Considering the Pills

I have to go old school on this female-bodily autonomy piece, just to get to my point--we know that access to reproductive choice can influence not just quality of life but long-term health. It makes sense for female-bodied people to have access to a wide range of options that mean preventing conceptions and even considering termination of pregnancy (but also, most certainly can include, optimal pre-natal care for wanted children). Family planning is not solely about abortion services, but it can and should include those as an option. So I guess that's why I want to talk about a difference that isn't really one to go to war about--but is a discussion we need to have.

I've been a little cold on Buttigieg regarding his kind of centrist views, and how he's a friend of Faceberg and the whole McKinsey thing. But I will say I'm taking his point regarding "unintended consequences" for expansion of medical abortion--because I really take what he's saying to heart. In red states, they are just looking for ways to screw people up for seeking reproductive choices. Local laws can certainly be put into place that criminalize certain abortions, so this can also happen for seeking out medical intervention and acquiring them, or the laws that shield people who put roadblocks in the way of people who seek birth control can be expanded to include medical abortion.  Courts take time, and yet, fertility has its own schedule.



Basically, I think what Buttigieg is saying here is that a "boots and suspenders" legal approach has to be taken to ensure that if female-bodied people have access to over the counter medical abortion, it can't be legally turned against these people to treat them as murderers, because in a world where lawmakers can try to pass a law to force doctors to try and fix ectopic pregnancies or face the penalty of "abortion murder", you can imagine much misinformation and fuckery surely pertain. This is still a society, after all, where despite great failure, people try and pretend abortion reversal could be a thing.

I think the intervention of medical abortion has already been strongly determined to be medically safe, and the logical corrective if it is not foolproof should be that female-bodied persons have more access to surgical abortion as an alternative, at an accessible site that has a functional local hospital as a backstop. Because if your community isn't set up to accommodate pregnancy at all stages (including ectopic, miscarriages, and high-risk births that might include high blood pressure, high blood sugar, clots, etc.) what are you even for? Because lack of resources is a recipe for babies who might not survive and high maternal mortality. That reality isn't pro-life--it's just stingy.

But so-called pro-life people are dead-set against that kind of protective infrastructure for human fertility, if it even allows some chance at fetal terminations. I get that Buttigieg' s red state view is trying to express the real and ever-present anti-abortion contortions that local legislatures will attempt--it isn't that Mayor Pete doesn't know the situation with current FDA approval of mifepristone and all that, but he gets that people will be punished for acting on their personal ideas of bodily autonomy unless their validity to act is foolproof/considered constitutionally valid. Because he is from a state where a recent governor tried to enact a law where local businesses could deny himself and his spouse from doing business with them on legal grounds.

I see where some people want to say he got this wrong, but I have seen how state laws screw with individual rights, and think a cautious approach to how to not just temporarily have rights happen for a given time, but perpetually safeguard them, makes sense.

I think medical abortion is safe in most cases--but I want medical infrastructure that protects people who might have complications too--and I want someone who thinks in terms of problems not necessarily optimistically to address that. Give me a pragmatist who sometimes harshes the picture I want to see. I will look and listen to their POV.