself away from land and keep going till you get to the land of s’mores and Taco Bell. If we get to complain about how they seem to get shedloads of money from shady US backers, then they should be able to object to UK organisations taking out ads in our papers. Right?

Wrong, actually.

When we object to things like overseas funding and a strange unwillingness to publish where certain organisations get their money, the point isn’t that some people who happen to live outside Ireland are giving people some money. The point is, in fact, twofold. It’s inappropriate and harmful for people with no stake in, or knowledge of, contemporary Ireland to try to influence our laws- it’s quite frankly none of their business. And hiding that you’re doing so, while pretending that you have vastly more local support than you do, is unethical and dishonest. If you can’t make your point while fighting fair? GTFO.

BPAS, on the other hand, couldn’t be more different. Ireland’s ban on abortion doesn’t mean that Irish people don’t have abortions. It means that Irish people get our abortions from English doctors. English hospitals, nurses and doctors do what their Irish equivalents will or can not. They provide the care and services that we need. By banning abortion, Ireland forces itself into a symbiotic relationship with our neighbours. UK hospitals, whether we like to admit it or not, are an integral part of Irish health care.

BPAS aren’t strangers to Irish women. They are the people who, for decades, have stepped up where our country has abdicated responsibility. When Ireland talks about statistics and anonymised cases, BPAS provides services to real people. They are as part of Irish healthcare as my GP down the road. And as the people who care for Irish women, who hear our stories and show us the respect and compassion that our country denies us, they have as much a say in this issue as anyone on this island.

And they write their name on their ad.

This is just a cynical move by those murdering scum to make more profits from killing cute little babies who have toesie woesies and things

This one makes no sense. BPAS are challenging the Irish government to actually get off its butt and decriminalise abortion already. BPAS are a British organisation. Britain is where Irish pregnant people go to get abortions now. Irish pregnant people don’t get NHS treatment, so we have to pay privately for our abortions. If abortion were legal in Ireland, we would have abortions in Irish hospitals and clinics. Not British. This would mean that they would be paid less money by the 12 people a day who wouldn’t need to travel.

It’s called logic.

You know what else, though? I took a look at BPAS’s site today. They have a specific Irish website which I found through their main site. While Irish women cannot access the NHS, BPAS charge us significantly reduced rates than UK private patients. They can waive consultation fees in several circumstances. They link to non-directive pregnancy counselling, free post-abortion medical and counselling services, and to the Abortion Support Network for people who need assistance with funding or accommodation.

Does that seem like the actions of uncaring people who care about nothing but profit to you?

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Advertising Abortions In The Irish Times