I'd like to hear suggestions, too. It stunned me to find out that my sister was pro-life (it just doesn't seem to fit with her other beliefs), and that was a few years ago. Absolutely blew my mind to discover my mom is pro-choice (albeit it, probably for classist and racist reasons). I won't bring up the topic willingly with my sister again, but it raises its head from time to time and is always awkward to deal with. :\

I have two approaches.

For people I know well, I tell the story of my pregnant wife passing out in the shower, and of our terrifying few hours in the hospital waiting to find out if she and the baby were both okay (I know, it's a fetus technically, but when you're joyfully expecting, things get blurry). And I tell them that the one thing I never ever thought was, "Boy, I sure wish the government was involved in this!"

The second approach is to ask if they think the government should have the right to force someone to donate a kidney if they're a good match with someone who needs a kidney and will die without a transplant. And then point out that it's about as safe to donate a kidney as it is to deliver a baby, with fewer long-term complications.

Because most pro-life people are conservatives, it is often rather jarring for them to realize that they are advocating an enormous intrusion of the government into people's personal lives.

My older sister got pregnant about 2 years ago. I was the second person she decided to tell about it, the first being her boyfriend that got her pregnant. We are very close and my opinions about choice are no secret.

As we talked over coffee she asked me what she should do about it. I told her that was her decision, and her decision alone. If she wanted an abortion I would help her, if she carried to term I would help her. I became an aunt 8 months later.

4 years earlier my little sister at 16 asked the same question. I told her the exact same thing as my older sister: my role is to support your choice not tell you what action you need to take. She got the abortion, and only told my parents years later. Now my family is proud of both choices, because both are equally valid and neither sister has regretted her choice.

These two stories are what it means in my mind to be pro-choice to be able to celebrate a woman having a child and a life she loves and to be able to celebrate a woman not having a child so she can have a life she loves. I dont know what to tell you other than to tell your sister you support her choice, and would have regardless of the choice.

I can't speak for giving advice to sisters, as my mother, sister and I all agree 90% politically & socially. However, I tend to go with the 'live & let live' angle. Basically, I start by asking if they agree that others have the right to any belief or any religion that they choose. I think most people would say yes. I then ask why they feel that forcing their beliefs onto other people seems OK to them. Some people just do not believe that life begins at conception. Period. So each individual should be able to make their own choices based on their own values or beliefs, or any other motivating factor.

I also like to ask why they feel that a fetus has more rights than the person carrying it. A full, breathing person should not be forced to carry a fetus to term. The person carrying the fetus will have their entire life turned upside down by becoming pregnant, including potential risks to their health. Even if they believe that a fetus is a living being, (a baby, or whatever) one person's life is not more important or worthy than another - so how can you force a person to act in this manner? 'pro-life' is not pro-life, because you are forcing a person to an increased risk to their health for another 'being'. This is never found appropriate between 2 existing people (an adult is never legally forced to put themselves physically at risk for another adult in a general, non-circumstantial manner; you don't get punished for NOT donating organs, marrow, saving someone's life, etc). So why do pro-lifers want to force punishment for not putting yourself at physical risk (or many other risks - career, which could lead in a loss of income and inability to properly take care of the baby, etc etc etc) in this particular situation? To control women's bodies & health.

There are so many arguments, but these are two that I specifically recall using.

I've always been pro-choice, coming at it from a women's right to bodily autonomy standpoint. It doesn't matter if a fetus is a human life or not, no other human has the right to use my body and put me at medical risk unless I allow it, even if the result is their own death. But I was pro-choice in a lackadaisical kind of way.

And after two pregnancies and giving birth to two children, I am deeply, passionately, pro-choice. I believe women need the right to choose like they need the right to breathe. And here's why.

I really love being pregnant- most of the time. I'm one of the women who positively glow. I love my pregnant shape. I love feeling the baby twist and turn, kick and respond and react. I am one of those women who bond with their children in utero. But there are times when it's incredibly overwhelming and the only thing, the ONLY thing that makes it bearable is the fact that it is freely chosen. If safe abortion is unavailable I'm quite certain that no only would women die attempting it themselves, the number of suicides among pregnant women would skyrocket.

I can think of few things worse than forcing someone to go through an unwanted pregnancy. It affects every single part of your body, from your hair to the bones in your feet. It affects the way you move. It affects the way you breathe. It sure as hell affects the way people interact with you. And then there's labor and delivery, and our screwed up misogynistic maternity care system, and 1/3 of pregnant women having major abdominal surgery, and the post-partum recovery period, and on and on.

Life and love are amazingly, beautiful, profound- but they cannot be forced. Forcing a woman to remain pregnant against her will twists it, it takes a transcendent experience and turns it into something ugly, disgusting. Can you imagine being a baby, inhabiting a body that did not want you ? Your entire universe filled with loathing of you? A flood of negative biochemicals released into your bloodstream from your mother every time you kicked out in joy?

Bearing a child and giving birth is a beautiful choice. Taking away that choice demeans it and turns it something hated, unwanted, vile, unspeakable. It's blasphemy, it's taking something that could be sacred and turning it into a despised obligation.

A pregnancy and a baby should be greeted with and surrounded by joy and welcoming and love, not loathing.

Heather, I recently found out that my sister is anti-choice too. I think her position stems from the fact that her husband left her while she was pregnant and later told a judge after paternity tests proved he was the father that my sister should've had an abortion. Obviously, that is such a terrible thing to say and this pathetic excuse for a man is quite an a-hole. This is why I think she's anti-choice, because she never forgot those words and my mom and sister have also used vocabulary similar to that of your sister, "he wanted her killed." Anyway, pretty much my whole family is liberal and quite pro-choice (even my old-fashioned traditional parents) and this is the topic that I believe makes my sister a one-issue Republican. I don't anticipate ever discussing this with her for so many reasons but if it did happen to come up, I'd love to have some great arguments as well. My niece who is now 10 years old and whom I love to bits is doing well but like you, I also support the decision any woman makes that is best for HER. It saddens me to think that there are not just people, but other women who because they are convinced that their choice was right, that no other woman should make that decision for themeselves. Too often they forget about the lives of those who are here now. Please keep up the work at G-Town. We need you!

heather,

for people steeped in rights-based discourse (and this is now widespread in social conservative messaging as well), the distinction between two positions premised on wildly different presuppositions inevitably leads to an argument that is eternally circular. Neither side will grant the premise of the other and no rational discussion has resulted from arguments where involved parties do not acknowledge even the possibility of the other party being correct on the merits of their particular argument.

If your folks have an ear for the "maximizing liberty without coercion" line of argument, that's generally the most effective. It serves this small-l libertarian very well when discussing the issue with parents and friends who feel very much differently.

Heather,

Thanks for the post.

As always in these discussions, your answer turns on whether you understand a fetus to be an actual human being or merely a "potential" one. My impression is that you believe the latter - in which case, if your sister had had an abortion, it would not have been "killing" her child but merely preventing him from coming into existence - whereas your sister probably (like most expectant mothers) understood her unborn son to be an actual, and not merely a potential, child. You could explain your pro-choice position to her in these terms - she may not agree with you, but it could at least clear up whatever misunderstanding might exist between you.

A couple of additional points:

I have never seen anyone advocate the idea that a woman should be held legally liable for the unintentional death of her fetus. Keep in mind that most pro-lifers do not advocate criminally prosecuting women who have abortions - I think everyone recognizes, however unconsciously, that the issue of legal punishment needs to be handled delicately in cases where a person's physical integrity is compromised, even when one it talking about an intentionally caused death. The same principle would be doubly true in cases of unintentional death.

The analogy to organ donation doesn't work, because there is a tremendous moral difference between declining to aid someone's life, and taking direct action to cause their death. If you refuse to donate your organs to someone, you have no intention of causing them to die - even if this does end up happening as an unintended result. This is very different from an abortion, in which direct action is taken to kill an unborn human. (What I am describing here is known in moral philosophy as the principle of double effect, if you are not familiar with it.)

If you wonder why some people have such difficulty understanding pro-choice philosophy, I think this is the crux of it - many people are never going to respect choice when "choice" involves the direct and intentional killing of another human life. It's also why I think "common ground" will never be found on this issue until there are viable alternatives to abortion - I'm thinking not only of increasing the viability of adoption but also a procedure known as transoption, which, if it ever became perfected and widely used, could shift the grounds of the entire abortion debate. Unfortunately, such an option seems to have been ignored by people on both sides of the debate thus far.

However, she then asked how I would feel if she "had killed Braxton."

Don't you hate questions like this? Pro-lifers think they're so clever in asking it, but it's really a stupid question. If your sister had had an abortion, she wouldn't have "killed Braxton." Braxton wouldn't have existed. I mean, how many "Braxtons" did she pass during her periods? Dozens? Does she miss any of them? She was eventually going to have Braxton (or Julia or Antoinette or whatever the case may be) because there was a point when she decided that she wanted to have a child. "Braxton" was going to come in some form eventually.

My parents intended on having two kids, two years apart. They ended up having two kids, one and a half years apart. What if my mother had stayed on birth control and had me on February 23, 1985 instead of September 18, 1984? Nothing much. I just would have come later. I'd still be me, I'd still have the same parents, I'd still have an older brother, and I'd still be the youngest of two children. I'd just be younger, and maybe a boy, and maybe I'd look a little different.

I have to admit: the logic behind Heather's sister's stance on abortion eludes me. How does figuring out the best way to deal with one's own unplanned pregnancy qualify the person to then make that decision for every woman on the planet?

"My sister said that if a man was willing to take care of the child, then the woman should not be allowed to have an abortion. I told her that I disagreed, and she said she didn't want to talk to me anymore. She proceeded to give me the silent treatment for the next two hours."

Heather: I cannot believe that anyone - let alone another woman, can hold such sexist views about her own bodily autonomy!!

Since when is it a man's choice to "allow" or not "allow" a woman to choose what to do with her own pregnancy?? Have we just warped back a few centuries?!

I think you should have given her the silent treatment, frankly. And then after that, invested her with some serious feminism 101.

And this is exactly the problem with many pro-lifers. It's not about preserving life in many cases...it's about preserving male control over WOMENS property - our own bodies.

I think you did rather well, actually.

What makes our pro-choice position somewhat difficult to break down into soundbites is that we care about women's ability to choose whether she starts/continues pregancy. Therefore, viable options need to be available: abortions should be legal and safe. Women shouldn't be harrassed over their choices.

We support other women's decisions. We want them to be able to choose. Because we trust women to make that call.

I expect that (with your sister's consent of course) you could use this story to illustrate just this point. It's not about forcing women to make either decision. It's about allowing them choice.

wow - a pretty good discussion so far. Weird, but good!

I agree that you should use the example of kidney donation. No one should be forced to donate a kidney to their child, but that doesn't mean you'd push her (or any parent) NOT to.

The way you've described your sister, something tells me that she would come around to this argument, or at LEAST stop getting so upset with you.

Another line of reasoning is the "what about if the mother's life is in danger, or serious health issues?" She may already agree with that, but then it's a discussion of what constitutes "serious" - what if a doctor (or even worse, the government) disagrees that it's serious enough? What if the baby has a condition where it couldn't live for more than a few minutes outside the womb once born, etc.?

Anyway, I hope this discussion continues in the spirit it started, and that you and your sister can come to a good resolution. I think she's overreacting to you, but more for personal emotional reasons than evil intentions. I'm glad that you didn't respond in anger or retribution because that would surely alienate her and prevent her from ever really seeing your point of view. Certain kinds of pro-lifers are clearly anti-woman (and should be responded to accordingly), but it doesn't really sound like this is what's going on with your sister. Instead, it's one of those things where choice isn't always pleasant (even if it is vitally important). Imagine if someone said they wish that they could just have an arranged marriage, or have their career chosen for them, because it would just be so much easier. It's the same kind of thing with your sister. She was glad (in retrospect) that she didn't have the choice. Yeah, it's a questionable political stance to extrapolate that to everyone. But it clearly touches on very deep emotions for her. Again, I really support your gentle treatment of her, both to preserve your relationship and to eventually have her come around.

I apologize for being hurtful, but your sister is the exact kind of anti-choicer I despise most. Her views are applied to every other woman in the world because SHE feels it is wrong after having her own baby. The fact that she would take that choice away from someone else if she could because she gets some sappy feeling when she looks in little Braxton’s eyes is enough to make me want to slap the shit out of her. I’d say the same thing if this were one of my own family member’s by the way. As far as her views on women not being allowed to have abortions if the man /father wants to take care of the baby……that is so ignorant it’s hard to know where to start with that one. People who feel this way obviously are just willfully ignorant about the fact that pregnancy and childbirth come with many potential hazards for the pregnant woman. What if I’m forced to continue a pregnancy because my boyfriend want sot take the kid and raise it and I end up in the hospital with preclampsia (sp?) or diabetes or some other pregnancy related health problem? Who cares about that though because my sole purpose in life is just to be a walking incubator, right? As far as that “how would you feel if I had killed Braxton?” absurdity goes, anti-choicers always rely on these stupid hypothetical emotionally charged arguments to make their point when all else fails. Someone asked me once, “What is your mother had aborted you?” I replied, “Well, I guess you’d be standing here talking to yourself then, wouldn’t you?!” I mean, really, what if Ted Bundy’s mom would have had an abortion? How many women would still be alive now?

However, she then asked how I would feel if she "had killed Braxton."

You could tell her you'd feel about the same as you would have felt if she had never had sex in the first place, thus preventing the existence of Braxton.

I've always wondered why people who think its wrong to take the morning after pill or have an early abortion don't think its wrong to prevent someone from having sex in the first place. I guess if you believe in the soul appearing at the moment of conception that makes sense, but not everyone uses that as a reason. If you aren't relying on arbitrary religious reasons, then what is the difference between preventing a fertilized egg from developing and preventing the egg from being fertilized in the first place?

UnHingedHips wrote: "It doesn't matter if a fetus is a human life or not, no other human has the right to use my body and put me at medical risk unless I allow it, even if the result is their own death."

I think UnHingedHips and those who agree with her statement are evidence of a disturbing proliferation of dissocial personality disorder throughout the pro-choice community. Such a flagrant disregard for the life of another human, especially one that an individual helped create, reveals the existence of a socio-psychological disconnect usually found only in serial killers.

The fact that so many agree with her comment can only make one wonder how many "unhinged" people we have roaming free amongst us.

My usual answer to "why are you pro-choice?" is:

I don't believe that I have any rights over you. If you're pregnant I don't have the right to tell you to abort or keep the child. Only one person in the world has that right. You. Whether I agree or disagree with your decision or the reasons for it has no bearing on your right to make that decision. I believe the unborn child has rights too, but I also believe that as the mother you have more right than I to decide what those rights are. I'm pro-choice because I believe that you and you alone have the right to make your own decisions for you and your child.

I sympathise; my brother has a daughter (nearly two; aren't they just so cute at that age?!) where I also know that abortion was being tossed around during the pregnancy. I'm very sure he's not pro-life, but I wouldn't be too surprised about the mother... The actual life vs. potential life bit is a fallacy that a lot of people make; I had a friend in high school who was pro-life because her mother had almost had an abortion and she quite liked being alive, thankyouverymuch. It is difficult to explain, in that kind of situation, that it wouldn't have been murder but would rather have meant she would never have existed in the first place and so is really kind of irrelevant to the discussion.

I mean, abortion is hardly the only thing that could have prevented our existence and it hardly makes sense to fixate on it. When you think about it, there's an almost infinite number of things that could have happened differently which would have meant you never existed - and yet that in and of itself doesn't mean that those things happening would have been bad. My example of choice for this: My grandfather died several years before I was born. Because of this, my mother moved to be with my father earlier than she had been planning to, and my brother was conceived during that time period. If my grandfather hadn't died, my brother would never have existed. Does that mean my grandfather's death was a good thing? (For the big guns, I have another personal example that involves WWII.)

Another argument you can make is that - well, you're here anyway, which means that your mother *chose* to have you. What would you rather have, the knowledge that your mother considered an abortion but decided against it (meaning that in the end she decided she wanted to have you?), or the knowledge that you don't know whether your mother would have aborted you or not given the choice? Which do you think your child would rather hear from you?

...Well, I am going to go in a bit different direction. I think your sister has a lot of purely emotional reasons for her pro-life views, and those are hard to argue with; perhaps you should back off of trying to argue her out of them, especially so soon into her difficult choice and its ramifications.

It would be wise to reassure her that you do not have opinions about whether she should have had an abortion. (Andif you do have them, bury them deep inside of you just as you would any other unrelated opinion we form that is not our business to share ;). REmind her that you love her and your nephew very much. I am sure you have already done this, but I think it is a good thing o do again, rather than trying to convince her of your position right now.

Your sister may or may not be aware that there ARE plenty of people out there with very strong opinions about what women do with their pregnancies, and some of them WOULD be considered "pro-abortion." I have seen them here at Feministing a number of times, even. Perhaps she is responding to tha, or perhaps she feels that old guilt about getting pregnant/having a baby in what she thinks are not-ideal circumstances/not loving her child every second...etc...you understand? The emotional landscape of motherhood is so complex. TRy not to take be too hard on her, and look for ways to reassure her, and stand firm.

This is just my two cents,from moving in circles that are strongly (and intelligently) pro-life,being an "unwed mother", and also fiercely loyal to family peace and harmony.

I don't talk about it much, and when I do, I usually say I don't believe in telling other people what to do with their bodies.

But I would love to tell people that I got my period when I was in the 5th grade. That usually shocks people---totally throws a wrench in the idea that only teenagers and adults can have kids.

Also, I totally believe in the potential life of my eggs, so I feel that I already have control of who exists and who does not.