Blog for Choice Post

A lot of my favorite bloggers are participating in Blog for Choice day. I'd like to talk a little bit about the other side of choice. Forced abortions. There are two American instances of this that I have read about. One is coercive practices in the cult of Scientology. Now, if you follow that link it might seem to be too horrible to be true. I've had an amateur interest in Scientology criticism for a while now, and I believe that many of the accounts of coerced abortions found on that webpage are basically credible. The second involves cases of forced abortions in the U.S. territory of Saipan in the South Pacific. Corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff represented the territory with the help of Tom DeLay; many sweatshops there use low-paid Chinese immigrant labor to make clothing. To keep the women at maximum sewing efficiency, they were coerced into unsafe abortions.

From Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the issue of forced abortion, which is astounding given Tom DeLay's stand on abortion. Can you talk about that?

BRIAN ROSS: Well, it's completely counter to anything that DeLay or most Republicans seem to espouse, that was, on that island there were forced abortions. And the workers there who are all young women, who often had to pay to get these jobs, knew the rules. And they were barred from having boyfriends and certainly barred from having children if they became pregnant. They knew where to go, and there were a few essential back-alley abortion mills on the island. And that's where these young Chinese women went in order to keep their jobs. And that was the deal. That's part of the situation that was essentially endorsed by DeLay when he fought the laws. The laws were established essentially exempting Saipan, although it is a U.S. territory, from U.S. labor laws.

AMY GOODMAN: So, of course, the clothing that is made there says "Made in the U.S.A."

I don't want to say which is more horrible, coercing a woman into having an abortion, or sending her to jail if she has one, as occurs in countries where abortion is illegal. In either case reproductive freedom for women should be everyone's desired solution. Women should have enough resources, education, parenting support and access to birth control so that can really enjoy true freedom. If all women were empowered in this way, there would be hardly any need for abortion! Women would have children when they truly wanted to have children. What a wonderful goal.