Feministe has a truly remarkable post by Molly Westerman in which she argues her pro-choice position was solidified by her pregnancies with her born children. It’s remarkable not for it’s argument but for the lengths Westerman takes her rhetoric.
I have been so lucky to avoid unwanted pregnancies and to have unambiguously healthy planned ones. I have felt two beloved fetuses moving inside my body.Who would describe their own children growing inside them as fetuses? Apparently they're so beloved they can’t be called “babies” or “children” until they’ve emerged from the womb?
My only thought is someone who is either very creepy or someone has seen prolife people point out the absurdity of how the rhetoric of abortion advocates changes when discussing wanted pregnancies and is trying to avoid using terms she likely used while she was pregnant.
I had no idea, before experiencing it myself, how whole-body and huge and permanently-changing pregnancy and birth are. I also had a less-direct understanding of the process of fetal development and what all that means as a physical and emotional reality for the person whose body creates and sustains that other/same body.So were your unborn children part of your body or another body? She’s trying to make a point about how a pregnant woman body sustains the unborn’s body and the toll that can take but then realizes that in order to make her point, she would have to honestly describe how the unborn have separate bodies and then for some reason calls attention to her troubles by writing “other/same.”
It’s just that I can’t wrap my heart around forcing anyone to stay pregnant, and I can’t wrap my head around the idea that a potential future person’s right to join the human community trumps an existing person’s right to bodily autonomy and self-determination.Not content with one word to indicate the unborn aren’t really persons, Westerman feels compelled to use both potential and future to describe the personhood of the unborn.
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