On Monday, Nov. 13, an organization set up near Free Speech Plaza with signs reading “Exposing Planned Parenthood.” The signs supercharged me with emotions, because the night before I was panicking about something that worries me constantly: what if I get pregnant?
Nothing scares me more than pregnancy. My family would think less of me, I’d be sick for nine months, I’d struggle with my education, and finally, I would give birth. I would sacrifice my autonomy for an unwanted child in the prime of my life, or cast it into the loneliness of orphanhood. And as a woman in a relationship with a man, the spectre of pregnancy is always lurking around the corner.
To avoid all of this, I would have an abortion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m terrified of that too. I’ve read in depth about the processes and they all sound painful and traumatizing to me, but even then, less so than pregnancy. My choice at this point in my life is set in stone.
I read the trifolds of Exposing Planned Parenthood and saw that its most central scare tactic against PP was that they provide abortions. They didn’t need to scare me, I was already terrified. But out of a desire to know my enemy, I stayed to have a long, careful discussion with the first person who stepped out to welcome me.
Their facts were intentionally manipulative: on a graph of services offered by PP, they represented three of their least commonly performed services, and one service they referred to other clinics. This was meant to say, “Look, they perform abortions more than breast exams.” What they didn’t say was that they perform cancer screening and prevention more than twice as much as abortion, and STI testing and treatment over 12 times as much.
They told me PP shouldn’t say 3 percent of their services are abortions. Why? Because contraception is ranked as a service as well. “It’s misleading.”
When I told the spokesperson I felt that the government shouldn’t intervene in what I do with my own body, they responded for the third time, “Science tells us life begins at conception.”
The claim is something I’ve never understood, and scientists can’t decide on. We don’t call fertilized chicken eggs “chickens.” We call them eggs. If you took an embryo out of me and put it on a table, nobody would walk by and say, “Look at that baby!” So why is it a baby while it’s still developing into a baby? Yes, a zygote is a human cell, much like my skin cells, but it isn’t even an organism. So why is something that cannot think or feel more important than my education, my dignity, my health, and nine months of my life?
I don’t think it is. And even if someone else thinks it is, the law shouldn’t enforce that. My body is my dominion, my property and my temple. My decision is: I will create life if I choose.
Anna Foster
Mass Communication sophomore
