This article by Amanda Marcotte is from July 15, 2013, but it hasn’t gotten any less relevant or important:
While spouting a series of lies, Bill O’Reilly whined recently on Fox News that women in Texas are providing what he considers insufficient reasons for getting an abortion. The exchange between him and Fox’s official fake feminist Kirsten Powers went like this:
Powers shot back: “The current status quo in Texas that these people are fighting for, who are fighting the bill, is to be able to abort your baby up until the third trimester.”
“Yeah!” O’Reilly jabbed. “For any reason! Women’s health! ‘Hey! Look I sprained my hand!’”
“Yeah,” Powers said. “For any reason. For any reason. Yeah.”
To hear O’Reilly and Powers talk, one would think that in order to get a safe, legal abortion under the standards set out by Roe v Wade, one has to go in and provide a “reason” that you “deserve” this abortion, and some kind of authority figure determines if it’s good enough before you get an abortion—their only concern is that women are supposedly not giving good enough reasons. Obviously, these two pundits know better and are just being dishonest with the viewers, but that they are engaging in this rhetoric in the first place speaks to a serious problem in how abortion is discussed in this country.
***
The confusion between how ordinary people talk about abortion in terms of deserving-ness and how the law handles abortion, as a matter of rights, is why so much polling data on abortion is bunk. Gallup is notoriously bad on this front, showing that somehow half of Americans call themselves “pro-life” but a majority still want abortion to be legal. In other words, a lot of Americans call themselves “pro-life” but disagree with the “pro-life,” i.e. anti-choice movement about abortion access. I believe that speaks to a longing a lot of people have for women to be able to access abortion, but only if they provide a good reason for it. Of course, there’s no legal way to determine the difference between a good and a bad reason, to separate the “good girls” who just “made a mistake” from those deemed unrepentant sluts.
***
Unfortunately, I fear that pro-choicers may be making this problem worse by our rhetoric. Every time anti-choicers try to restrict abortion, we trot out women who’ve had abortions to put a face on the situation. It’s a good idea, but as Jessica Grose of XX Factor writes, the women in these stories almost always feel the need to justify their abortions, to explain that they are deserving—which in turn implies that others are not.
***
Because of this, I have to sign off on Grose’s suggestion: Tell your abortion stories, but don’t try to justify yourself! We need to get the message out that, as with every other medical intervention out there, pre-viability abortions don’t need to be earned. You don’t need to be a “good girl” who is full of remorse. The woman who slept with 30 guys and accidentally got pregnant because she foolishly took her chances without a condom deserves her abortion just as much as the loving mother of two who has discovered a fetal defect incompatible with life. We believe this to be true, and we can only start convincing the public that it’s true if we start talking about this belief more straightforwardly.
