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“The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion”
(joycearthur.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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Now crying as I have met many medical people that don't act like that but it is good to read that. I needed to read that.
I don't cry every single time I read this, so just shut up okay
"I was born into a very Catholic family, and was politically pro-life during college. After dating my first real boyfriend for three years, we broke up, and the day my boyfriend moved out, I discovered I was pregnant. It was an agonizing decision, and something I never thought I would do, but I decided an abortion was the only realistic option. Thanks to Planned Parenthood counseling, I worked through some very tough conflicts within myself. I had to learn that my decision was a loving one. That ‘my god’ was actually a loving and supportive god. And that men don’t have to make this decision, only women do. That it is a very personal, individual decision. I had to own it. I became much more compassionate towards myself and others as a result of my experience. Two years later I began medical school. When it came time to choose a practice, an abortion clinic opportunity came up. In working there, I began to feel that this was my calling. Having been in my patients’ shoes, and coming from an unforgiving background, I could honestly say to patients, ‘I know how you feel.’ Deciding to have an abortion was THE hardest decision I’ve ever made in my life. Yet it has brought me the greatest transformation, fulfillment, and now joy. I am a more loving person because of it, and a better doctor for having experienced it. I love the work that I do, and the opportunity to support women seeking to end an unwanted pregnancy. My patients and my work are life’s gifts to me, and I think my compassion and support are my gifts in return.”
Why can't more people be like this woman?
Well, that seems to miss the point entirely right? Like if more people were exactly like this woman then they would still be just as anti as they are now. The only thing that made this woman be more compassionate was when it became a problem she dealt with herself.
Either you'd have to ask "why can't more people also deal with this problem personally?" or better yet
"Why can't more people be BETTER than this woman?"
This article is about how women deal with their own beliefs/morals/views against their own reality.
She did it as gracefully as she could within those parameters.
It would take you a year to find 10 people with the same ability to introspect and correct this type of behavior and conditioned thought, if you even found them.
If people changing their views to accept more people is not a win, why convince them or attempt to in the first place?
You dont each them so they can claim to be a "good person"
You teach them so they stop harrassing actual good people and stop teaching their children evil shit
If you have to be personally effected to realise something is bad, you are a piece of shit. Hands down. With that reasoning altruism simply wouldnt exist.
|You dont each them so they can claim to be a "good person"
You teach them so they stop harrassing actual good people and stop teaching their children evil shit
It's not about allowing them to claim it, it's about having experiences that teach you empathy. You aren't born with it and neither are they.
You have had experiences that have led you to having empathy about that subject before they did. But guess what, if that person is able to recognize their faults and go forward with empathizing with that thing, they're likely to apply that same thinking to other matters just like you did.
God forbid that people grow to change their views.
She escaped a mindset she was taught when she was young. I was taught to hate gay folks, abortions, etc. Typical Christian upbringing. Then all my best friends in high school were queer and I was like "so what else was I taught incorrectly?"
No one is born perfect. Glad she grew to change and now supports others in these tough situations.
It is good that she changed her belief, but if everyone was like her, we would need a lot more abortions to get people to change their mind.
Y'all are sticking onto abortion having to be the center of the behavior this woman exhibited. This same line of thinking could and should be applied to any other model of beliefs.
No. I'm sticking to requiring someone to have to experience something to have empathy for someone else.
Everyone has blindspots dude, that was hers. Empathy is a learned behavior.
I'm not gay or trans but I still care about those people and those issues without needing to be directly affected by them.
It IS good that she came around eventually but it is a far too common problem.
Agreed. That doesn't mean that it's not learned though, some people are in hateful social structures their whole lives and can't see an alternative until they do.
You and I just learned empathy earlier because our experiences led us down that path, just like this woman, only later on.
Another thing to point out, although it didn't take this exact extreme experience for us to have empathy for women and their choices, it did for her. Now it has changed how she empathizes with everything else in her life. We both had something or multiple somethings in our lives that lead us to the same behavior.
There are plenty of people that will live under hate their whole lives and never change. If no one is there to celebrate the wins and the work people put in to change when needed, what's the incentive when they're still told they're incorrect because they didn't do it at the same time we did? Humans are social, and despite everyone saying it, everyone cares what each other thinks. It's how we operate.
Agreed again, it's way too common. I feel like we were on a real good streak for awhile, then with the emergence of social media misinfo campaigns and the rise of the alt right, we just got kneecapped back into the 50s.
I'm just glad that after she realized she needed to change, she put in an extraordinary amount of effort to help others in the same situation that she was in. It's not like she only cares about things that affect her; she simply didn't realize she should care until she experienced it. Subtle difference, but it's reflected in her behavior after she realized her mistake.
But she did care. She states her herself. She actively opposed womens rights until it effected her.
Made an edit to my other comment on there and just wanted to make sure you saw it, I don't know if you get pinged for those or not
Nah, its all good. My debates tend to come off as combative myself, and I want to make it clear that while I do strongly disagree with her point of view, to the point of being genuinely angry, I dont want to seem that I was angry at you. I did notice you were extremely civil and I appreciate it.
I do see your point, and I can empathise(see what I did there?) with where you are coming from, but I do think that celebrating people who have changed their views for the better during their adult life is somewhat downplaying the harm that they have done. I view it in the same light as the US taking in nazi scientists after ww2 in exchange for clemency(I definitely recognise that the situations are not at all similar, but they both strike me as unjust). Or drug users who get clean later in life being celebrated while there are no celebrations for those who never got addicted in the first place.(That one is way different since they are generally only hurting themselves, and as such i dont really care what they do)
I suppose I view it as there being a baseline level of humanity, and reaching that baseline is nothing to be impressed by. Going beyond that baseline is. If we start to celebrate people simply moving towards that baseline, it effectively lowers the baseline on what a "decent" human should be.
I do not get pinged for edits, and I wasnt going to mention it bc it wasnt relevant, but just so you know to quote someone the command is > not [
Thanks, hopefully I'll remember that
This one is also different due to genetics, upbringing, environment, id say it probably doesn't have a spot in most of this discussion, but there's some overlap I can see.
Idk if impressed is the word id use for how I feel about it. But I would say it's commendable for sure, and something to have respect for. Especially with what humanity's baseline actually is vs. what we want it to be.
I don't think it takes away from the baseline, and I don't think it's downplaying the harm either. The harm is real, and it's hurtful, but this is still a win. It's definitely not a perfect win, but I think this may be a case of letting perfection get in the way of progress. This woman's actions are going to echo and hopefully help other people grow as well.
Children are sponges, adults are too, just less so. It sounds like you grew up absorbing empathy from whoever it was that you grew up with, or whatever you grew up with (books, media, etc.) these people absorbed hate, and for them it was celebrated and too often still is.
I think that this is a problem that cannot be solved by family or in some cases only introspecting without adding viewpoints of people that understand empathy. It's going to take community. That's what this woman was given on the worst day of her life, and it paid off. Unfortunately we can't know what happened before that, but you can probably take an accurate guess based on people you know that are deeply embedded in a lot of different Christianity sects.
The keyword you keep glossing over as if it means nothing is "did"
You, and I, and all of us also did this until we learned true empathy, and started applying it to other aspects of our lives and thoughts.
Edit: that first sentence up there was kind of combative, my bad
Were you born into a capitalist society? Did you have the opportunity to look around and see that there are haves and have nots? Did you ever read a book with the morals of the story being inequality? Have you ever heard of racism?
You dont get to be 8 years old in this world without taking a look around and realising everything is fucked. That should be all it takes. Holding those beliefs until you are an adult(which she presumably was) is disgusting. Being anti-abortion is means of control, there is no argument to the contrary. She never even attempted to justify her beliefs, she just wanted to hurt people until it was her being hurt.
|You dont get to be 8 years old in this world without taking a look around and realising everything is fucked. That should be all it takes.
I couldn't agree more, but that's not reality. A lot of people don't catch on that easily and are tied up in hateful social structures. In her story, she states that it was other people that empathized with her although she was so hateful and it forced her to change how she thought about that and other things in her life.
It's the same process you went through, just later, with different people, and a different perspective.
Yeah, she hurt people with her actions, and that does suck. But she grew from it. She doesn't need to justify past belief if she is correcting it. The very fact that it isn't justified is what led her to this decision.
She wouldnt have had to change her views if people like her didnt oppress others
Well yeah. But they do, so she did.
You know what? Thats fair.
This is true, but some people don't change even after dealing with the problem personally.
And that is exactly why I'm talking about this woman, she made a conscious decision to be better, and that is something to celebrate.
Yes!