Life is Not a Fairy Tale Abortion is a Necessary Option
By Maddie Broder ’09
News Associate Editor
Over the holidays, I saw the movie Juno and found myself charmed by the heart-warming story of Juno MacGuff and Paulie Bleeker, high school students suddenly faced with the very real result of their fleeting passion. When Juno becomes pregnant with Paulie’s baby, she hastily chooses to have an abortion. After arriving at the clinic, however, Juno finds that she is unable to go through with the procedure and decides to carry the baby to term and give it up for adoption. She finds the “perfect family” to adopt her baby, and, after she delivers, she and Paulie fall in love all over again. While the movie was adorable and has won national recognition for its atypical humor, it still has a Hollywood ending. So Juno is “the cautionary whale” for nine months—what’s the big deal? She has a lot of support from her family, her baby is certain to have an amazing life, and she reunites with Paulie. Most teenage pregnancies are not the dreamy ride that Juno’s is. None of us can truly imagine the consequences of interrupting high school to carry and raise a child.
Women and girls are in a unique position of privilege: only they can bear children. Along with that privilege comes a huge responsibility, essentially to make sure that children come into the world only when they can be cared for. Abortion can provide a vital safety net for those women who, for any reason, cannot or do not want to fulfill those responsibilities.
To date, abortion has been used primarily by teenage girls, victims of sexual assault, and women living in poverty. According to the National Abortion Federation, one million teenage girls get pregnant every year. Of these million pregnancies, seven hundred and eighty thousand each year are unintended. And seventy percent of pregnancies in girls thirteen and younger are the result of sexual assault. Around thirty-five percent of all teenagers who get pregnant decide to have abortions.
Teenage pregnancies constitute only a small number of the abortions performed in the U. S. each year: there are close to one and a half million abortions in total. Just over eighty percent of women who decide to have abortions are not married. Almost ninety percent of abortions are performed during the first trimester of pregnancy, before the fetus has fully developed.
Many women decide to have abortions because they are rape victims, incest victims, or mentally or physically unfit to have a child. These reasons are self-evidently justified. But even if an abortion is performed for financial reasons, it should not be considered invalid, unjust, or a mere budget-dodge. Dismissing abortions as an unfair “cop-out” from financially supporting a child is simply ignorant. According to the Statistical Abstract of the U.S., it costs the average-income family twelve thousand dollars per year to raise a child from birth to seventeen years of age, excluding the cost of college and private education. For working class families this presents a challenge to the pocketbook. In an age where the cost of diapers is not even covered by food stamps, this financial burden is literally insurmountable for families already living in poverty.
With the teenage birth rate rising slowly but steadily, the government can encourage teenagers to use contraceptives, but should not punish girls alone for “their” mistakes by outlawing abortion. In an ideal world, the country would have the welfare and foster care systems to support all children. But even then, financially stable girls and women who face single parenthood for whatever reason still deserve the option of abortion.
As high school students, most of us are clearly not ready to take on the full-time responsibility of nurturing babies. Should children, or any humans, really be forced to have children? The answer, because of both the burden on the unprepared pregnant woman and the miserable life facing the hypothetical child, is no. But some of us thoughtlessly support policies that would force our peers to carry a baby unwillingly to term. Here we are in the twenty-first century: we can tinker with the biology of procreation in remarkable and life-improving ways, but we still hold women solely accountable for what is a joint act. As long as we, as a society, are giving women and girls the responsibility of pregnancy and childcare, we also have an obligation to give them a choice.
