Blog for Choice Day

If you've been poking around anywhere on the feminist blogosphere today you know that it's Blog for Choice Day. Happy 35th anniversary of Roe.

Part of today is about talking about why we're pro-choice. I actually remember a time in my life when I thought I was pro-life. I was in high school in conservative Orange County. I was heavily invested in my beliefs. Only a handful of my friends had even had sex back then. I was supremely sheltered. Growing up like that does give me insight into how people can pass judgment when they can't fathom being in another person's shoes. It's easy, after all, to go through life with blinders on. Ignorance is bliss.

But part of maturing and experiencing life is understanding that people have widely varying life experiences, which include mistakes and falling victim to circumstances they never would have wished on themselves or anyone. And so, clearly, to impose our own set of reactions and choices and would-be decisions onto those scenarios is to choose to maintain a stance whose very foundation is riddled with self-righteousness. So yes, that's saying a lot about what I think of pro-lifers, and I still have friends who are pro-life. Which is why abortion and choice is so hard to talk about. It's unbalanced and polarizing and complicated and provocative.

I'm blogging for choice today because I can't imagine living in a country where that choice doesn't exist. I haven't been alive long enough to know what it was like before Roe v. Wade, and I dread the idea that I might be looking at a future where I'd have to.


Check out some of the following posts:

I Am Roe and I Have Questions for the Candidates, by Gloria Feldt

Feministing's highlights some of today's top posts.

Amanda at Pandagon.net

And this late addition:
Salon's highlights, with entries from Gloria Feldt, Lynn M. Paltrow, Cristina Page, Frances Kissling, Amanda Marcotte, Jennifer Baumgardner, Kate Michelman, Shelby Knox, and Pamela Merritt (aka Shark-Fu)

Thanks.

---Brooke