Abortion and other lovely things to think about at night when you're trying to sleep

I blame a friend for the insomnia-induced contemplation of abortion rights. 

She helped me rediscover comic central, so I spent the entirety of my evening watching Jon Stewart verbally beat up O'Reilly and that alone was enough to get my adrenaline rushing. 

Anyway, I always used to be pro-choice, and I still am. Kind of. But, while I was trying to fall asleep, a weird thought occurred to me. Abortion isn't a tool for equality, it is a tool for sameness. In the process of aborting a baby to further your career, or to retain autonomy of your body, we are in essence conforming to a male-oriented society. Abortion likens that of a double-edged sword for women’s rights in that it creates a dead-end or cul-de-sac. Without the right to choose, women would be consequently confined to a gender role that possibly does not resonate with their own values or aspirations. Nonetheless, this also acts to overlook the greater issue of our patriarchal society: the lack of support for women as mothers within our society, and how it is constructed only to allow those that have qualities of a male to flourish. 


I still believe in the choice of abortion, of course. Denying the right for women to govern their own bodies at their own discretion places them into submissive roles in society, condemning them to second-class citizenship as mothers. Once a woman becomes a mother, due to certain hindrances presented by an arguably (SORRY THAT WAS JUST THERE TO SEEM IMPARTIAL I REALLY MEAN: DEFINITELY) patriarchal society, her opportunities become severely limited. The safe and legal access to abortion allows a woman to have the basic right of autonomy, something which is and has always been granted to men. It allows women to walk away from sexual activity with the same amount of responsibility as men. For this reason, abortion has the quality of making the properties of both genders more similar to each other. 

Or, the female gender more similar to the male gender. 

That in itself is a form of inequality.  In fact, I think that women’s equality is still based on standards set by men for men. “In order to be equal, women must adopt the characteristics of men.” To be on an equal level politically, socially and economically, women cannot become pregnant, because that is something that men do not do. To put it blatantly, though abortion liberates women in the short term, abortion liberates men and society in the long run.

I found a great quote from Germaine Greer; she encapsulates the feminist pro-life reaction to the legalization of abortion perfectly: "[With winning the right to abortion] What women 'won' was the 'right' to undergo invasive procedures in order to terminate unwanted pregnancies, unwanted not just by them but by their parents, their sexual partners, the governments who would not support mothers, the employers who would not employ mothers, the landlords who would not accept tenants with children, the schools that would not accept students with children. Historically the only thing pro-abortion agitation achieved was to make an illiberal establishment [patriarchal culture] look far more feminist than it was" 

While I fully support abortion rights and the freedom of choice it entails with a fiery passion, I also disagree with the fact that this is society's only answer to pregnant women in the workplace, government, etc. 

I don't know, maybe I'm just thinking too much into the issue.