catfoxwolf:

Hi friends!

I am interrupting your irregularly scheduled comic update to make a post about a thing happening here on my island which is probably quite far away from wherever you are and so unlikely to affect you directly. Still, it’s a Thing I have been very anxious and noisy about IRL* so I feel like I ought to tell you about it.

There’s a referendum happening on May 25th (THIS FRIDAY!!). A yes vote would mean abortion is at last legalised in the Republic of Ireland, which, and let me very, very, very clear about this, would be an Extremely Good Thing.
As I see it, a Yes vote would be an endorsement of three very basic principles that I wish weren’t controversial but here we are. Those three basic principles are:
1) women are people
2) a foetus is not the same as a conscious human being
3) you are free to ignore other people’s opinions regarding what you do with your own dang body

In general, #2 is the one the anti-choice campaigners tend to latch on to. Arguing with #1 immediately gives them away, hardly anyone does it explicitly. It’s easier to tacitly call into question the humanity of women by suggesting they are not to be trusted. #3 anti-choicers tend to deflect by refusing to acknowledge that the moral framework they propose is a matter of opinion, and not fact. So that leaves us with #2. It’s an emotive subject because humans as a species are very, very good at storytelling and it’s easy, if you’re so inclined, to see something at an early stage in its development and play a little movie in your head where you watch it grow up, whether it’s an egg hatching or an embryo developing or a little aloe vera plant turning into a beautiful hefty green monster that haunts the bathroom and harbours spiders in its dusty crevices. But the passing of time and the action of various processes is necessary for each of these things to alter its structure, change its nature, and become something other than it is. Potential is beautiful and poetic and the decision may be painful for those or many other reasons but it is fundamentally a personal decision because a turtle egg is not the same as a turtle. A tree is not a chair, a cow is not a handbag, a smile is not an invitation, and a clenched fist is not a punch in the face, which is why I have never been charged with assault after conversing with someone who thinks that reproductive freedom shouldn’t be a fundamental human right.

It’s not only women that can get pregnant, of course, but misogyny is unequivocally the reason that abortion is illegal and it’s the same malevolent force that propped up so much of the old system that I desperately want to believe we’re now systematically dismantling on this weird little island. Marriage equality and the gender recognition act were huge symbolic steps. This one’s even bigger. So c’mon lads, let’s make it happen.

Oh and P.S. – in case anyone feels the need to try and argue this with me, please take a moment to consider that my entire position is predicated on the conviction that unsolicited opinions from outsiders re: bodily autonomy have precisely zero value. Whatever else might or might not be stirring in the private reaches of my bodily tissues – again, not your business – I have not a single solitary atom of interest anywhere in the seething fugue of my being for anything you might have to say on the subject of anyone else’s body. It doesn’t matter. You don’t matter. Your opinion doesn’t matter.

Repeal the eighth.

Love, Quidditas

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*IRELAND