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Today is Blog for Choice Day, and the question to be answered is "Why are you Pro-Choice?"

This is something I was kind of iffy about being involved in, at first.
Mostly because I don't feel overly qualified to talk about being pro-choice: Unlike so many other women, it's an abstract ideal to me, something that has never come into play in my own life. For reasons we've talked about here, my life as a young woman has been as far from normal as you can get. So I have never had to deal with, firsthand, the issues surrounding unwanted pregnancies. I feel a little bit unqualified to preach on the subject.

And yet.

And yet, I am a young woman who has been faced with making numerous, life-altering decisions about my body. I'm a young woman who's had to make difficult choices about treatments and procedures that have changed the path my life has taken. I am a woman who will continue to make these decisions for myself, never knowing if I am making the right choice, only knowing that I have to choose.

My decisions have been medical in nature, but they've also been influenced by my ideals & my goals for my future; social & familial pressures; the best information that's available to me; financial restraints; where I've been in my life - healthwise, professionally, or personally; & what I thought I could handle at that specific time.

And, if you think about it, all of these things - all of these factors and fears and issues - are the things that come into play when you're talking about a woman's right to choose.

Now, deciding to have an abortion - or to continue a pregnancy - is entirely different from deciding whether or not you opt in for the next dangerous treatment, or decline to undergo the next potentially harmful test. They're not the same, in so many ways. But they are the same in one very important way: My body - My choice.

That's what it all boils down to, I guess; All my untested ideas about what I would do in that situation, or how I would counsel my friend or one of my sisters, should she find herself in need of my help. It all comes down to ---> Her body, her choice.

It may seem simplistic, perhaps even naive, but I don't expect that my parents or my significant other, even a doctor would be able to override any other medical decision I might make. Or that there could be a law denying me the right to make these decisions: it's ludicrous to even imagine that such a law could be passed. Not in our country.

Why should this decision - even though it's got a zillion different aspects to it, when you come to the core of it, this medical decision - be any different?

Comment away: I'd like to hear your takes on it.