adjustments

It continues to be quite a time to be alive, so I looked up “abortion stigma news” and found this interesting tidbit, which we will examine together below this picture of winter in Madison Square Park.

Jersey, if you didn’t know, is not part of the UK. (Maybe I thought it was.) It’s part of the Channel Islands, which are technically governed by the Crown, but also operate independently. So Jersey can kind of do what she wants. (Kind of.)

Currently, unless a pregnancy has a “severe fetal anomaly,” you can’t get an abortion after 12 weeks on Jersey. An abortion can happen at any point in pregnancy if it’s necessary to save the life of the pregnant person.

A new proposed law would push the limit on obtaining an abortion to 22 weeks, and would allow pregnant people, regardless of age, to refer themselves for abortion. There are a lot of other pieces to this proposed law, as well as the reality of being able to actually get an abortion on the island, and the language in this article about abortion isn’t great, but, for a moment, let’s focus on what is positive about it. Removing a barrier like referral is a huge step towards de-stigmatizing abortion; it trusts that the person seeking abortion is doing so because it is right for them, which is the only reason they need, and something a person at any age can know.

There is an expectation that a person must be able to articulate, to everyone else’s satisfaction, their reason for choosing abortion. People who can get pregnant have internalized this (so, by the way, have people who choose not to have children - it’s difficult to say, “Because I don’t want to,” and move on).

We don’t all live in a reality, at least not in the US, in which people can get abortions without having a reason others deem acceptable, but what if we behaved like we did? What if our conversations around abortion didn’t involve justification? This isn’t a policy suggestion, but a way to conduct ourselves in our daily lives, with the goal of normalizing abortion. Talk about abortion without qualifying it, without offering reasons why it should be “allowed.” Drop the defensive posture, and see what happens next.

Action item: Have a conversation about abortion in which you don’t justify why it should be accessible/legal, etc. (You can also write or talk to yourself about it.) What words would you exclude? How does it feel to have the conversation or imagine having it?

Next week: Abortion because you want to be pregnant.