Deborah Lipp

I had some good ideas about what I would write today, and then I saw this: This year’s topic is a simple one: tell us, and your readers, why you’re pro-choice.

Which at first I wasn’t going to do, because it is such a simple topic. And then I thought about the anti-choice forces in the world, and I thought, yes, it’s worth saying.

I am pro-choice because women own our own bodies.

See how simple?

When I was doing the preliminary calling* for Call for Change, I got a woman who asked if the candidate I named (Jim Webb) was pro-choice. She was anti-choice, she said, because “If a woman spreads her legs, she should pay the price.”

Slut-shaming, as Amanda says. And remarkably, this is the new talking point for the anti-choice crowd. Just a few short years ago it was “the life of the unborn.” Whoever thought that would be a fond memory? As the Radical Religious Right has become more powerful and aggressive, they increasingly mobilize their base with hatred. While the notion of “saving the unborn” has a compassionate basis, slut-shaming is based in the hatred of women, and hatred is what they want. And don’t be fooled—hating sluts is fundamentally hating all women; all women are potential sluts, all women have Teh Scary Vagina.

If anti-choice was really “pro-life,” they would be concerned about the lives of women, not just cute cuddly microscopic fetuses (feti?). And over and over again, they prove they are not. By fighting pregnancy prevention almost as vigorously as they fight abortion. By fighting to make sure that women who have Teh Sex can get cancer. In a thousand different ways.

But all of this is why I’m pissed off at the anti-choice crowd. Why am I pro-choice?

Because I own my own body.

I can use my body to have sex if I want to, or I can use it to abstain. I own it.

I can have many sexual partners or few. I can have sex only when I love or sex whenever I lust. I own my body and I can make that choice.

I might, as a result of my choices, end up pregnant.** I will then have to pay a consequence for how I use my own body. That consequence could be pregnancy. That consequence could be abortion. Both are consequences. Because I own my body, I get to choose which consequence I prefer.

If choose to smoke with my body, I might, as a result of my choice, end up with cancer. I can then choose treatment which may include radiation, chemo, and/or surgery, or I can choose to die. I own my body, so that’s my choice. I get to choose which consequence I prefer.

There are forces in this world so hateful that they would decide for me which choice I should live with—as punishment. Set aside the fact that childbirth-as-punishment doesn’t give the subsequent child much of a life. I assert that no one can decide what punishments to inflict upon my body for how I have used it because I, and I alone, own it. You cannot inflict childbirth on me, you cannot inflict death-by-cancer on me.***

If you need a kidney transplant, if you will die without one, you cannot force me to give you my kidney. Because I own my internal organs, and even if that ownership affects the life of another, my organs are my own. My kidneys. My liver. My fucking uterus.

*Preliminary of calling was to identify Democrats so they could be called back for “get out the vote” calling. So in that first round, there were a lot of Republicans, some of them hostile.
**Okay, I personally can’t, but stay with me.
***The State has some (limited) rights over criminals’ bodies. Rightfully, when they have violated others, but, I’d assert, wrongfully when they are being punished only for how they’ve used their own bodies.