I have been thinking for the last few weeks about the arguments given by the anti-choice/anti-abortion lobby, a thought process started by a demonstration outside our hospital in Nottingham and further strengthened this week by the outburst of an anti-abortionist at a House of Commons meeting about safe abortion access.
As with many extremist viewpoints, the major issues is over simplification of the issue. The anti-choicer sees a woman carrying a baby. They see it as a baby as soon as it is conceived and they see any loss of that life as a tragedy. Where choice has been a factor, they see that as malicious, as murder, as intent to harm and whilst I appreciate the temptation to see life and loss in this simplified way is a strong one, it misses so many of the inescapable facts of the matter.
When I chose to have children in my twenties it turned out to be very complicated indeed.
My first pregnancy ended in miscarriage at 6 weeks and I was completely devastated. I felt like my body was failing me. It turns out I was as wrong as I could possibly be about that.
After having my son approximately a year after that first spontaneous abortion, I went on to have a further two miscarriages before I discovered that I had a chromosomal abnormality and another one after that diagnosis. I have been pregnant six times in total that I know of and have only two children. The miscarriages involved varying levels of grief and feelings of inadequacy, but the difference with the last miscarriage was profound. By this point I knew that my body was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. It was rejecting a pregnancy that was not compatible with life.
The collection of rapidly dividing cells that can lead to a full human person is a vulnerable entity. Many things can go awry between fertilisation and birth, from genetic coding errors to misplacement and error, from accident or infection to uterine malfunction.
In many cases when things don't go to plan, the host body will reject the cells. Given the number of things that can and do lead to the rejection of a pregnancy by a woman's body it seems completely ludicrous that the woman's complete psychological aversion to hosting the pregnancy should somehow be less valid that any of these other reasons for abortion.
Thanks to medical advancement we now have ways to remove many collections of human cells that aren't where they should be or aren't doing what they're supposed to. In every case however, the ultimate choice about whether that happens lies with the human in who's body this is happening. Why on earth should pregnancy be any different?
For me half of my pregnancies will result in a unbalanced mix of chromosomes that would be unlikely to sustain human life. Luckily in every case my body has rejected the "bad eggs" as I would call them, but through some miracle of biology and mathematics, the amazing people at in Genetics were able to calculate that my affected pregnancies had about a one in ten chance of making it to term, i.e. of getting all the way through a pregnancy to birth. They couldn't really tell me what a "baby" would look like in that case but considering that the information affected involved brain and spinal development, amongst other things, it was unlikely the child would live beyond birth for long.
In my eventual sixth pregnancy I had chorionic villi sampling (similar to an amnio) and was able to check that the genetic information was balanced. After the test I waited two agonising weeks for this result. Knowing throughout that if the result was bad I would opt to abort, rather than put myself, my family and this unborn life through further pain and suffering.
For me pregnancy was psychologically bruising and the birth caused permanent physical damage, but no matter how straightforward it might be, the investment, both physical and psychological that growing a human requires is absolutely enormous. The host body will never fully recover from the event. To suggest that after a conception a woman's feelings and thoughts on the matter are not as valid as her bodies cellar acceptance of the embryo, is to try to separate body and mind in a way that fails to recognise that it is not possible to do so. As a human being with bodily autonomy, the only thing that would justify your taking that choice away from me is if you don't feel my thoughts and feelings hold enough validity or are somehow malicious.
So perhaps here in lies the truth of the matter. The vocal minority asking for an end to abortion not only don't appreciate the connection between body and mind but don't trust the minds of women. They somehow believe that women are not to be trusted to make this level of choice about anything, least of all their own body. A body that inconveniently has the power to give and to not give life.
When I confronted one male anti-choicer on social media last week about his opinion on abortion he told me that abortion was murder. If this is the language we are choosing to use about the death of all cells capable of advancing to human life, then we are faced with having to say that one in three pregnancies ends in murder of the embryo. In may case it was my physical body rather than my mind that committed that murder. Alternatively, if we only use this term to describe abortions where psychological choice and medical help are involved, then we are suggesting that one in three women are committing murder in their lifetime, that they have killed a child. A ludicrous suggestion when we consider how many women who have abortions are already, or will later go on to be loving parents to children.
The World Health Organisation recognises access to full birth control to be the single most important step in eradicating poverty. This fact blew my mind the first time I heard it but it makes complete sense. If women cannot control when and if they have children, then they cannot control their finances at all, both in terms of ability to work and earn and in terms of the huge financial investment that a child requires. Contraception is not full proof for numerous reasons, allergy and adverse reaction to drugs, failure of barrier methods, drug interactions that invalidate the pill, human error of judgement or lack of choice in the matter in the case of rape or coercion all play a part. On top of this, in the UK contraception services are undergoing the same cuts as the rest of our health service and as a consequence are getting more difficult to access. Given all of this it is absolutely inevitable that some women will become pregnant when they did not intend to.
In health care terms we have long accepted that the best care comes from seeing the full picture of a patients life. The interaction of the physical, the psychological, the socio-economic, the spiritual. If we accept that stress can contribute to cancer, if we understand that poverty can contribute to mental health issues and increase suicide, why do we not appreciate that in terms of pregnancy, whether or not we can afford a child, can accommodate them in our already existing family, can psychologically or physically get through a pregnancy, are all just as valid in deciding whether that pregnancy continues as any physiological cellular rejection of the embryo.
In our privileged, developed world medical advancements have allowed us to progress as humans, to make choices about our lives, to survive or to completely avoid infections that might have killed us, to remove rogue overgrowth of cells (cancers) and to avoid the constant pregnancies that limited our working lives, and damaged our bodies. A collection of human cells do not make a person, making a person requires the investment - physical, psychological, financial and spiritual, of the woman in who's body this is happening as well as, ideally, the wider support of her family and community. When any one of those things is not in place we are lucky enough to have choices.
The real tragedy is that here, where we have such privilege, we are still having to invest in the relentless fight to keep unhindered access to safe abortion, when what we should now be doing is fighting to extend this provision to those unlucky enough not to have it, purely by accident of geography.
Abortion has always existed, it even exists in the animal kingdom, it is a vital part of our survival, our progress and now we can do it safely we have an absolute humane responsibility to offer that choice.
