Let me begin by
stating succinctly a fact that men like Terryl Givens are not at liberty to
question: when they put “reproductive rights” into quotations, as a thing to be
mistrusted or invalidated by them in any way, it’s a betrayal to the women they
claim to love. They’re placing the enfranchisement of their wives, daughters,
granddaughters, mothers, and sisters in jeopardy to score points in an
argument. They speak without personal stake or experience in the rhetoric
they’re posing against women’s bodily autonomy. And if through some nightmarish
scenario their efforts are successful and they overturn Roe. v. Wade, they will
still be threatening the very sanctity of life they claim to be defending.
This is what I’m going to be talking
about today. Not because I want to. Not because I don’t have anything better to
be doing with my time. But because when men put philosophical challenges to
reproductive rights out into a public forum, it’s a direct threat to me and my
survival in this country. Please pardon me for talking about abortion like it’s
a life or death issue to me, because that’s exactly what it is. I will be
bringing the full weight of my passion into this response. If seeing women be
passionate in an argument offends you, now is the time to make your exit.
Also, to my transgender, non-binary, and gender
non-conforming friends. My apologies for using gendered language in this
response. In all the ways these discussions also affect you, regardless of your
gender expression, you have my love, recognition, and support.
Men are the Least Important People in
ANY Discussion Concerning Legalized Abortion Access
It always astounds me whenever men talk
about refusing to support safe, legalized abortion because, barring some
advancement in medical science that gives men a womb, they will never
experience any of the risks surrounding being pregnant. They will never know
the devastation of being pregnant with an unwanted child. They will never know
the trauma of having their bodies used against their will to carry a fetus to
term. They will never know how it feels to desperately want a child and to have
their bodies continually thwart their efforts by rejecting multiple
pregnancies. They will never know what it’s like to have reproductive tissue
vacated from their bodies, either through manual removal or forced inducement,
that could’ve been a person… but just isn’t.
These may be fighting words, but it needs
to be said. Fetuses are not people. Not medically and, in most cases, not
legally. Not even in the eyes of God, at least not as practiced in The Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This is a fact with which any temple
president can acquaint Brother Givens or anyone else who cares to explore it.
All he has to do is ask if any temple ordinances are performed for stillborn
children. Having served as an ordinance worker myself, I’ll save him and you
the phone call: no temple ordinances are performed for fetuses who do not
survive birth into mortality, independent of where they were in their mother’s
gestation cycle. The Church has no official stance that delineates when life or
personhood begins in a fetus. In policy, they currently treat birth, not
conception, as the point when life begins.
I want to talk about the word fetus. It’s
the medically correct and factually accurate term for reproductive tissue
before it successfully exits a mother’s body during the birthing process. Until
a fetus successfully transitions into an independent existence, no longer
relying on a mother’s lungs for air, her body for nutrients, and her womb for
protection from the elements, that fetus is not a child. It is reproductive
tissue that belongs to and is a part of a woman’s body. It is legally hers to
remove from her body at will.
The fact that Givens has grandchildren
and either doesn’t know or has no respect for these fundamentals about a
woman’s reproductive health is exactly why men like him should have no say in
our reproductive choices. To speak on these issues in an educated way, you need
to have a deeper understanding of female anatomy beyond “slot A, tab B.” To the
degree that men don’t understand female anatomy, they’re unprepared to have
intelligent conversations on abortion.
Without Legalized Abortion Access,
Unwanted Pregnancies Become Forced Pregnancies
I don’t view Terryl Givens and critics of
legalized abortion like him as being “pro-life.” Individuals who are pro-life
support comprehensive, affordable health care for all people. They support laws
and policies that lift individuals and families out of poverty. They hold the
governments they elect accountable for reproductive violence through forced sterilization and family separation. They recognize the humanity
and dignity in every person, not just the unborn. That’s not an accurate
description of most who oppose abortion in the United States.
Instead, I refer to critics of legalized
abortion as “pro-pregnancy advocates,” because that’s where their support for
the unborn starts and ends. They envision a society where laws and policies
force women who don’t want to be pregnant to give birth to unwanted children
anyway.
The only alternative to safe, legalized
abortion access is to impose unwanted pregnancies on individuals and families.
Let’s talk about why that’s such a despicable thing to advocate for in the
United States.
Women who receive abortions in the United
States are overwhelmingly poor or at low-income status. In 2014, 75% of
abortion patients met that criteria. More than half of them (51%) were using
contraception at the time they became pregnant. White individuals made up 39%
of cases, with the remaining 61% being made up of Black, Latinx, and other
racial minorities.
As one of the last developed countries in
the world with no guaranteed paid maternity leave or child care, the most
expensive health care in the world, rampant racial bias in reproductive medicine, and a
shockingly high maternal mortality rate, the United States is
arguably one of the worst countries in the world in which to have an unwanted
pregnancy. But that’s exactly what pro-pregnancy advocates are trying to impose
on women: illegitimate control over the most vulnerable families in our
society. It’s predatory and unconscionable, which is why Givens leaves all of
this out of his think piece. It’s easier to justify harming women and families
through pro-pregnancy advocacy when you never acknowledge the humanity and harm
of the people most affected by this issue.
Forced Pregnancies Produce Unwanted
Children
This is something I can talk about with a
great deal of personal knowledge and experience. I was an unplanned, unwanted
child. I grew up in a low-income family that later turned into a single mother,
with the bare minimum of education, caring for two children with no child
support. We were as poor as it was possible to be in the United States without
being homeless.
I know exactly what it’s like to be an
unwanted burden to my parents. My parents frequently took their financial
struggles out on their children in all kinds of abuse. If Givens is outraged
about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder women experience from abortions, his head
might actually implode when he discovers what Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) is like for
the unwanted children he’s trying to bring into this world.
I have years of missing time in my memory
from C-PTSD, where my brain has compartmentalized and blocked off the worst
traumas I’ve lived through. This doesn’t stop isolated fragments from violently
breaking through into my consciousness on a semi-regular basis. Thought
spiraling and hallucinations are a regular part of my daily life. I’ve had to
learn techniques to cope with my mental illness, with varying levels of success
from day to day. Unlike regular PTSD, which often centers on a single event
that can be successfully reprocessed and healed through therapy, C-PTSD is
different. The compounded results of living in trauma, insecurity, and
deprivation for prolonged periods of time make it almost impossible to treat.
There are too many incidents for me to ever reprocess, and many of them are too
suppressed to be accessible to me anymore. As a result, there will never be a
time when I’m no longer living with the harm from my childhood.
Givens’ argument rests on the
unacknowledged, unchallenged assumption that being a living, unwanted child is
somehow preferable to being an aborted fetus.
My question is: what exactly does he know
about being either one?
Admittedly, I don’t know what it’s like
to be an aborted fetus. But I’m an expert on being an unwanted child in a poor,
dysfunctional family that would (and almost did) seek out abortion. The act of
keeping a child alive in circumstances like mine is not merciful. It’s not a
decision worth honoring or enshrining in law or public policy. It’s not
preferable to terminating a pregnancy that never should’ve happened. If having
legalized abortion means more kids aren’t born into impoverished,
dysfunctional, abusive families like mine, I don’t view that as a problem.
Pro-pregnancy advocates who grew up in
families where they were wanted, loved, and valued should want the same thing
for all children, but they just don’t. They show that every day in the
legislators they vote for, the policies they refuse to support, and the poverty
they’re comfortable with existing in this country. My early life is a testimony
to how little they genuinely care about me and families like mine.
They can lie to themselves all they want
about that, but they’re not fooling me.
Legalized Abortion Guarantees
Comprehensive Health Care to Women with Reproductive Disorders
Givens is deeply mistrustful of anyone
who disagrees with him on abortion, especially if they’re members of the
Church. He paints them as individuals who couldn’t possibly approach the issue
of abortion from an impartial, fully-educated place if they are pro-choice. In
total contradiction of that portrayal, allow me to put forth what I know about
women’s reproductive health—not because I’m a policy expert, a Constitutional
scholar, a medical professional, or even because I have children of my own.
I stand instead on the only credential
that matters in this discussion: I am a woman. What’s more, I’m a woman whose
reproductive health has uprooted the life I tried to build for myself and
forced me to be the expert on pregnancy I never wanted to be.
I have been diagnosed with, and take
medications for, multiple chronic conditions. One is typified by infertility
and hormonal imbalances that make pregnancy more dangerous for me than the
average woman. My endocrine disorder makes me prone to pregnancy complications
at every stage. I am more likely to miscarry and to have stillborn children. I
am more likely to require dilation and evacuations for the removal of
non-viable pregnancies—procedures that could be necessary for me at any stage
of pregnancy. These procedures are abortions and are not distinct in any way
from the practices Givens wants to see outlawed.
And even if I somehow avoid all of that
and safely make it to the labor stage, I’m still not out of the woods.
Preeclampsia and eclampsia are more common for women with my condition. If you
need a point of reference, that’s what Sybil died from on Downton Abbey. They
are still fatal when they aren’t caught and addressed in time. Remember that
preventable maternal mortality rate I mentioned earlier? The state I live in is
part of the reason for that, having a higher maternal mortality rate than the
(already high) national average because they don’t catch preventable pregnancy
complications in time to intervene.
For me, however, the scariest aspect of
pregnancy would be the mental and emotional anguish I would experience from
discontinuing the medications I depend on to be well. Life without those
medications isn’t survivable for me, and I’d have to discontinue the ones I
rely on the most if I ever became pregnant.
If there was ever a woman who wanted to
be pregnant, whose entire existence is just completely incompatible with being
pregnant, it’s me. Pregnancy would put me into an impossible position of
choosing between risking everything to have a child I want and destroying my
physical and mental health in the process, or terminating that pregnancy
immediately to avoid living full time on suicide watch from the combined
Molotov cocktail of hormonal imbalances and untreated mental illness. To avoid
ever being placed into the position where I would be forced to choose abortion,
I’ve instead chosen to do everything in my power to never become pregnant.
Because my infertility is so severe, it hasn’t been that difficult to achieve
so far.
This is my reality, what I’ve accepted
about God’s plan for me on this earth. I accepted a long time ago that part of
that plan for me may include having an abortion someday, whether it’s a
spontaneous abortion (the actual term for a miscarriage) or a procedure to
remove non-viable tissues from my body. Those with better luck in relation to
their reproductive health shouldn’t forget that not everyone else’s situation
is the same. I shouldn’t have to show up in these conversations and make my
struggles visible to remind people like Givens to have empathy and compassion
for those who are different from them.
Eliminating Choice is Just
Outsourcing Choice
When abortion restrictions are written
into law and policy, the first concessions are always the same because we
already recognize as a society that being too conservative on this issue is
inhumane. Rape, incest, maternal mortality (respected even in Utah's first abortion law of 1876), and fatal fetal abnormalities are
the standard exceptions. Some people take comfort in outlawing abortion on
these grounds because they tell themselves that all the “deserving” women will
surely still get a pass. But given that we live under a system that is supposed
to have protected equal access for everyone, and there are plenty of these
“deserving” women who can’t access care, we already know these exceptional protections
won’t work as intended. And really, who are pro-pregnancy advocates to be the
gatekeepers in determining which women are “deserving” and which ones aren’t?
What qualifications do they have that we should be outsourcing choice to them?
When you introduce a system of abortion
where exceptions need to be justified to meet legal requirements, the
responsibility of appointing arbiters of choice instead falls to the
government. Under a system where women can’t be trusted to terminate their own
pregnancies responsibly, the government undertakes that responsibility by
appointing someone (or a group) to make those decisions instead. Depending on
the beliefs and biases of the members of that group, that doesn’t mean they
would grant me an abortion, even if it would save my life. All they would have
to say to prevent me from proceeding is that my needs aren’t justified. Given
the many, varied positions that exist on abortion in this country, ranging from
“go ahead” to “we should give women who have abortions the death penalty,” I
don’t like my odds trusting strangers with that decision about my body.
Speaking of outsourcing, we need to
confront the policy that Givens quoted in his essay regarding consulting with
the bishop before terminating a pregnancy. God forbid I should ever end up in
that position. But if I did, the last conversation I intend to have in that
moment of crisis is an interrogation with my bishop. I reject the very premise
that I need his permission or forgiveness for seeking valid, necessary medical
treatment. I don’t need my bishop’s permission to receive cancer treatment, an
organ transplant, or to have one of my limbs amputated—nor does he need mine.
Why on earth should I need his blessing, under the threat of church discipline,
if I need to terminate my pregnancy? Especially if I’m in a time sensitive
position where my life is in danger, he is not the priority for consideration
at that moment. Nor should he be—not for me and not for any other woman.
I don’t trust anyone enough to
unconditionally put my life and decisions this important into someone else’s
hands. I don’t trust ANY institution (religious or secular) to appoint someone
else to make my reproductive choices for me. No one is more personally invested
in my health and continuing survival than I am. That’s why I will always believe
that the decisions surrounding my own body are best left with me. No one is as motivated to protect my interests as I am.
Interfering with Reproductive Choices
Outside of Your Own is Unrighteous Dominion
Much of the criticism to abortion coming
out of the Church relates to the belief that woman’s responsibility in God’s
plan of salvation is to bear children. Everything she does, in their eyes,
should be centered on that goal. Anything that exists separately from that goal
is considered evil.
Infertility has freed me from this view
of myself, the women around me, and the world. Bearing children likely won’t be
the most important thing I’ll ever do with my life. Like many women who
experience infertility, I’ve had to reconstruct a new purpose for myself, my
talents, and my time separately from having children. That’s what I’ve learned
from walking around in the body that God has given to me for the past 30 years.
The entire reason I live with infertility is to be a walking, talking,
breathing contradiction to people who never learned to value women for anything
beyond our ability to reproduce.
The divine mission of a woman’s life on
earth is as vast as any man’s, expansive into every aspect of life—not just
reproduction. In every way men fail to see that, in every way they limit our
potential as a trade-off to marriage and children—especially against our
will—they deny the divinity within us. They frustrate the contributions we were
sent here by God to make to the human family. Their actions are a form of
unrighteous dominion that is deeply offensive before God.
Perhaps saying it quite that strongly is
a little rich for some people. But even in the worldview of more traditional
views of womanhood, men controlling reproductive choice doesn’t hold up. In
that worldview, men have priesthood and women have motherhood. Even in the most
conservative interpretation of the Church’s teachings, motherhood still belongs
by divine ordination to women. This necessarily includes decisions related to
family planning and pregnancy. According to male church leadership, this is
what women get instead of ordination and real institutional access within the
Church. They had better expect we’re going to hold them to that. They can’t
relegate us to a gendered position in our community based on biological
functions, then get mad at us when they don’t like how we’re performing (or not
performing) those functions. A complementarian view of male/female
relationships dictates that men and women occupy different spheres where they
are each most prepared and qualified for the affairs of that sphere. If men are
going to continue expecting women to respect the delineations of those spheres,
they need to have the self-awareness to know when they are intruding outside of
the place they’ve appointed for themselves and for us.
At the bridge between the most
progressive and most conservative views of family planning in the Church is the
idea of couples making choices together prayerfully through revelation.
Wherever revelation exists, the limitations of stewardship will always apply.
There is no reason or occasion where God would ever provide specific guidance
related to pregnancy and family planning outside of anyone’s individual
stewardship. For a man like Givens to try to insert himself into these sacred
decisions for untold numbers of women through interference with law and public
policy is beyond inappropriate. There is no stewardship he could ever possess
that would grant him the needed revelation to counsel every woman, both in and
outside of the Church, on their individual reproductive choices. This is
because that kind of authority has never been appointed to any individual
person on earth.
Adoption is NOT an Acceptable
Alternative to Legalized Abortion
What troubles me also is the flippancy
with which Givens proposes adoption as an alternative to abortion. Adoption
does nothing to address the physical and emotional needs of women during wanted
and unwanted pregnancies, to say nothing of the lifelong traumas carried by
adopted children throughout their lives. You can’t fix one set of traumas by
piling more traumas on top.
Adoption comes with its own unique brand
of harm that too often goes unrecognized, a fact I became aware of when I
started helping people to find their biological families through genetic
testing. Through my work, I’ve met and listened to many adoptees rights
advocates talk about their own adoptions. I’ve heard them talk about first
rejection, the trauma they carry in body and memory from being separated from
their biological mothers. Second rejection, where biological families refuse to
connect with them later in life when they go searching for answers and
wholeness in their identities. The difficulties in obtaining legal documentation
like birth certificates and passports, being treated differently from an
adoptive couple’s biological children, and sometimes even being rejected by
their adoptive families for “not fitting in enough.”
Anyone who thinks adoption is an easy and
convenient solution to unwanted pregnancies is unaware that the systems of
oppression that have existed in this country to benefit adoptive parents above
everyone else are actively being dismantled as we speak. The days in which
adoptions were performed in secrecy, preying on vulnerable women for the sake
of giving their babies to couples who were willing to pay enough money, are
disappearing. As rates of unwanted pregnancies have gone down in the United
States, adoption rates of infants have followed suit. The majority of domestic
adoptions in the United States are now performed through the foster care system
with older children. That may sound like a good thing, until you consider that
adoptions from the foster care system are nowhere near matching the total number
of kids in the system. The vast majority of kids in foster care age out of the
system without ever being adopted.
Why increase the number of unwanted
children on an already burdened foster care system? Because white people want
to adopt white babies, and more than half of the kids in the foster care system
aren’t white. And since children under the age of 1 make up only 7% of the kids in foster care, there aren’t
enough white infants for white parents to adopt domestically anymore.
If white people are looking for more
babies to adopt, they can’t keep looking for marginalized people to take
children from. That’s not a valid solution to curtailing abortion rates, and it
was never designed to be. It’s a talking point that Givens needs to avoid using
until he more fully appreciates its problematic connection to evangelical adoption culture. Evangelical
Christianity has entire ministries dedicated to taking children from some of
the most marginalized societies on this planet. They have found all kinds of
ways to justify deeply problematic behavior. The last thing on earth church
members want or need to do is to mimic these communities in how we advocate for
and talk about adoption.
There are Better Ways to Reduce
Abortion Rates than Making Abortion Illegal
I’m also not surprised that Givens is
unaware that progressives on the left have already proposed solutions to reduce
unwanted pregnancies (and by extension, abortion rates) in the United States.
Getting abortion rates much lower at this point won’t be an easy thing to
achieve, as they are already at historic lows. The benefit of having legal
abortion in this country is these rates are knowable and trackable. The fact
that Givens has reliable numbers to cite in his judgmental portrayal of women
who seek abortions is a credit, in fact, to legalized abortion. But I digress.
One solution to reducing abortion rates
is to provide comprehensive sex education that teaches consent, and free
contraception to those who are sexually active. The falling rates of unwanted
pregnancies in this country (and I would argue in every country) are largely
attributed to the availability of contraception. Contraception is more
effective at preventing unwanted pregnancy than religious lectures and
moralizing, and it’s not even close. If what you care about is seeing the
number of abortions go down, that happens as effective contraception use
expands. That’s part of why the birth control mandate was included in the
Affordable Care Act. Among the many ways that mandate improves women’s lives,
it makes them less likely to ever need to seek out abortions.
The second solution, proposed by Gabrielle Blair on Twitter, is the compulsory
sterilization of men through reversible vasectomies. This approach sounds like
a joke, but the fact remains that it would prevent unwanted pregnancies with
far greater consistency than anything else women can do.
In this arrangement, the only pregnancies
that would happen with men in the United States are planned, wanted
pregnancies. When a man is in a committed relationship where he is emotionally
and financially prepared to provide for a child as a father, his wife or
partner could even provide him with written permission for the reversal of the
vasectomy, thereby indicating her consent to being impregnated. Since women have
had such a hard time seeking out sterilization for themselves from doctors who
won’t perform the procedure without permission from a male partner, even if the
woman is single or isn’t straight, this solution has a degree of poetic justice
to it. Let men take on the responsibility and burden of being taken seriously
and treated with respect in regards to their reproductive health for a change.
I can already hear the unironic outcry
that “This is America! You can’t force men to do that!” Why not? What’s good
for the goose should be good for the gander. Why should women be the only ones
subject to government mandated intervention with their genitalia? And people
who balk at this proposal act as if we’re not talking about the United States,
a country that has habitually and forcibly sterilized people whenever it has been convenient. In fact, our
current government is still engaged in forced sterilization under the tenure of
Republicans that Givens has likely voted for in his lifetime. If he wants to
direct his ire at individuals and groups who don’t respect the sanctity of
life, perhaps he should start with the Republican party.
The thing conservatives fail to
understand and retain in memory during this discussion is that progressives
ALSO envision a society where abortion is no longer necessary. We want all
sexual interactions to be consensual, with shared goals in whether or not those
interactions lead to pregnancy. We want families to have the financial
stability to care for the children they conceive, where no child lives in
poverty, food scarcity, or in want of education and opportunity in the future.
Progressives want the tax dollars we pay to be used on a social safety net that
protects everyone indiscriminately. We not only believe that women deserve
better than abortion, we’re fully committed to supporting women in all the life
challenges that would eventually make abortion obsolete. Until then, we’re
fully committed to leaving the choice to the women most affected by it,
respecting the decisions they make about their own bodies. We understand that
to outlaw abortion without dealing with any of the root causes for why it happens
is cowardly, and ultimately impossible.
If you’re Terryl Givens or someone who
agrees with him and none of this has convinced you to expand your worldview on
abortion and reproductive rights at all, can I just point out that we’ve
already tried life with illegal abortion, where contraception was taboo? IT
DIDN’T WORK! No amount of moralizing about abstinence from religious people has
ever made it work, and countless women have died as a result.
Women like Margaret Sanger have spent the
past century building infrastructure to care for women’s health, born out of
the suffering of women. Sanger’s motivation for founding the organizations that
later became Planned Parenthood was to help women like her own mother, whose
health was compromised from too many pregnancies and seven miscarriages. These
advancements have provided vulnerable women with comprehensive healthcare, not
just abortions. Those services have contributed directly to the reduction of
unwanted pregnancies and abortions for decades.
If men are going to contribute to women’s
health, it’s not going to come from dismantling the health care infrastructure
and legal protections women have spent the past century building for
themselves. It’s not going to come from removing access to healthcare and
reproductive freedom. It’s not going to happen by challenging in court women’s
legal status as fully autonomous individuals who are capable of making our own
medical decisions. If men like Givens care about women and want to help us so
much, care about us with the same empathy, intelligence, and rationality that
women show for each other. Come prepared to talk about real solutions in these
discussions, including ones that don’t directly benefit you. If you want to
give medical advice to women, become a doctor and give qualified medical advice
from an informed position, or just shut up already.
There’s also something to be said for how
historical illiteracy has shaped the way many conservatives view this issue.
Why don’t I support the religious right in their efforts to overturn Roe v.
Wade? Because I know, historically, the people who are treating women and
mothers as collateral damage in the war against abortion are the same ones who
support segregation and white supremacy. You get in bed with those folks at the
peril of your own soul.
I’m So Tired
The fact that I need to defend my
humanity publicly to a man in my own church, who claims to love and sustain
women in the family of Christ, leads me to challenge him to consider if he
knows the meaning of either of those words. And if Givens is going to teach
about abortion without the spirit of empathy or any legitimate understanding of
women’s health and our best interests, maybe he should follow the scriptural
injunction in D&C 42:14 and not say anything at all on the subject.
Thinking about the greatest exception I
took with Givens’ piece, I fully admit that it’s a cultural difference. As a
proud east coast native who was born and raised there, one of our hallmark
traits is minding our own business. You disagree with someone else’s life
choices? Incorporate that decision into your own convictions and behavior. In
no way is it necessary for you to express that disapproval to anyone else, or
to impose your values on anyone else’s behavior. Failure to abide by that would
get strings of expletives thrown at you, even from people who might agree with
you. Why? Because you broke the cardinal rule about minding your own damn
business. It’s an approach to life that has served me well and it applies in
this discussion, too.
You fundamentally disagree with abortion
because of your personal religious beliefs? Then don’t have one. Leave everyone
else in this country out of that decision.
That’s not hypocrisy. That’s not a
betrayal to Jesus. It’s the tolerance and love necessary for coexisting with
people who think and believe differently from us in a civil society. It’s the
example we receive from The Book of Mormon in Alma 30:7-8, which I believe is
the best recipe for civility in our day. If we want to live in a society of
equals, we can’t reintroduce the subjugation of women into our laws. And we
certainly shouldn’t be demonizing others within the Church for holding nuanced
viewpoints on controversial subjects. We don’t all need to agree with each
other on political issues to be good members of the Church.
Remember: if you’ve somehow magically resolved what is (and should be) a complex issue, you’re the one
oversimplifying or willfully misunderstanding it.
