Choosing for others is not God's work

The data on conversations around abortion tell us that men are the ones who dominate the conversation. So as a woman, I’m speaking up and if you’re a woman, I want to encourage you to speak up too.

Because women may not agree about how to manage reproductive issues but one thing is clear; it’s OUR conversation to have.

This is women’s business and as women we must reach agreement that our first and most basic human right is that of sovereignty over our own bodies. We cannot progress as a society is we don’t reach consensus on this basic principle.

To the anti-choice movement; if your religious beliefs have convinced you that you know better than a pregnant woman about how she should handle the situation, that’s not spiritual guidance.

If you can’t stand the thought of a woman choosing for herself because you would make a different choice, that’s your dark night of the soul right there. Sit with the discomfort of not having control over everyone and everything and you might even find you stumble across a real spiritual truth.

If you think you’re here to ‘save the babies’ then you’re amped up on a spiritual ego trip that is dangerous and is the exact same ego trip that created the Spanish Inquisition and the Witch Hunts and thought the ‘moral thing to do’ was to steal children from Indigenous women.

You are standing on the wrong side of history and one day you will deeply regret your arrogance and your egoic presumptions.

Your desire to control others — to choose for them — is not something God asks of you.

Your saviour ego is based on a religion deeply infected by misogyny and a violent and ugly patriarchal mindset that has sought to colonise and control other nations, cultures, and women’s power for centuries. It has no place in an enlightened society.

Spiritual enlightenment looks like seeing a person who is weighing up what is best for themselves, their family, their economic circumstances, and their capacity to nurture and care for another human being, and offering to stand beside them as they make the choice they deem right for them.

It’s having the humility to allow other people to make decisions about their lives and understanding that these choices are not yours to make.

It’s having the emotional maturity to witness people making very different choices to you, choices you might never make, and being able to surrender.

The anti-choice movement knows nothing of surrender and while it refuses to learn this lesson it will remain stalled in its own spiritual evolution. It seeks to control, it acts from a place of fear, and all the while it tells itself it’s acting in the best interests of humanity.

If you truly wish to act in the best interests of humanity, then stop the guns and the manufacture of armaments, fight for more birth control and more money for child care places, for more maternity and paternity leave, for free education and for affordable housing.

Take a moment to understand why a woman might choose an abortion before you demonise her. Help to create a society where raising a child is something that's not done predominantly by women, alone in their homes, with deeply inadequate levels of support. 

 Shame on you for calling on the divine to justify your efforts to undermine a woman’s bodily sovereignty. You don’t yet know what the divine is.