Pride & Opinions

Last night, I was talking with my sister about health care and such - she goes to law school with a scholarship, and has little to no money, which means that figuring out health care is a gigantic pain. She gets dental care through her girlfriend, but the premiums on the health insurance proper are too high to be anywhere near feasible. We were talking about her need for a physical but lack of desire to pay for one out of pocket, and I mentioned that she might want to go to the local community/women’s clinic and get at least the ob/gyn part of the physical part done on a sliding scale, and ask if they had an opinion on where one might get a low-cost cholesterol test. Going to those kinds of places was a staple for me in college and just beyond, because, like a lot of health places, you have to have a gynecological visit every year in order to continue receiving birth control, and places like Family Tree are the cheapest place to do it when you don’t have money or health insurance.

But my sister? Hadn’t thought of this option. Because she doesn’t need to take birth control pills. DUH.

This conversation reminded me of a long-standing thought I have about the relationship between GLBT communities and reproductive rights communities, which is the way that traditional discussions of feminism and abortion politics are sort of necessarily heterosexist, insofar as they assume a biological role of reproduction that doesn’t happen if you’re not having heterosexual sex. The first Pro-Choice carnival, for example, while featuring a collection of excellent posts on abortion and politics and feminism, doesn’t contain anything explicitly about non-heterosexual folks and their relationships to abortion.

But then I think about abortion, and about how popular imagination constructs it as an aberration brought on by irresponsibility on the part of women, rather than a medical fact more often initiated by women in monogamous relationships, or for medical reasons. Throughout my current pregnancy, we have been faced with tests and information, all of which, if particularly horrible, might necessitate termination. For a wanted, planned pregnancy. The facts and necessity of abortion do not lie in their necessity for just unplanned pregnancies, but to deal with the fact that all pregnancies don’t go the way we might like, and even a lesbian couple with a planned pregnancy might be forced by medical circumstance to do something they might wish desperately to avoid.

Luckily, as Jill at Feministe puts it in a post about anti-choice bloggers ‘not getting it,’ reproductive rights aren’t just about the termination of pregnancy, which is what I should have figured out above:

All of this should make one thing clear: Infringements on reproductive freedom are not just about abortion. Reproductive freedom is about the right to be pregnant as much as the right to not be. This is what Jill Stanek and other anti-choicers overlook or outright ignore — Stanek goes so far as to say that forced sterilization “was long ago outlawed and has nothing to do with abortion.� I would argue that forced sterilization has everything to do with abortion, as it’s impossible to separate abortion rights from other rights to sexual autonomy.

Just because people have different relationships to abortion and birth and pregnancy and reproduction in their lives doesn’t mean that we can’t all stand in solidarity with each other about all of them. After all, intrusion into one area certainly justifies intrusion into others, and my stance that pregnancy and parenthood ought to be a choice, freely and non-coercively entered, extends to all people. This stance, I think, is much more likely to offer the possibility for expanded rights than alternate ones.

GLBT, GLBT and feminism, reproductive rights, abortion

GLBT, GLBT and feminism, reproductive rights, abortion