Right to life — but for whom?

I, for one, am rather fed up that a women’s right to make decisions about her body is still at issue.

Here’s the truth: Right-to-lifers are not really that. They are, in fact, right-to-birth. They claim they are protecting the unborn when in reality they take no responsibility for what happens to a child after birth. Is the child well cared for, given proper love and nutrition, communication and safety? We really do not know.

The reality is that regardless of what happens with Roe v. Wade, abortions, mostly unsafe, will continue.

Let’s look at the history excerpted from NPR on May 20, 2019, an interview between Mary Louise Kelly and Karrissa Karissa Haugeberg, assistant professor of history at Tulane University, about what it was like to get an abortion before Roe v. Wade.

“First, start with the numbers. Before the Roe versus Wade decision 1973, how many American women got abortions?

HAUGEBERG: “Scholars will probably never be able to answer that question with precision precisely because the procedure was illegal. But scholars estimate that between 20 percent and 25 percent of all pregnancies ended in abortion before Roe v. Wade. Immediately before Roe v. Wade, officially approximately 200 women died per year. Historically, the most commonplace method that women have used when they haven’t been able to obtain legal abortions is self-induction. Those are the horror stories that you hear of women trying to fall down stairs or ingesting poisons or using instruments to try to induce an abortion.

“Another method that women commonly used was turning to the unregulated market. And some women were able to find providers who were willing to perform abortions safely but criminally at great risk to their professional careers and at risk of being imprisoned themselves. So one thing that’s kind of interesting is that throughout the period when abortion was criminalized beginning in the mid-19th century — for the most part, physicians were the people who were providing it as well as midwives. And as long as a physician was offering the service, until about the 1930s, they were less vulnerable to being prosecuted or having a police raid their practice. And so there was a vibrant word-of-mouth network that enabled many women to find safe providers. But again, they were always operating in a gray area. …

“When we look at the provision of abortion in the immediate pre-Roe period, I think it’s actually very instructive. We had a patchwork system where women in certain places, like New York, and in certain areas — for example, cities — had much better ability to be able to get to a licensed provider and to afford a provider than women who lived in rural areas. So even in 1971, a woman who lived in rural Louisiana had very little ability, often, to be able to afford to get to New York. Precisely. But if the recent history on contraception and these states’ reluctance to cover contraception is any guide, it wouldn’t be surprising if next there will be a crackdown even on these other chemical options.”

I, myself, don’t believe that anyone thinks abortion is a great idea. Those of us who have experienced the procedure have found it to be a difficult decision. I am fortunate to have lived most of my life where my choices of birth control are, legally, up to me. You don’t have to like the idea of abortion, but it really is about the rights of the living, not the unborn. The definition of a live human is when it can survive outside the womb. We live in a nation that has put separation of church and state as a priority. I suggest every one of us respects the rights of others to make decisions about our lives and our bodies, as individuals.