Why I am Pro-Abortion, not Just Pro-Choice

I believe that abortion care is a positive social good — and I think it’s time people said so.

By Valerie Tarico | 26 April 2015

A still from "Trapped". (Credit: Trilogy Films)
A still from “Trapped”. (Credit: Trilogy Films)

Not long ago, the Daily Kos published an article titled, I Am Pro-Choice, Not Pro-Abortion. “Has anyone ever truly been pro-abortion?” one commenter asked.

Uh. Yes. Me. That would be me.

I am pro-abortion like I’m pro-knee-replacement and pro-chemotherapy and pro-cataract surgery. As the last protection against ill-conceived childbearing when all else fails, abortion is part of a set of tools that help women and men to form the families of their choosing. I believe that abortion care is a positive social good. And I suspect that a lot of other people secretly believe the same thing. And I think it’s time we said so.

Note: As an aside, I’m also pro-choice. Choice is about who gets to make the decision. The question of whether and when we bring a new life into the world is, to my mind, one of the most important decisions a person can make. It is too big a decision for us to make for each other, and especially for perfect strangers.

But independent of who owns the decision, I’m pro on the procedure, and I’ve decided that it’s time, for once and for all, to count it out on my ten fingers.

1. I’m pro-abortion because being able to delay and limit childbearing is fundamental to female empowerment and equality.

A woman who lacks the means to manage her fertility lacks the means to manage her life. Any plans, dreams, aspirations, responsibilities or commitments—no matter how important—have a great big contingency clause built: “until or unless I get pregnant, in which case all bets are off.” Think of any professional woman you know. She wouldn’t be in that role if she hadn’t been able to time and limit her childbearing. Think of any girl you know who imagines becoming a professional woman. She won’t get there unless she has effective, reliable means to manage her fertility. In generations past, nursing care was provided by nuns and teachers were spinsters, because avoiding sexual intimacy was the only way women could avoid unpredictable childbearing and so be freed up to serve their communities in other capacities. But if you think that abstinence should be our model for modern fertility management, consider the little graves that get found every so often under old nunneries and Catholic homes for unwed mothers.

2. I’m pro-abortion because well-timed pregnancies give children a healthier start in life.

We now have ample evidence that babies do best when women are able to space their pregnancies and get both pre-natal and pre-conception care. The specific nutrients we ingest in the weeks before we get pregnant can have a lifelong effect on the wellbeing of our offspring. Rapid repeat pregnancies increase the risk of low birthweight babies and other complications. Wanted babies are more likely to get their toes kissed, to be welcomed into families that are financially and emotionally ready to receive them, to get preventive medical care during childhood and the kinds of loving engagement that helps young brains to develop.

3. I’m pro-abortion because I take motherhood seriously.

Most female bodies can incubate a baby; and thanks to antibiotics, cesareans and anti-hemorrhage drugs, most of us are able to survive pushing a baby out into the world. But parenting is a lot of work; and doing it well takes twenty dedicated years of focus, attention, patience, persistence, social support, mental health, money, and a whole lot more. This is the biggest, most life-transforming thing most of us will ever do. The idea that women should simply go with it when they find themselves pregnant after a one-night-stand, or a rape, or a broken condom COMPLETELY TRIVIALIZES MOTHERHOOD.

4. I’m pro-abortion because intentional childbearing helps couples, families and communities to get out of poverty.

Decades of research in countries ranging from the U.S. to Bangladesh show that reproductive policy is economic policy. It is no coincidence that the American middle class rose along with the ability of couples to plan their families, starting at the beginning of the last century. Having two or three kids instead of eight or ten was critical to prospering in the modern industrial economy. Early unsought childbearing nukes economic opportunity and contributes to multi-generational poverty. Today in the U.S., unsought pregnancy and childbearing is declining for everyone but the poorest families and communities, contributing to what some call a growing “caste system” in America. Strong, determined girls and women sometimes beat the odds, but their stories inspire us precisely because they are the exception to the rule. Justice dictates that the full range of fertility management tools including the best state-of-the-art contraceptive technologies and, when that fails, abortion care be equally available to all, not just a privileged few.

5. I’m pro-abortion because reproduction is a highly imperfect process.

Genetic recombination is a complicated progression with flaws and false starts at every step along the way. To compensate, in every known species including humans, reproduction operates as a big funnel. Many more eggs and sperm are produced than will ever meet; more combine into embryos than will ever implant; more implant than will grow into babies; and more babies are born than will grow up to have babies of their own. This systematic culling makes God or nature the world’s biggest abortion provider: Nature’s way of producing healthy kids essentially requires every woman to have an abortion mill built into her own body. In humans, an estimated 60-80 percent of fertilized eggs self-destruct before becoming babies, which is why the people who kill the most embryos are those like the Duggars who try to maximize their number of pregnancies. But the weeding-out process is also highly imperfect. Sometimes perfectly viable combinations boot themselves out; sometimes horrible defects slip through. A woman’s body may be less fertile when she is stressed or ill or malnourished, but as pictures of skeletal moms and babies show, some women conceive even under devastating circumstances. Like any other medical procedure, therapeutic contraception and abortion complement natural processes designed to help us survive and thrive.

6. I’m pro-abortion because I think morality is about the well-being of sentient beings.

I believe that morality is about the lived experience of sentient beings—beings who can feel pleasure and pain, preference and intention, who at their most complex can live in relation to other beings, love and be loved and value their own existence. What are they capable of wanting? What are they capable of feeling? These are the questions my husband and I explored with our kids when they were figuring out their responsibility to their chickens and guinea pigs. It was a lesson that turned expensive, when the girls stopped drinking milk from cows that didn’t get to see the light of day or eat grass, but it’s not one I regret. Do unto others as they want you to do unto them. It’s called the Platinum Rule. In this moral universe, real people count more than potential people, hypothetical people or corporate people.

7. I’m pro-abortion because contraceptives are imperfect, and people are too.

The Pill is 1960’s technology, now half a century old. For decades, women were told the Pill was 99 percent effective, and they blamed themselves when they got pregnant anyways. But that 99 percent is a “perfect use” statistics, and in the real world, where most of us live, people aren’t perfect. In the real world, 1 in 11 women relying on the Pill gets pregnant each year. For a couple relying on condoms, that’s 1 in 6. Young and poor women—those whose lives are least predictable and most vulnerable to being thrown off course—are also those who have the most difficulty taking pills consistently. Pill technology most fails those who need it most, which makes abortion access a matter not only of compassion but of justice. State-of-the-art IUDs and Implants radically change this equation, largely because they take human error out of the picture for years on end, or until a woman wants a baby. And despite the deliberate misinformation being spread by opponents, these methods are genuine contraceptives, not abortifacients. Depending on the method chosen, they disable sperm or block their path, or prevent an egg from being released. Once settled into place, an IUD or implant drops the annual pregnancy rate below 1 in 500. And guess what. Teen pregnancies and abortions plummet—which makes me happy, because even though I’m pro-abortion, I’d love the need for abortion to go away. Why mitigate harm when you can prevent it?

8. I’m pro-abortion because I believe in mercy, grace, compassion, and the power of fresh starts.

Many years ago, my friend Chip was driving his family on vacation when his kids started squabbling. His wife Marla undid her seatbelt to help them, and as Chip looked over at her their top-heavy minivan veered onto the shoulder and then rolled, and Marla died. Sometimes people make mistakes or have accidents that they pay for the rest of their lives. But I myself have swerved onto the shoulder and simply swerved back. The price we pay for a lapse in attention or judgment, or an accident of any kind isn’t proportional to the error we made. Who among us hasn’t had unprotected sex when the time or situation or partnership wasn’t quite right for bringing a new life into the world? Most of the time we get lucky; sometimes we don’t. And in those situations we rely on the mercy, compassion, and generosity of others. In this regard, an unsought pregnancy is like any other accident. I can walk today only because surgeons reassembled my lower leg after it was crushed between the front of a car and a bicycle frame when I was a teen. And I can walk today (and run and jump) because another team of surgeons re-assembled my knee-joint after I fell off a ladder. And I can walk today (and bicycle with my family) because a third team of surgeons repaired my other knee after I pulled a whirring brush mower onto myself, cutting clear through bone. Three accidents, all my own doing, and three knee surgeries. Some women have three abortions.

9. I’m pro-abortion because the future is always in motion, and we have the power and responsibility to shape it well.

As a college student, I read a Ray Bradbury story about a man who travels back into prehistory on a “time safari.” The tourists have been coached about the importance of not disturbing anything lest they change the flow of history. When they return to the present, they realize that the outcome of an election has changed, and they discover that the protagonist who had gone off the trail, has a crushed butterfly on the bottom of his shoe. In baby making, as in Bradbury’s story, the future is always in motion, and every little thing we do has consequences we have no way to predict. Any small change means a different child comes into the world. Which nights your mother had headaches, the sexual position of your parents when they conceived you, whether or not your mother rolled over in bed afterwards—if any of these things had been different, someone else would be here instead of you. Every day, men and women make small choices and potential people wink into and out of existence. We move, and our movements ripple through time in ways that are incomprehensible, and we can never know what the alternate futures might have been. But some things we can know or predict, at least at the level of probability, and I think this knowledge provides a basis for guiding wise reproductive decisions. My friend Judy says that parenting begins before conception. I agree. How and when, we choose to carry forward a new life can stack the odds in favor of our children or against them, and to me that is a sacred trust.

10. I’m pro-abortion because I love my daughter.

I first wrote the story of my own abortion when Dr. Tiller was murdered and I couldn’t bear the thought of abortion providers standing in the crosshairs alone. “My Abortion Baby” was about my daughter, Brynn, who exists only because a kind doctor like George Tiller gave me and my husband the gift of a fresh start when we learned that our wanted pregnancy was unhealthy. Brynn literally embodies the ever changing flow of the future, because she could not exist in an alternate universe in which I would have carried that first pregnancy to term. She was conceived while I would still have been pregnant with a child we had begun to imagine, but who never came to be. My husband and I felt very clear that carrying forward that pregnancy would have been a violation of our values, and neither of us ever second guessed our decision. Even so, I grieved. Even when I got pregnant again a few months later, I remember feeling petulant and thinking, I want that baby, not this one. And then Brynn came out into the world and I looked into her eyes, and I fell in love and never looked back.

Reprinted with permission from the author.


Valerie Tarico: Recovering From Religion

“Whose Choice?” A Pro-Abortion Film

“Trapped”: New Film Follows the Providers Who Are Fighting to Keep Abortion Accessible in the South

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  1. Very well written, and presents many arguments I had never thought about. I wish I had the nerve to display it on my Facebook page in this deeply conservative and gun loving small town. I don't have any hope of changing people's minds around here, and I don't want to invite trouble. But I did share the article with a few carefully chosen friends. (And I hate that I am such a coward. Change won't happen until people have the courage to act.)

      • That's untrue–many of us who are well informed realize just how stupid and dangerous mass gun ownership is in a society that is not primarily devoted to agriculture and hunting and which has viable police forces. Logic suggests that gun-loving people are the irrational ones, and their love of guns is more due to a belief in the idea that ultimately they will be able to win an argument with a barrage of bullets instead of a well-constructed argument.


  3. Every one of your reasons focus on superficial and self-focused reasons for killing an unborn child. None deal with why an unborn child should suffer capital punishment for the sake of someone else’s convenience. The selfishness exemplified in this reasoning is appalling.

  4. This is one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read. Not only do you show utter selfishness but a truly inhumane aspect. Why is any life less important than another? It is illegal to commit murder even if you do value the other persons life less than your own. You cannot go out and shoot someone because you want to. Babies should not suffer because of your poor judgement, they can feel and they do suffer. The only choice you truly have in the matter is whether or not to have sex. After a baby is developing it is no longer your choice to kill another human being.

  5. using this woman’s argument – we can take the next step – that is, if the child is not aborted, then killing it once it is born must be alright too. Or, if the parents become unemployed and can not afford day care, kill the children, or if they want to improve their position in life and need training or take a position that the child is an imposition – kill the child. You get the idea, any situation where a child is a burden, killing must be using her argument justified. You can find any justification for murdering a life, and at any stage, there is no MORALITY involved. It is the same immorality that allows socialists to take hard earned possessions away for the sake of their government. It is the same immorality that allows killing, robbery, mugging etc etc, because of “entitlement” issues. GET A LIFE – the choice was made when you needed to have an intimate relationship without responsibility. It is why good parents don’t want their children involved in sex till they understand “responsibility”. Seems the world is full of people who want trophies without winning anything, or doing something without being held responsible. The Daily Kos is a blog that rarely provides facts and data to substantiate their claims.

  6. #11. I'm pro-abortion because I care more about preserving my own life than the possibility of destroying another's.

  7. It's amazing how easily EVIL can be rationalized if you're selfish enough. I see that Jews and atheists condone abortion. Fair enough–their souls (even if they don't believe they have one) at stake, not mine. But if you profess to be a Christian, there is no way you can approve–if you do, you are an apostate and in danger of damnation. The test for the truth of that is simple: imagine Jesus going to a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic and watching the "procedure." What do you honest;ly think would be his reaction?
    So if you approve of abortion and are still a "professed" Christian and regularly go to church and embrace and take part in the sacraments–communion for instance–you are not only apostate no matter what you personally may think, but you are guilty of what the Bible describes as the only unforgivable sin–mocking the holy spirit.
    No matter what a few renegade clergy may aver, and however silent your church may be on the matter from the pulpit, unrepentant support of abortion is incompatible with Christianity. You must give up either your faith or your conviction that abortion is moral and acceptable. There is no other option. To be in a state of grace, you cannot be a Christian and support the practice of abortion..

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