Abortion is Not "Camping"

Photo by Alex Guillaume on Unsplash

After the Supreme Court overturn of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, my social media feed filled with trendy memes and posts inviting friends and strangers to go “camping” in abortion-friendly states. Posters offer up spare bedrooms or futons, sympathy, puppy snuggles, and “no questions asked.” 

Few of my social media connections dared to post anything in praise of the Dobb’s decision, but those that did either did so in an echo-chamber (their viewers curated to only include pro-lifers) or were met with vicious trolling. 

No one (as far as I could see) took up an internet-invitation for “camping.”

Of course, abortion is a private thing, so it would be weird to openly accept one of these weirdly open invitations. Sex is supposed to be private, and usually is in American society. 

But babies are not private. 

Pregnancy is not private. 

Pregnant women are bulbous walking billboards that declare, “I had sex, and now I will have a baby, and then I will not sleep well for the next 6 years at least.”

Barring camera-off work from home positions and grocery shopping by delivery, a pregnant woman cannot disguise her condition for very long, nor can she restrict who receives her body’s declarations. Her colleagues and boss (or classmates and teachers), her neighbors, her family, strangers in shops and restaurants and on the bus or train, all see her, all know: this is a woman who has had sex. Who has chosen a baby. Who has chosen sleepless nights and expensive diapers and staying home for sniffles. Someone who needs to be available for parent-teacher conferences and soccer practice, who needs to put dinner on the table with her own two hands.

A man’s body never advertises his paternity. Certainly not so loudly. And even if the man should speak of his fatherhood, our society does not yet presume that he will go sleepless nights, stay home for sniffles, leave work early to chauffeur for soccer, or miss out on the office happy hour to produce dinner at home. (For a good laugh and to enjoy the utter ridiculousness of our society’s expectations for women, check out the comedy of Man Who Has It All on Facebook and Twitter!) 

Both the presumed and real pressures of motherhood lurk in the imaginations of every person who encounters a woman whose pregnancy visibly shouts her past sex and future difficulties. 

Her audience (literally everyone who sees her) might continue to treat her as they always did, or (more likely) greet her public revelation with joy, or derision, or that ever-annoying comment, “you know how that happens, right?” These interactions can wear on a woman’s emotional and spiritual health, but the comments of the peanut gallery fade compared to the loudly spoken judgment of her school or workplace.

Pregnant women and other “known mothers” are often excluded from honors and activities at school and work, passed over for promotions or hiring, shunted into undesirable duties, deprived of hours, ostracized, or refused reasonable accommodation. Even mothers who work through pregnancy and return to work immediately after maternity leave make less money than their childless counterparts. 

Why, then, should a woman risk accepting a billboard body when she could simply “go camping”?

Her workplace might even pay for her “camping” trip, an expense she might be able to conceal from her supervisor with the help of HR.

It is, of course, obvious why a capitalist society prefers women take private “camping” trips to quietly do away with pregnancy. No business that champions the fiscal bottom line ahead of the well-being of its employees will ever choose pregnancy and motherhood for its female workers. Motherhood is expensive for an employer. Pregnant women cannot (and should not!) perform the physical tasks they could before pregnancy. Maternity leave is expensive even if the employer merely holds a woman’s position for a few weeks until her return without offering her any shadow of a salary. If the woman chooses to leave her work to spend time with her newly born offspring, the employer then has to find and train a new employee. If she chooses to return, her productivity may suffer due to her sleepless nights and her reduced willingness to work after 5:00 pm.

It is all so, so much easier and cheaper to eliminate the woman’s child before it becomes a nuisance. Certainly cheaper to pay for a hotel and elective surgery.

Cheaper and easier for the woman herself, too. More financially secure–she will not suffer pregnancy discrimination if she is not pregnant. No visible advertisement of her sexual exploits (so long as she doesn’t post publicly about her “camping”).

So we, we who love babies and women and appreciate that mothers are quite capable of working and schooling and are very worth the expense of keeping their feminine genius in the workforce and classroom, we must have sympathy for the women being invited (Encouraged? Pressured? Told?) to go “camping.” And we must be part of the society that celebrates motherhood. 

We must grant promotions to the woman about to go on maternity leave 

→and respect her time away from the office by not bombarding her with work emails.

We must hire the teenager with the huge belly to work the cash register 

→and provide her with a director’s chair so she can take a load off as needed.

We must find something useful for the factory worker to do during her regular hours

→and not reduce her hours from full time to part time to push her out of her job.

We must challenge and celebrate and support the high school or college student whose baby keeps her too tired for homework

→and give her a break if she needs it while never barring her from her degree.

We must permit parents to go to their children’s sports / performance events

→and not hold it against them when it comes time for COL pay increases or promotion 

consideration.

We must treat abortion as it really is: 

-society’s objectification of women as nothing more than a cog in the corporate machine

-society’s objectification of a child in utero as rust on the cog

-society’s shame that a woman has had sex

-society’s fear of pregnancy and motherhood that nourishes the life of the next generation

-society's prizing of money over life

-society’s gynophobic inability to deal with women being women and needing accommodation for their bodies’ normal functioning

-society’s insistence that it is better for a woman to be like a man

Abortion is not “camping.”

It is not a corporate funded holiday.

Abortion is society telling women they cannot both work and mother. Cannot be both beautiful and mother. Cannot be both successful and mother.

We must tell women they can.

We must tell women they are more than a cog in a corporate machine. They will not be discarded or downgraded or replaced just because they bear children.

We must tell women that real camping–the kind with s’mores and scary stories and stargazing–is a lot of fun with your kids snuggled up next to you, racing you to the canoe.

We must tell women that we value them–as whole human beings capable of work and play and sex and motherhood. As human beings whose private lives do not shame us but fill us with the joy of life.

Written by the Holy Rukus