Blog for Choice Day 2008

This is me and Ms PM getting ready to go to a pro-choice rally before "the hardest day," when Bush was re(retch)-elected.

"On the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we asked pro-choice bloggers to join us for Blog for Choice Day!
Blog for Choice Day provided us with an opportunity to raise the profile of reproductive rights in the blogosphere and the media, while celebrating Roe's 35th anniversary. Plus, it was a great way to let your readers and the mainstream media know that a woman's right to choose is a core progressive value that must be protected.
This year's topic: tell us, and your readers, why it's important to vote pro-choice".

Blog for choice day is past but I'm assured it is acceptable to post this late. This has always been an important topic to me. Being pro-choice is something that has always felt normal and natural to me. I consider myself pro-choice in the whole realm of women's reproductive health. This includes whether or not to continue a pregnancy, how to continue a pregnancy and plan for birth, having a full range of accessible birth control options and support around infertility treatment. I don't have a lot of stories to tell that would convince anyone to vote pro-choice. I just know in my heart that it is the right and moral thing to do.
My experience with access to abortion services has always been positive. I don't have a personal memory that extends far back enough to pre-RvW. Since college I have always lived in towns or regions where abortion services were available, safe and supported. A few years ago I did a half-day preceptorship with an older doctor at Family Planning. He told me about his first years in residency and how he remembered coming in to the hospital on Monday mornings and seeing the ward filled with women who had sought out "back-alley" abortions over the weekend and had come into the hospital with infection or hemorrhaging. This is something we do not want to go back to. Voting pro-choice is crucial because any limitations to access can put women in situations where they may try to seek out dangerous options. Forcing someone to raise an unwanted child can lead to a whole other batch of misery and suffering. And I cannot imagine the unmeasurable pain of being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term and giving the baby up for adoption. Nobody deserves that kind of torture. We should not have to keep fighting so hard for the right to choose. But we will.