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Abortion Regret Debates Frame Women as Incompetent, Fuel Loss of Bodily Autonomy [1]

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Date: 2023-04-14  

A 5th Circuit judge has issued a ruling that could ban or significantly limit access to the abortion pill cocktail. In his decision, Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk leaned heavily on discredited research claiming that women commonly regret abortion, and that abortion is linked to suicide, depression, and other serious mental health issues.

He chose to ignore a veritable avalanche of research showing the myriad ways abortion benefits women’s mental health, as well as data showing that access to abortion improves maternal mortality rates. Murder by abusive men is the leading cause of death during pregnant, and suicide is a leading cause of death in the postpartum period. Pregnancy, birth, and parenthood are, by every measure, more dangerous and more likely to undermine women’s mental health than abortion.

This is all beside the point, though, and these debates about abortion regret cater to right-wing narratives.

It’s true that it’s especially offensive to claim women often regret something when they rarely do.

But the truth is that women, like all humans, have a right to make decisions they regret. The very notion that we should protect women from their own bad decisionmaking, or that we should have to prove that women don’t typically regret their decisions, is paternalistic, born of the notion that people other than women know what’s best for them.

When we participate in debates about whether abortion regret is real, when we on the left feel obligated to prove that women don’t regret their abortions, we’re giving into the right-wing narrative. We’re letting them set the terms of the debate. If abortion regret is relevant to abortion’s legal status, then it also means that:

Random strangers may know what’s best for individual women. Because individual women can’t be trusted not to make stupid decisions.

Women’s bodily autonomy is contingent upon making good decisions. If women make bad decisions, we can and should take away their right to control their bodies.

We need scientific research to tell us that women deserve the right to make their own decisions.

Culturally, if we’re going to continue this offensive narrative, maybe it’s time to start talking about the decision women routinely regret, and the one that can have catastrophic implications for the rest of a woman’s life: marriage. In one survey, half of women said they regret getting married, and more than 70% had contemplated leaving their husbands. Unlike abortion, marriage really does cause declines in women’s health, especially when the marriage is bad.

Yet banning a choice women are more likely than not to regret feels oppressive even to conservatives when that choice is marriage.

That’s because this isn’t really about protecting women from their own bad decisions, however offensive that notion may be. It’s about cobbling together whatever framing works best to control women. That’s why arguing about whether women regret abortion cedes so much ground. Women don’t need men in power to protect them from their decisions.

While the abortion pill cocktail may soon be inaccessible, women need to know there’s another alternative. I wrote about it last month.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/14/2163912/-Abortion-Regret-Debates-Frame-Women-as-Incompetent-Fuel-Loss-of-Bodily-Autonomy

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