Changing the Way Women Experience Abortion
Via Feministing, I see a great article  by Sara Robinson about the changing dynamics of abortion.Â
The gist of the article concerns the way in which medical termination of unwanted pregnancies (i.e. RU-486)Â is changing the way in which women receive and experience abortions, and is changing the locus of control over reproductive freedom - namely moving it into the privacy of a person’s home and away from the clinic setting.
My favorite passage:
As medical abortion becomes the norm, it would seem to leave that howling pitchfork-and-torch-bearing mob at the clinic door all dressed up for battle — with absolutely nowhere to go. Unfortunately (as we’ll see) that doesn’t necessarily mean that the battle will be over any time soon. But it does make staying with the current tactics a lot more complicated.
Assuming every woman who went through the doors at a Planned Parenthood clinic was there for an abortion was always the same flavor of stupid as assuming that that everyone who goes into Safeway must be buying beer. Even so: as RU-486 becomes The Way It’s Done, those women aren’t easy pickings any more. You can’t just hang out in front of the clinic on Tuesdays and Thursdays and assume everyone coming up the sidewalk is a slutty, bamboozled, innocent, callous-hearted baby-killing bitch who just doesn’t understand that it’s a baaayyybbeee, that she has Options, and how much Jesus loves her.
That era, as I said, is coming to an end. Increasingly, those women are bypassing the clinic entirely. Instead, they’re showing up for regular appointments, on all days of the week, at doctors’ offices all over town. Which makes it hard on the berzerkers: after all, there’s no legitimate way of knowing which doctors are in the abortion business now, or why any individual woman is seeing any given doctor on any given day. Our culture has strong, long-standing customs protecting discussions between doctors and patients; and as abortion increasingly slips behind that shady wall, that decision is finally ending up exactly where we’ve always argued it should be — as a private matter between a woman and her doctor.
Over the long haul, making early pregnancy termination a common piece of most doctors’ everyday medical practice will be the final step in normalizing abortion, removing its stigma, and ensuring that it will eventually be accepted as an unquestioned and relatively uncontroversial right.
Between effective emergency contraception and effective and readily available medical abortion, the entire dynamics of the debate over women’s reproductive freedom will change. I think we’ll see pathetic attempts at slut shaming that will in essence argue women must get permission from the sperm donor before using RU 486 otherwise how will these poor men know that some baby murdering slut is depriving them of the right to control her uterus? The weakness of the prolife movement has always been its failure to see women as moral agents in their own right rather than useful and decorative beings who need male oversight and should not really be trusted to make decisions.
I also believe the trend toward medical abortion is one of two, generally positive trends taking place in American culture with regard to reproductive habits. The second trend is toward the more consistent use of contraception. Together, these two social movements are moving us toward a more responsible, less emotionally fraught relationship with sexuality and reproduction.Â
