Abortion...Let's PREVENT IT, not debate it!

You know what REALLY makes me CRAZY about the pro-life/pro-choice debate????? That fact that both sides have drawn their lines so deep in the sand and take every opportunity to try and tell somebody else why they should/should not have the right to an abortion WHILE COMPLETELY IGNORING the real problem and solution to the problem...PREVENTING UNWANTED/UNINTENDED PREGNANCIES! If these zealots would redirect their efforts to educating people in abstinance/safe sex, working on young girls self-esteem, promoting healthy relationships, actually explaining the processes of menstruation, ovulation, conception, fertilization...you get the idea...you could damn near ELIMINATE the need for abortion and leave it for cases of rape, incest and danger to the mother.

I remember when I was volunteering at a women's clinic in Canton, I was talking to a girl while she waited to see a nurse. She was about 19 y.o. and came to schedule an abortion. When we were talking she was waiting to be called to take a pregnancy test, which was appearantly protocol for establishing that the woman is, in fact, pregnant. Well, I asked how far along she thought she was and that opened up the flood gates to her entire personal life. So here she is, trying to calculate the times and dates she had sex to give me an answer and I interrupted her to tell her we could estimate it by how many weeks she was past her missed period.....long story short, she hadn't even missed her period yet! I spent the next 10 minutes or so giving her the cliff's notes version of how and when a woman gets pregnant and why it would be virtually impossible for her to be pregnant... turns out I was right, the test came back negative.

The whole point of that story was to show that there are people like this, young people, and LOTS more of them, that don't even know the basics of their own reproductive functions/processes! I believe that just giving them the basic knowledge would empower them to make smarter choices. OH, and did I mention they should throw in some information about how antibiotics can decrease the effectiveness of hormone based birth control?!?!?!? SURPRISE!!!!

Look. No women grows up dreaming of having an abortion. Albeit, some women/couples do abuse this procedure and use it as a means of birth control, but the decision to have an abortion can be really REALLY hard to make and can have negative consequences for the woman/couple. Shouldn't we do everything in our power to keep them from even having to make that decision?!?!?!?It goes without saying, that there is no "one solution fits all" to this debate, or any other (don't EVEN get me started on religion and spirituality!!!) but I FIRMLY believe that so much of these people's energy is severly misdirected and they could do much more to solve the problem by PREVENTING the problem. Less unintended/unwanted pregnancies = less abortions.

Think about that.