Gail Helen Bremner

No Surprise There . . .

Posted on May 6th, 2006 by gail helen.
Categories: Relationships, Personal, Politics, Feminism, Current Events.

Unwanted Pregnancies Rise for Poor Women, Rate Drops for the Affluent: Marc Kaufman reports that a new study analyzing federal statistics indicates that “Poor women in America are increasingly likely to have unwanted pregnancies, whereas relatively affluent women are succeeding more and more in getting pregnant only when they want to . . . As a result of the growing disparity, women living in poverty are now almost four times more likely to become pregnant unintentionally than women of greater means, the study found.”

Listen well, girlies. Money is freedom, and choice is for the rich. Abstinence education is the worst joke the ridiculous right has played on this country. But don’t worry. Once you’re knocked up, you can undergo the physical discomfort of an abortion and the matching emotional baggage, or better yet, you can pray to your God that some ‘nice,’ straight, wealthy couple will adopt your baby and abuse it as their own. More likely, you will carry that baby for nine months, squeeze it out into this world, and love it in a way you will never, ever love anything else. Including any hopes of being all that you could be. All because you didn’t know or were too afraid/ashamed/asinine to take advantage of the fact that Planned Parenthood or another agency would hand over everything you need to be sexually safe (excluding common sense and self esteem, of course) with relatively few questions asked.

In the meantime, your more affluent sisters will be pursuing self-fulfillment through careers or service or experimental experiences, and maybe eventually finding their ideal partner and deciding “here’s the co-parent of my children, and s/he just happens to be a doctor!” Which is good, because when they say that we’re “getting preganant only when [we] want to,” they’re obviously not considering the women for whom pregnancy doesn’t come easily. Is infertility only a curse upon the wealthy? Or do we just think so much more about it because its yet another course on the buffet table of life that’s grown cold while we rushed about to gobble all the other things we were told we should be consuming?

Think about the meaning of choice. Choice is inherently sacrificial — you choose one thing and another is automatically removed from the table. Good luck directing the rage resulting from this slight of hand. Sure, you can have it all — career, passionate marriage, babies, self fulfillment, and good health. Just not with good sleep habits or all at the same time. Unless, of course, you have the money to invest in having others live your life for you. Kudos to the girls who manage to pull it all off, and make it look easy. Remind me to get the name of your therapist…

(Via Washington Post.)

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