Yesterday, I had a discussion with my sister that started out about abortion. She has always identified strongly as pro-abortion, while I used to identify as pro-life (with exceptions to save the health of the mother) and am increasingly shifting towards politically pro-choice. Personally, however, I remain strongly pro-life, so, even though I choose not to have children, abortion would not be an option for me should I ever accidentally become pregnant.
The reason I am becoming increasingly pro-choice is actually at the core of the remainder of this blog post. One of the main things that drove my opinion away from the pro-life movement – apart from radical nonsense coming from anti-abortion extremists -, was the 2010 Blog for Choice campaign, which had “Trust Women” as its motto. Trust women to make their on decisions regarding reproductive health. This, to be clear, does not merely involve the choice to undergo an abortion, but also the choice to take whatever birth control measures one wants, to carry to term or to parent children. Then, if we believe that women should be trusted to make their own choices regarding reproductive health, we must say that all women should be trusted to make these choices, if enabled to do so. This means that a disabled woman should not be assumed not to be able to make her own choices: if she lacks access to the necessary information to make an infomed choice, she should be enabled to access that information. That enabling can only happen if she is trusted to make an informed choice in the first place.
I cannot be certain whether my family did not or does not trust me, but the continuing discussion with my sister made me feel that at least in part, they may not. As I explained that I would not get an abortion and would prefer to look into adoption services if I became pregnant, my sister told me that she’d discussed the matter with our parents and she would be filing for custody if I had a child. “So please don’t get pregnant,” she added, given that she is a student and wouldn’t want to have a child now.
I am not aware of the exact context of the discussion(s) – my sister mentioned the mental hospitalization of a family member with children, who was facing custody problems, in 2007 and my relationship with my boyfriend, that started in 2008. I am also not aware of the exact reason my family felt the need to discuss their steps if I became pregnant. Neither am I aware of what exactly was discussed there, since obviously I wasn’t present. But that is exactly the point: my reproduction was discussed without me being involved, or without me even being aware. Without knowing whether or not I wanted to have children, and without knowing what measures I took or didn’t take to prevent becoming pregnant, my sister decided that she would be taking custody of my hypothetical child. She apparently didn’t even feel the need to inform me as she discussed the matter.
The problem is not that my sister might be taking custody of my hypothetical child. Even though disability, whether it is physical or mental, should never by definition prevent a person from choosing to have children, in my own case, I have decided that I am not fit to be a parent. As I said, I woud never undergo an abortion and would seek out adoption services, and, if my sister felt that she wanted to have my hypothetical child instead of an anonymous adoptive family, that would be fine with me. I, however, make the decision what happens to my body and my hypothetical child, unless that decision would endanger my child, in which case my family can go to court and indeed file for custody without my consent. But the presumption that I do not have the ability to make informed choices, is entirely false.
There were a number of false assumptions behind this discussion, all of which my sister and/or my parents could’ve asked me about when the subject came up, or which my sister could have asked me about yesterday. Rather than assuming I don’t take birth control because I’m pro-life (uh-huh, I never opposed contraception), or that I haven’t thought about what I would do should I ever accidentally become pregnant, isn’t it possible to just ask what I would want to happen if I became pregnant? We have enough time to discuss my and my family’s (and my boyfriend’s!) options, since I am not actually pregnant now. And even if I were pregnant, there would be enough time to discuss our options, too. There is no need to rush decisions or to presume I am unable to make my own choices just because I’m disabled, or institutionalized, or didn’t use to be on birth control (because I wasn’t sexually active, you know!), or because I for whatever reason am at risk of becoming pregnant and/or unfit to be a parent. Heck, whether I am even unfit to be a parent, isn’t up to you to decide – even if I endangered my child, it would be up to the court to decide so -, and you didn’t know we agree on this subject until I told you so. This signifies all the more that there is no reason to make even hypothetical decisions about me without me involved.
You sound eminently qualified to make all of your own decisions.
Good post, Astrid.
I’m sorry your family members didn’t see fit to listen to you, and talk with you, rather than talk among themselves in your absence, about what would happen if you became pregnant. It’s got to be pretty demoralizing to be ignored like that, by your family especially.
Also, your changing ideas about abortion are a lot like how mine evolved; I used to consider myself pro-life, probably because I was worried about eugenic abortions of fetuses likely to be born with disabilities, and also just because abortion *DOES* end a life, and that freaked me out. Of course, now I’m very much pro-choice. Lots of things contributed to changing my mind, and it happened pretty slowly, but one factor was definitely the need to trust women that you mention here. (Another major one was just me finding out how complicated pregnancy is, and how many things can go wrong during it — this actually might be a subset of the Trust Women thing, trusting a woman to know what’s happening in her own body, and to determine what an acceptable level of risk in pregnancy is).
[...] resides in a psychiatric hospital in the Netherlands, in which she said that her family had discussed behind her back what they would do if she got pregnant and decided that the sister would adopt the child. The [...]