Abortion has nothing to do with being in control of your body

Being in control of one’s own body might possibly be abortion activists’ most frequently used argument for legalizing abortions. It’s as if women are just minding their own business, and at any time, the pregnancy fairy might attack, causing them to ‘need’ abortions. The way they present it, women are next to useless without the ability to kill a preborn child whenever they feel like it.

Pro-abortion writer Caitlin Moran recently talked about how she gets “chills in her bones” remembering that women can’t have abortions in Ireland. Moran claims that because abortion is illegal there, Irish women don’t have control over their own bodies or futures…

“It’s always a shock to me,” she tells Una Mullally on the latest episode of The Women’s Podcast. “My family are from Ireland and I go over there a lot, and I always forget when I go over there. You’re walking around and you suddenly remember this is a country where women do not have control of their bodies and their futures … I’ll be walking down the street and suddenly remember this … it’s a chill through your bones.”

… “I was lucky, I was being picked up by my husband in our car and being driven back to our house around the corner and we’d done this in our country without any problems at all. And this girl had to come all the way to another country on her own, I presume it was a secret, and when she came out of her procedure she just limped away slowly out of this clinic and stood at the bus stop in the pouring rain, clearly in a lot of pain, in order to start her journey back home again”.

Abortion advocates use this claim to try to persuade people that, without abortion, women are practically helpless. There’s never any mention of how women get pregnant; it’s as if pregnancy is another form of cancer to pro-abortion extremists – something that no one has any control over – and depriving women of abortion is like depriving cancer patients of chemo. They don’t mention what causes pregnancy for a very good reason: because doing so would create a pretty big hole in the “no control over our bodies” argument.

Except in the very rare circumstance that a woman gets pregnant from being raped, women do have control over their bodies. They have control over if and when they choose to have sex, which is what causes pregnancy. And because no birth control method is 100% reliable, it’s a risk that women take every time they have sex.

While abortion advocates claim that consent to sex is not necessarily consent to pregnancy, this is a denial of exactly how our bodies are supposed to work. It’s not punishment or patriarchy; it’s biology. So if a woman is not ready to be a parent, there’s a way she can take control of her own body and avoid pregnancy: don’t have sex.

“But Cassy,” the pro-abortion extremists will cry, “people have a right to have sex whenever they choose to!” And that’s certainly true. But sex is not simple recreation – there are potential consequences. Pregnancy is one of them. Avoiding any possibility of pregnancy means that people will have to avoid having sex, plain and simple. Yes, it may be difficult. Yes, it’s not as much fun. But the alternative, insinuated by pro-abortion feminists, is that people are nothing more than slaves to their urges – no better than dogs in heat, unable to control our own desires. Are we simply animals, or are we human beings, capable of controlling ourselves?

The argument could be made that the prevention of pregnancy is what birth control is for, and this is true. However, once again, no birth control method is foolproof. Even sterilization has failure rates, small as they might be.

Moran also peddles in one of the most insulting pro-abortion stereotypes out there: that having a baby destroys a woman’s future. Yet somehow, abortion supporters like Moran also try to claim that they empower women. How? By telling women that they’re too weak to handle any adversity, any unexpected event? A woman in college can still go to school while she’s pregnant. So can a working mother. There is no doubt that being a single mother is difficult, but the answer is not to kill the child.

Abortion advocates also ignore that while an abortion may seem to solve the immediate problem, abortion can cost women much more than they planned. Women who have abortions are at higher risk for an array of physical complications, like multiple cancers and higher incidences of preterm birth in future pregnancies. That’s not including the mental health risks, which include higher incidences of drug and alcohol abuse, suicidal behavior, depression, and anxiety. So would it really be worth it in the long term?

If feminists were actually interested in feminism, they would work to change the climate to be more supportive of women in crisis pregnancies. Instead, they attack organizations that do work to help women facing unplanned pregnancies.

It’s clear that pro-abortion extremists aren’t interested in actually helping women or making their lives better. They’re interested in furthering abortion, while wrapping it up with a fake bow of control and choice.