On Abortion Exceptions: "Rape, Incest, Threat to Life"

Because there is a growing and increasingly vocal "pro-life" contingent in the Democratic Party (see: Congressman Bart Stupak and his BFF Senator Ben Nelson), we are hearing ever more frequently about the Triumvirate of Acceptable Abortion Exceptions: Rape, incest, and threat to the life of the pregnant woman.

(It used to be life or health, but then a bunch of straw-ladies got late-term straw-abortions after changing their silly little lady-minds about having straw-babies and made up straw-lies about "mental distress" to get them, so now wise "pro-life" proponents limit the exception only to women who risk death due to an identifiable physical complication of pregnancy, and none of this bullshit about fake things like mental health, snort, that only exist in the fevered daydreams of Oprah guests.)

So. The Exceptioneers are Very Concerned about exceptions for pregnancies as a result of rape or incest—always with the two separate and distinct categories, never connected with the more appropriate "and/or," but treated as mutually exclusive possibilities, which might give someone who didn't know better the impression that the Exceptioneers think a father impregnating his property daughter is only icky because of the potential chromosomal clusterfuck to our otherwise pristine gene pool (!)—and threat to the life of the pregnant woman. And they are very proud of their Highly Principled Concern, shouting these exceptions at anyone who listen, as evidence of their magnanimous compassion.

They must trust that no one of any consequence will ever examine their position too closely, lest it become side-splittingly evident that they are merely mendacious opportunists attempting to straddle a compromise between the pro-choice and anti-choice positions that doesn't exist, trying to pretend into being their imaginary Principled Moderate Middle Ground with rhetoric that's absolutely nothing more than a classier way of saying, "Suffer the consequences, slut."

Only if you were raped (and provably so, in one of those infallible courts of law that never favors rapists, lest you think you can claim to have been raped and just handed access to an abortion like you have autonomy over your own body or something), or became pregnant as the result of incest, or you will probably die if your pregnancy continues, should you be allowed to have access to abortion. But if you want an abortion for any other reason under the sun, well, fuck you, you should have kept your legs closed.

Leaving aside that "I don't want to be pregnant" is all the reason any woman should ever need, the Exceptioneers' position also excludes a multitude of things that are just as out of any woman's control as any of their precious exceptions: If you were raped but can't prove it, if you had a contraceptive failure, if you just lost your job, if you found out the fetus will die as soon as it's born, if you're pregnant by someone who became abusive, if you've been diagnosed with a non-life threatening illness, if your existing child has become ill, if your spouse has become ill, if your parent has become ill, if your psychiatric medication is incompatible with pregnancy, if you lost your health insurance, if…if…if any of these things, tough shit for you. Should have kept your legs closed if you weren't prepared to RAISE A CHILD IN ANY CONCEIVABLE CIRCUMSTANCE IN THE WORLD!!!

It would be genuinely hilarious that there are people who believe "Don't ever have sex unless you will be absolutely prepared to parent in whatever circumstances you find yourself nine months from now" is a reasonable position, if those people didn't have so much control over reproductive and health policy.

What's rage-inducing about the Exceptioneers is that they obviously haven't given any thought at all to the inconsistency of their position (or spoken seriously to anyone who might inform their opinions with some "facts") if they're willing to concede that being forced to carry to term a pregnancy created by rape can totally fuck you up, but don't understand how being forced to carry to term a pregnancy that you didn't plan and don't want can totally fuck you up, too.

How ridiculously incapable of self-reflection can one be that one is able to acknowledge that rape (forcing a woman to do something with her body she doesn't want to do) is a Terrible Thing, but the denial of abortion (forcing a woman to do something with her body she doesn't want to do) is a Moral Imperative?

I'm really hard-pressed to see why I should be any less contemptuous of a man who sits at a big mahogany desk in Washington making decisions about my body without my consent than I should be of a man who used physical force to make decisions about my body without my consent.

Undoubtedly the Exceptioneers would be outraged and horrified to be compared, even obliquely, to sexual predators.

As well they should be. I am horrified to have to make it. But anyone who holds the position that zie should be able to legislate away my bodily autonomy and supersede my consent about what happens to my body shouldn't be too goddamned surprised by the comparison.

Still. Nothing would please me more than to never again have to worry about someone else having control over what goes into or comes out of my vagina, to never again have to worry about someone who views forcing me into doing something with my body that I don't want to do as an acceptable consequence, as the "just desserts," for behaving in a way they deem irresponsible, or unattractive, or inappropriate for a woman to behave.

The ball's in your court, Exceptioneers.