"The controversy is over women controlling their own fertility. It's about whether we have the right to decide for ourselves if and when to have children, whether we're autonomous human beings with full rights or if our primary purpose on earth is to birth and nurture the next generation."We all know the great abortion debate has long been a subject of public scrutiny, but as this article points out it seems that it's in fact all issues of the womb that seem to be up for public debate. Whether we chose to procreate or not, how many children we chose to have, whether we seek assistance in the form of medical treatment in order to make childbearing possible and as with the example of Tarrah Seymour our ability to choose our own methods of birth control. The list seems endless and I don't really want to weigh in my own personal opinion on each and every item, but I do think the overall question of how much control a woman has over her own reproductive functions is an important one. Why do we so closely monitor and debate these issues and yet pay little or no attention to the subject as it adheres to men? I certainly don't hear any public outcry over men who donate their sperm to sperm banks or those who chose to get vasectomies, why then is it that women should be held under such a strong microscope when it comes to such personal and private matters?
Regardless of where you stand on the topics of abortion, infertility, birth control, etc., I think it's about time we stop hiding behind the notion that this is a debate about morals and ethics and admit that it's really about a woman's basic rights to control the reproductive functions of her own body. As Kate Harding so poignantly puts it:
"As long as we keep pretending that the debate is only about "killing babies" and not about whether women should have the basic right to control our own fertility, that common ground will remain elusive."
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