{"id":2481,"date":"2015-08-03T08:20:21","date_gmt":"2015-08-03T14:20:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=2481"},"modified":"2016-01-22T08:11:15","modified_gmt":"2016-01-22T14:11:15","slug":"unplannedparenthood-and-a-chicken-and-egg-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/08\/unplannedparenthood-and-a-chicken-and-egg-question.html","title":{"rendered":"#UnplannedParenthood and a chicken-and-egg question"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Which came first: \u00a0the chicken or the egg? \u00a0(Apparently, the egg, insofar as we\u2019ve learned that dinosaurs laid eggs which, bit-by-bit, became chickens. \u00a0But that\u2019s beside the point.)<\/p>\n

Which came first: \u00a0attitudes about unplanned pregnancy, or opinions on abortion?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been a Twitter hashtag that the pro-life community has been trying to promote: \u00a0#UnplannedParenthood \u2014 trying to push back on the idea that an unexpected pregnancy is a disaster for any woman in that situation.<\/p>\n

The Atlantic isn\u2019t pleased; they\u2019ve titled their article on the subject, \u201cThe Bizarre Celebration of \u2018Unplanned Parenthood\u2019<\/a>\u201d and have this to say:<\/p>\n

. . . the movement becomes disastrously illogical.<\/p>\n

First, there is a big difference between an unplanned pregnancy and an unwanted one\u2014and an even bigger gulf between a baby you actively choose to have and one you\u2019re forced to carry because abortion is illegal.<\/p>\n

Twitter hashtags aren\u2019t exactly doctoral dissertations. Still, it\u2019s odd how this one seems to celebrate unplanned pregnancy. Let\u2019s recall that women have been desperate for effective birth control for centuries. During the Great Depression, women who wanted to avoid having babies they couldn\u2019t afford used \u201cdisinfectant douches\u201d that burned their genitals and didn\u2019t do much to stop conception. The invention of the pill is partly credited with helping women expand their earning potential and achieve greater gender equality.<\/p>\n

Today, reducing unexpected pregnancies is widely considered to be a major public-health imperative. The work of Isabel Sawhill and others has shown that high rates of unplanned births, particularly among poor and unwed mothers, contribute to poverty. When women are offered long-acting reversible contraceptives, like IUDs and implants, they overwhelmingly choose to get them inserted\u2014and both unplanned births and abortions decrease as a result.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, they\u2019re accusing women posting under this hashtag of having trivial experiences of inconvenience, and failing to understand that women who get abortions had real hardships that pro-life women couldn\u2019t possibly understand.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, consider this post, from another Patheos writer, Calah Alexander, \u201cAll Parenthood is #UnplannedParenthood<\/a>.\u201d \u00a0Some readers may think she\u2019s a fool for being pregnant for the 5th time, and relying on NFP rather than an implant or putting the whole baby-making business to an end by getting her tubes tied, but read what she says:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve kept going through four unplanned pregnancies. The first one happened when I was unwed and addicted to meth. The second and third happened in Vegas, when we were on welfare and thousands of miles from family. The fourth happened here in Florida, and brought crippling PPD in its wake. None of this was my plan for my life, and it sure wasn\u2019t the Ogre\u2019s plan for his. But all these unplanned pregnancies have filled our lives with crazy amounts of joy, too. Joy we could never have planned for ourselves. Yes, there\u2019s also sadness, stress, fear, and frustration, but wouldn\u2019t we have had those in spades anyway? At least this way, we have four little allies to cheer us up with their ridiculous antics, bizarre humor, snotty kisses, and unconditional love.<\/p>\n

No one plans to spend their lives constantly working and still struggling to make ends meet, but most of us do that anyway. No one plans for unemployment, chronic illness, cancer, dementia, or death, but everyone faces them sooner or later. Even when our children come according to our plan, we can\u2019t plan for autism, autoimmune diseases, asthma, or any of the zillion other things parents face every day. We can\u2019t plan for how and when our children will experience bullying or heartbreak, nor can we protect them from it. Even our best-laid plans for parenthood usually get wrecked by something, and often by our kids themselves. That\u2019s the thing about parenthood \u2014 the way it turns out is always unplanned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, no, women who have unplanned pregnancies but ultimately choose to carry them to term are not, as The Atlantic would have us believe, distinguished from women who get abortions, by simply not facing as many hardships. \u00a0They simply believe that they don\u2019t have the right, morally, to destroy the new life growing within them.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s my chicken-and-egg question:<\/p>\n

The pro-abortion lobby likes to claim that prolife people are really just anti-sex, and want to restrict abortion as a way of forcing people to refrain from having sex. \u00a0This is preposterous and exactly backward \u2014 because it is true that, when you are prolife, it requires that you take sex more seriously.<\/p>\n

But what about perspective of the pro-abortion\/prochoice crowd? \u00a0From everything I\u2019ve read, they don\u2019t make the decision that the unborn child is a nonperson, a la Peter Singer, and move on to sexual ethics from there. \u00a0Instead, they start with the stipulation that people must be able to have sex without consequences, and reason from there to determine that, consequently, abortion must be permitted, and if abortion must be permitted, than the unborn child must be able to be killed, and a being that \u201ccan be killed\u201d is a nonperson.<\/p>\n

And that causes me to wonder:<\/p>\n

is it just \u201csex without consequences\u201d? \u00a0Once one adopts the attitude that moral decisionmaking should be made to conform with a higher goal of not suffering from an unplanned pregnancy, how does that impact the degree to which you\u2019re able to handle all the other unplanned things that happen in life? \u00a0All the things that can go wrong with children. \u00a0A spouse\/partner or family member who doesn\u2019t behave as you\u2019d like. \u00a0A job loss, or another sort of financial crisis?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Which came first: \u00a0the chicken or the egg? \u00a0(Apparently, the egg, insofar as we\u2019ve learned that dinosaurs laid eggs which, bit-by-bit, became chickens. \u00a0But that\u2019s beside the point.) Which came first: \u00a0attitudes about unplanned pregnancy, or opinions on abortion? There\u2019s been a Twitter hashtag that the pro-life community has been trying to promote: \u00a0#UnplannedParenthood \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[198],"class_list":["post-2481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abortion"],"yoast_head":"\n#UnplannedParenthood and a chicken-and-egg question<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Which came first: \u00a0the chicken or the egg? \u00a0(Apparently, the egg, insofar as we've learned that dinosaurs laid eggs which, bit-by-bit, became chickens.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/08\/unplannedparenthood-and-a-chicken-and-egg-question.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"#UnplannedParenthood and a chicken-and-egg question\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Which came first: \u00a0the chicken or the egg? 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