It never seems to fail. Someone, somewhere, writes about abortion rights supportively, and someone in the comments section will trot out the ‘women are just doing it for convenience’ canard. In the strictest sense, I suppose that’s true in most cases. But lets look at what the term ‘convenience’ implies in this context.
It implies that struggling to put food on the table for yourself and your family is an ‘inconvenience’.
It implies that having to drop out of school for either financial or logistical reasons is as ‘inconvenience’
That nine months of pregnancy followed by childbirth is ‘inconvenient’.
Having you career thrown off course–‘inconvenient’.
Trying to keep your kids away from their abusive father, juggle childcare with work or school, manage health problems created or aggravated by pregnancy–all ‘inconvenient’.
The idea that abortion is done for reasons of convenience is very dismissive. Again, the reasons I outlined above could all be lumped into the category of ‘inconvenience’, but that makes them sound like much less than they are. They are life altering (and in a couple cases, life threatening) situations. Some pro-lifers like to suggest that ‘financial considerations’ means things like not taking a trip to Disney World, which itself shows a huge amount of class privilege. And none of this affect just the person who is pregnant but also anyone else in the household, especially other children. To boil it all down to an issue of ‘convenience’ greatly misses the point.
Equality sets us free 