Get Your Laws Off My Body, Redux

I know I've said this before (and probably better), but there are a bunch of new people on my friends list, and due to some recent events I am feeling it necessary to say it again.

If you personally believe that abortion is horrifying, and you would never have one nor would you ever suggest that anyone else have one, I know exactly how you feel.

If you are pro-life in the sense that you believe our culture should be doing everything possible to lower the incidence of abortion by making birth control widely available, by teaching young people about preventing pregnancy in the detail they require, and by doing everything possible to assist women who find themselves pregnant without the financial, emotional, medical, career, social or spiritual support they need, I am one hundred percent with you.

But if you are anti-choice -- if you oppose the legal right of women to receive safe medical care as their circumstances require -- and you post about it with any regularity or in any detail in your journal, I will take you off my friends list.

I find that position contemptuous of me as a woman, claiming that the government's interest in my body and its reproductive capacity should override my right to decide when and whether to reproduce.

I find that position contemptuous of me as a Jew, claiming that your religious beliefs about when life begins should override those of myself and my religion, as well as the beliefs of many Christians, Muslims, Pagans, agnostics and others.*

I find that position contemptuous of me as an individual, infringing on my right to make my own medical choices, my right to express my sexuality how I choose, my right to a family as defined by me and not a government that would limit marriage and childbearing only to a restricted subset, and in numerous other ways.

Don't talk to me about a "culture of life." That notion is incompatible with terrorizing teenage girls into suicide or dangerous back-room procedures that can leave them maimed or sterile. That notion is incompatible with laws that force women to carry pregnancies to term at the cost of their own physical or mental health. That notion is incompatible with a government that crosses church-state lines, claims ownership of our bodies and forces us to violate our most fundamental beliefs with state-dictated policy.

Yes, I am intolerant on this issue. I am intolerant of intolerance, whether the subject is the rights of gays to marry, the rights of criminals not to be executed within a deeply flawed and prejudicial system, or the rights of women to be treated as human beings under the law rather than breeding machines.

*ETA: Do NOT give me any crap about how abortion is like the Holocaust, defining helpless "babies" as non-human beings. Laws that treat women as government property to be used and disposed of as the state wishes, forcing them to bear children against their will, have far more in common with Holocaust dehumanization than individual women making the same individual choices that they have been making since before recorded history -- the difference now being that very few women die for making the choice to end a pregnancy.