This is my shameless attempt to get some help brainstorming an essay. If this is out of line, Amp, feel free to take the post down.

Two years ago - and it’s scary how the time has slipped past - I was in the very early stages of pregnancy, and I never seemed to have any energy left. By afternoon, I was often so exhausted I just took to my bed and slept for several hours. When I told my then-boyfriend, he called me lazy.

“Yeah?” I said. “When you can turn fish fingers into people, come back and we’ll talk.”

Any thoughts?

I’m currently trying to revise and expand Lady Madonna for publication as part of an essay collection, and I just had this thought.

Noting the similarities between me and a classical image of Madonna and Child is harmless enough. Concluding that I’m going to behave like the demure Virgin Mary of classical art is a step too far, and resenting me for acting like myself instead of the image is right out of line. Of course, this problem is only loosely connected to gender dysphoria: female-identified mothers suffer in just the same ways. Take the militant lactivists who confuse matters completely by aggressively demanding their right to breastfeed in public, or the mothers through the ages who protest the sacrifice of their children in needless wars.

Is this part of the reason why breastfeeding in public arouses such hostility in some quarters? If it was that perfect submissive Mary (who was delighted to be informed her destiny was to be a vessel, rather than wanting an abortion like these uppity women), she would naturally go elsewhere as soon as she realised she was making someone else uncomfortable. How dare these uppity women go around looking like the Virgin Mary and then refuse to behave like her?

Any thoughts?

In the summer of 2005, my financial situation, which had been shaky for months, finally reached critical point. A letter came from my bank demanding immediate repayment of everything I’d borrowed on pain of court action, and I knew I had no means of finding the necessary sum within the time they were willing to grant me.

I ran through an inventory of my assets, which didn’t take long. The most valuable thing I owned was my computer, and I’d only bought it for a tenth of the sum the bank was now demanding. Desperate, I started to wonder what an able-bodied white baby would fetch in a black-market paid adoption and whether I would be able to find a prospective buyer willing to make a down-payment while the baby was still in utero.

So I know what financial difficulties can do to a person’s thought processes, and that’s why I’m not rushing to criticise Amp for his decision to sell amptoons.com. If I’d owned a valuable domain back then and received the offer Amp received, I probably wouldn’t have even stopped to wonder what they would use it for.

I’m sticking around, but I know some people would prefer not to read or link to Alas now because of this connection. Some of these are people whose opinions I respect and whose comments I would hate to miss, so I’m going to start reposting the bulk of my Alas posts on my personal blog, The Iron-On Line. They will doubtless end up buried among memes, one-liners and updates about my life, but I hope people who can’t forgive Amp for this sale can still join in the discussion.

In the post about the dangers of baby blogging, I alluded to a child protection conference that had thrown up several essay-worthy subjects, then lapsed back into silence. Now, over a month later, I’m finally organised enough to tackle some of those subjects.

The child allegedly being protected by the conference was, in case there was any doubt, my daughter. By all measures health professionals have devised, she’s thriving, but I’ve struggled to cope with single parenting on top of my long-standing depression and my rocky financial situation. There are days when I feel overwhelmed with guilt and say that my daughter would be better off in someone else’s care, or even that my fragile mental state will do some concrete harm to her; these comments have been interpreted by people with responsibility for child protection as evidence that my daughter is in danger.

At first, I was happy for social services to be involved. I knew I was coping badly on my own, and I thought they could help me cope better, especially as everyone I spoke to insisted they only wanted to give me the support I needed to look after my daughter on my own. But as they called meeting after meeting and produced reams of paperwork, that objective seemed to get lost in the noise.

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Every so often, friends or family members tell me about opportunities for freelance work. Some of the suggestions - the ones that could help me build a writing career - would appeal even if I was childless and working full-time. Others - training to be a translator or proofreader, for instance - probably wouldn’t. But they’re not supposed to: their biggest selling point is that I can work from home while caring for my daughter.

Before I was a parent, it sounded like such a good idea. Rather than having to choose between going out to work and staying at home with my hypothetical child, I could combine both. No need to wonder whether my baby was safe and contented - a glance across the room could put my mind at rest. No need to worry that I was financially dependant on someone else - I would have the security of my own income source.

What I didn’t realise - what I had to learn from firsthand experience - was how intensive the job of looking after a small child is. In my vision of parenthood, the work consisted mainly of physical chores such as washing clothes and preparing meals; in practice the physical work is the easiest part. In addition to the chores, taking care of a child requires a level of concentration that doesn’t sit well with an attempt to build a freelance career.

While my daughter’s awake, she wants my attention. If she doesn’t have it, she quickly realises this and makes sure she regains it by letting out a cry that’s virtually impossible to ignore. For short spells, if I’m doing something I don’t need to think deeply about, I can block out the cries; shutting them out effectively enough to finish an essay is beyond me. And even if, by some miracle, she’s too absorbed in her play to miss my attention, I know she could wriggle into difficulties at any moment. Watching her out of the corner of one eye, constantly alert for the early warning signs that she’s about to need my help, pretty much prevents me concentrating on whatever it was I wanted to write.

That only leaves the times when my daughter’s asleep to work on my freelance projects. And here the problem boils down into one that’s familiar to any woman who does paid work: the second shift. Whether I work on freelance projects or not, I need to spend a certain amount of time on my daughter and associated chores. Trying to add freelance work to the mix means effectively trying to do two jobs at the same time - with exhaustion the predictable result.

But although this arrangement has the same disadvantages the working mother suffers, it doesn’t offer the corresponding advantages. My freelance projects will be speculative, at least initially, so the dream of financial independance remains just that. And, by not going out to work, I’m isolating myself with no colleagues and no potential change of scene. It seems I’ve combined the worst of working with the worst of staying at home.

I’ve heard some people make a success of freelancing with children. I don’t know whether they have money in the bank, contracts in hand, or just a partner willing to subsidise them until their projects get off the ground, but it seems they have something I’m missing. For me, working from home is all problems and no solutions. I’m thinking of training as a teacher instead.

This morning I attended a child protection conference. Several issues came up that would be essays in themselves, but the one that most immediately disturbs me is the chair’s attitude towards baby blogging. I post the occasional picture of Andrea over at The Iron-On Line, and I mentioned this as one way that her father kept abreast of her progress without interacting with me directly.

As soon as I mentioned the words “pictures” and “internet”, the chair became very grave. She asked me whether I was aware that paedophiles look for images of children on the internet and manipulate them for their own twisted ends. I was aware of it, but I don’t understand how the existence of manipulated pictures could harm my daughter. I don’t think child pornography - even the faked kind that’s at issue here - is acceptable, but neither do I think giving up baby blogging is an effective way to combat it.

I post pictures of Andrea because I want my friends to see them. My friends are a diverse lot, scattered all across the globe, and if I sent out the pictures in email by request only, some of them would miss out. Even if I posted them on a password-protected website, the act of having to enter a password is enough to deter her father from accessing the pictures, and I don’t want to raise any more barriers between father and daughter than he has already created.

And if I could practically give the pictures only to known friends, that’s no guarantee they wouldn’t end up in the hands of a paedophile anyway. Once they’re out of my hands, they’re out of my control. I may be certain none of my friends are paedophiles (as it happens, I’m not: I trust no-one absolutely), but can I say the same for their friends? Their co-workers? Can I be sure they won’t inadvertently leave a copy of one of the photographs on the bus for anyone to pick up?

So not only is it restrictive, it’s also ineffective. It reminds me of the rape-prevention advice that boils down to “live in constant fear.” Do nothing unless you’ve first assured yourself that it won’t make you (or in this case your family) into a victim. Allow the rapists to set the conditions by which you live your life. That’s one situation in which I find it perfectly reasonable to say, “The terrorists will have won.”

I’m not blind to the dangers of paedophiles. My daughter’s still too young to be out of my sight, but as she gets older and more independant I intend to give her all the sensible advice I can about self-protection, probably combined with natural parental paranoia. But cracking down on child pornography is a task for law enforcement. I shouldn’t have to stop sharing pictures of my beautiful little girl because determined perverts can manipulate them.

As some of the language in this post suggests, I wrote it while my daughter was still in utero. It turned up during a spate of hard-drive housekeeping, and I think it’s relevant enough to be worth posting, even so long after it was written.

If I had a tenth of Amp’s cartooning skills, I’d turn the Cute Li’l Parasite into a cartoon, a sort of pro-choice counterpart to the faintly disturbing Umbert the Unborn. Umbert, for those who missed him, is a cartoon fetus that floats in some kind of misshapen uterus that has been detatched completely from anything resembling a woman (the hypothetical artificial womb, perhaps?) and spouts the pro-life line as well as any adult.

Another kind of fetus, almost completely unlike Umbert, shows up in Listen: Your baby’s life before birth, a free booklet I got as part of my pregnancy loot. Aimed at women and couples who have already decided to continue with a pregnancy, it can celebrate fetal life without undercutting maternal choice, and the picture it paints of the third-trimester fetus is a good deal more believable than Umbert.

My baby, now well on the way towards birth and personhood, is already experiencing the world. Sounds, both from within my body and from the wider world, reach hir, and sie’s already learning to recognise my voice. Sie can feel hir own body and the umbilical cord, as well as being aware when something presses against my abdomen and restricts the available space.

But what fascinates me is that, apart from sound and pressure, everything my baby experiences comes through me. Take taste - sie’s sensitive to changes in the taste of the amniotic fluid, which takes on the flavours of whatever I’ve been eating. By the time sie’s ready to be born, my favourite foods will be familiar to hir, but the foods I hate and never touch - sie won’t have a clue about them.

And then there’s emotion. When I’m angry or stressed or euphoric, my baby shares as much of the emotion as is attributable to hormones. Without the intellectual development or the life experience to name the emotion, sie can’t be said to feel angry or happy, but the physical effects are clearly there. When some trollish argument infuriates me, my baby tenses up just as I do, and when I’m travelling home from a match in blissful relaxation, so is my baby.

Pro-lifers have accused me of cognitive dissonance for treating my baby as a part of me, but sie feels what I feel. How can sie not be a part of me?

The other side of the coin is that I’m shaping hir experience of the world. My baby is already very different from a hypothetical clone raised in a hypothetical artificial womb, and this is the part where I suspect pro-lifers of some dissonance of their own. A pregnant woman does a lot more for the fetus than simply refraining from abortion: every decision I make influences what my baby will become.

Sometimes it seems the following must be invoked whenever a feminist brings up the subject of childcare as a burden: “Lots of men who work long hours in high-stress jobs would give anything to spend more time with their children.” It’s supposed to prove that, far from being a burden, childcare is a privilege that women disproportionately enjoy and that, by implication, any feminists who complain are miserable, child-hating whingers.

It’s a red herring. I have every sympathy for the hard-working men - I’ve worked some terrible jobs myself to try to keep the credit card companies off my back - but their plight isn’t directly relevant to the question of whether childcare is or is not a burden. (Whether it’s indirectly relevant is a much larger question, far beyond the scope of this post.) There’s a huge difference between “spending time with” children and “looking after” them.

My dad spends time with my daughter. He sings to her, talks to her, encourages her to smile and clap her hands. And he can do all these things safe in the knowledge that if she fills her nappy or starts crying uncontrollably, or if he just wants to get on with something else now, he can hand her back to me and I’ll take over. Because I’m the one that looks after her.

I love my daughter, but I also know that there are very few high-stress jobs that can compare to the task of looking after her. In a job, you clock off at the end of the day and your time is your own. Parenting means being constantly on duty: even when the baby is asleep, you have to be alert for the moment when she wakes up and needs attention. If you have the financial resources, you can subcontract some of the work to a childminder, but even then you have to be alert for the call that says there is a crisis only you can resolve.

Looking after a baby is exhausting. Normal tasks like showering and preparing breakfast require careful planning so that the baby doesn’t get frustrated with boredom and start crying. Something as simple as reading the paper or writing an essay requires co-operation from someone else, otherwise the baby cries from lack of attention. Trying to cram everything you didn’t get done during the day into the evenings when the baby’s asleep means you don’t get enough sleep, which makes it even harder to cope with what can often feel like never-ending demands.

This is a partial explanation for why I haven’t posted anything recently.

I saw a headline for this story on this evening’s news and had to wait for the full story. A rape awareness campaign aimed at men? A rape awareness campaign that tells men it’s rape if she doesn’t explicitly consent? Sounds like a feminist’s dream come true.

Well, sort of. The first interview in the story was with a man (his identity concealed) who “thought he was having consensual sex” and found himself charged with rape. Was I hoping too much when I thought an item about teaching men not to rape wouldn’t lean on the angle that some poor men get unfairly accused?

The second interview was with a rape victim (identified by name and with her face shown) who hadn’t gone to court because it was her word against her rapist’s. She said that “you can’t stop rape with just a few posters”.

The posters, the campaign, are a promising first step. But oh, what a tiny step towards such a big problem.

NOTE: This comments thread is reserved for feminist, pro-feminist, and feminist-friendly posters only. If you suspect you wouldn’t fit into Amp’s conception of “feminist, pro-feminist, or feminist-friendly,” then please don’t contribute to the comments following this post.

The elder of my half-brothers is almost seventeen years old. He’s busy studying physics and chemistry for A-level, playing around with a BBC microcomputer he salvaged from somewhere, and saving up his Education Maintenance Allowance in the hopes of one day being able to afford a Landrover.

He owes his existence to an abortion our mother had some fourteen months before he was born.

She chose to end her pregnancy around the halfway point when she learned that the fetus had Downs syndrome. My half-brother was conceived on what would have been the due date had she chosen to continue the earlier pregnancy. If she hadn’t had access to abortion, if she’d had to carry the fetus to term and give birth, there is no way my half-brother could have been conceived.

My half-brother is a walking refutation of the Feminists For Life contention that “abortion pits women against their children”. Let us accept for the moment the pro-life formulation and agree to describe the fetus as one of my mother’s daughters. This (potential) daughter is pitted, not against her mother but against her (potential) brother. Abortion allowed my mother to decide which of her potential children she wanted to carry into actuality.

If she had not been allowed to make that decision, I would have a half-sister instead of a half-brother - not such a great difference. But my mother would have, instead of a son she bore by choice, a daughter she bore because she had no choice - an immense difference. It’s not just my brother who owes a debt of gratitude to the abortion that allowed her to have a child she felt she could raise: the whole family is better off because of it.

Pro-lifers like to accuse pro-choicers of thinking that disabled people, or children conceived by rape, have no right to exist. (A better summary of the pro-choice view would be that no fetus has a right to exist - they exist by the goodwill of their mothers, and will do so until they develop the ability to live independantly of women’s bodies.) But by saying my mother had no right to an abortion - no right to choose which of her potential children she wanted to give birth to - pro-lifers are saying my half-brother has no right to exist.

[The use of “pro-choice” in the title is borrowing, purely for rhetorical effect, the pro-lifers’ definition of “favouring mandatory, recreational abortion”. This is in no way an endorsement by me of this clearly nonsensical definition.]

I learned an interesting piece of my family history while I was in hospital: in 1949, my grandmother was given the opportunity to have an abortion. (In fact, since abortion would remain illegal in the UK for nearly two more decades, she was probably offered an “emergency D&C”, but the intention was to terminate the pregnancy.) With three small children, one of whom was seriously ill, she had every reason to feel unable to go through another pregnancy, but she decided she was up to the task.

If she’d chosen differently, I wouldn’t be writing this now, because the baby she gave birth to grew up to become my father.

When I heard this, I thought about the question pro-lifers frequently pose: “What if your mother was pro-choice?” What if your mother (or in this case, grandmother) had chosen to end a pregnancy and, as a result, you didn’t exist? Knowing that the possibility was discussed brings me as close as I think I’ll ever be to answering the question, and my answer is a great big “So what?”

Yes, if my grandmother had ended that pregnancy, I wouldn’t be here. But I wouldn’t be able to resent my non-existence, and the rest of the world wouldn’t be aware of what it was missing; it’s hard to say that anyone would have been worse off. In any case, I clearly am here, so speculating about what if I wasn’t is a purely philosophical matter with no practical bearing.

What’s more, there are any number of choices that had to be made the way they were in order for me to exist. If either of my parents had chosen a different university, they would never have met and I could never have been conceived, but university choices aren’t subject to the same debate that abortion is. That doesn’t prove, in itself, that the debate isn’t justified, but it does go some way towards demonstrating that “What if your mother was pro-choice?” is a red herring as far as the debate is concerned.

Another favourite way for pro-lifers to express the sentiment is the bumper sticker that says “Your mother was pro-life”. But I’ve got no evidence to say anything of the sort about my grandmother. Yes, it’s possible that she chose to continue the pregnancy because she considered that the emergency D&C would be murder. It’s also possible that she enjoyed being pregnant and wanted, in spite of all the difficulties, to bring this new life into the world. (If that’s the case, it’s an attitude I inherited from her.) I don’t know, and part of being pro-choice is that I don’t feel I have the right to second-guess her.

She had access to abortion and she chose to give birth. I don’t know what pressures were on her to choose one way or the other, but from what I know of her and the way I heard the story, I’d guess she weighed up all the factors and made the decision she thought was the right one. And since I’ve seen no evidence that she wants to put pressure on any other woman to decide any given way, who knows? Maybe she is pro-choice.

This is mostly me thinking aloud.

1. Society’s institutions were mostly created by heterosexuals for heterosexuals.

2. Many of these institutions can only deal with relationships that are formalised with the state by means of marriage.

3. This causes all kinds of problems for same-sex couples who are denied access to marriage.

4. There are two obvious solutions: allow same-sex couple access to marriage, or change the institutions so that they can deal with relationships that aren’t formalised by marriage.

5. Changing the institutions of society, while desirable, is a huge, radical change unlikely to win widespread support. Even if this change could be brought about, it would take a great deal of time and same-sex couples would continue to suffer while the status quo lasted.

6. Allowing same-sex couples access to marriage is a relatively minor adjustment, and enjoys far more popular support.

7. Allowing same-sex couples access to marriage doesn’t rule out the possibility of changing the institutions of society in the future.

8. Therefore, allowing same-sex couples access to marriage is desirable.

The British government has set out a new prostitution strategy. It seems to consist of helping sex workers, for instance by allowing them to work in pairs away from the street and offering them help with any drug or alcohol problems that might have forced them into prostitution, raising awareness among johns and pursuing exploitative pimps and people traffickers.

Changes like this don’t always produce the desired effect when they’re implemented, but it looks reasonable on paper.

According to the Sun newspaper, British immigration officials have been granting visas to foreign nationals in exchange for sex. (Now updated with a link to the Sun’s original story - many thanks TheInkSlinger.)

I find it ironic that a newspaper which proudly advertises its daily topless photograph was the one to break a story about what is effectively a form of prostitution. My cynical guess is that the Sun was less concerned with the exploitation than with the anti-immigration potential of the story.

At approximately quarter to one on the 23rd of November, the midwife in the delivery room helped get Andrea’s baby blogging career off to a great start by taking a picture of her as she met from the outside someone she’d got to know intimately from the inside over the previous nine months.

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Later that day, she began putting faces to voices as I introduced her to the rest of the extended family.

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I’m late posting this, but since Wednesday, same-sex couples here in the UK have been able to register civil partnerships and get most of the benefits of marriage. (I don’t know what benefits they can’t get, and, alas, have no time to hunt up a link.)

The media seem to have concentrated mainly on the details of the ceremony Elton John and his partner had, although I did hear one apparently heterosexual man on the radio complaining that he and his girlfriend didn’t qualify for a civil partnership.

I heard this joke from my mother, when I was about 11 or 12.

Two nuns were walking through the woods when they were set upon and raped. One said to the other, “Whatever shall we tell Mother Superior?” The second replied, “We’ll just have to tell her that while we were walking through the woods, we were set upon and raped twice.” The first one said, “Why twice?” The second replied, “We still have to walk back through the woods again.”

By the logic of this joke, women, however uninterested in sex they may appear to be, are desperate for sex and simply dare not admit it. Therefore, the man who gives them sex despite their apparent objections is doing them a favour. Rape is just a form of sex, and women enjoy it enough to hope it happens to them again.

Jokes like this one reinforce the idea that when a woman says “no”, she really means “yes”, that reluctance is nothing more than a pose women adopt, that there is no meaningful distinction between sex and rape, that rape doesn’t really do any harm. And jokes like this one get told all the time, not behind closed doors, but proudly, out in public.

That’s the kind of thing we mean when we talk about rape culture.

It’s virtually a law of Internet discussion that any conversation about rape will turn into a debate about the need for women to keep themselves safe. The attitude that women have the responsibility to protect themselves from rape is, at the most generous reading, an uncritical acceptance of the idea that men cannot be prevented from raping. At its worst, it is yet another example of the way society makes women responsible for anything men dislike. And all the while, there is no acknowledgement that this is just the mechanism by which sexist men can benefit from rape without themselves committing it.

That women are sexual beyond the ways men wish them to be disturbs a certain kind of man. The fears that once kept female sexuality in check are gradually being eroded by social change and medical advances: fear of ostracism, fear of disease, fear of unwanted pregnancy. But fear of rape remains, and it can be a powerful weapon.

There was one piece of fall-out from the paratrooper incident that I didn’t mention. A family member learned that I’d gone back to the camp with a couple of men for sex. He had no reason to think anything non-consensual had happened, but he was horrified all the same. He told me that my behaviour was disgusting and that I should be ashamed of myself. Friends and other family members defended his attitude by pointing out what many people in the other thread pointed out - that I’d put myself at quite some risk.

That explanation failed to convince me. Disgust and shame are appropriate responses to moral wrongdoing, not foolhardy risk-taking. He was horrified that I’d allowed myself to be sexual in an unapproved way; the risk of rape was a justification, not his true motivation.

It shocks some people that I want sex and don’t want to submit to male authority. It shocks them even more that these two desires outweigh my fear of rape, so that I dare to gratify both by picking up paratroopers in a pub. The “prudent” suggestions for keeping myself safe always boil down to giving up sex (or at least, the kind of sex I’m interested in) or submitting to male authority.

These “solutions” might well have no effect on my risk of being raped. But even if they were guaranteed to protect me from all risk, they wouldn’t be worth it. I think I’d rather be raped than spend the rest of my life turning aside from what I wanted and settling for something less. I know I’d rather take risks than allow fear of rape to control my expression of my sexuality.

In my ideal world, men would not be tempted to commit rape. Sexual encounters would be handled with negotiation, not with one partner’s insistence on getting what he wants at the expense of another. Men would respect the desires of women to control what happens to their bodies, whether they’ve known each other for ten minutes or ten years.

And in my ideal world, the fear of rape could not be used as a justification for slut-shaming.

The discussion about the man who claims he can’t be a rapist because his penis is too large set me thinking about my own near-miss a couple of months ago. It feels odd to talk about rape in connection with an experience that was more irritating than traumatic, but technically I came close to being raped and escaped more through luck than through anything I did “right”.

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I’ve stayed out of Supreme Court discussions because the system here in the UK is completely different and my ignorance of the whole subject is so profound I have nothing useful to contribute. But this quote from Alito about husband notification stood out so much that I had to say something.

The Pennsylvania legislature could have rationally believed that some married women are initially inclined to obtain an abortion without their husbands’ knowledge because of perceived problems”“such as economic constraints, future plans, or the husbands’ previously expressed opposition”“ that may be obviated by discussion prior to the abortion.

Every time I read it, my mind supplies a translation that runs something like this: “Those silly women think they need an abortion, but they don’t really. If they would only do the sensible, rational thing and discuss it with their husbands, they’d realise that.” And I know that, technically, Alito isn’t saying he thinks that - just that the Pennsylvania legislature could have thought it in good faith - but he seems to think it’s a perfectly reasonable way of looking at things.

The “perceived problems” Alito cites - which seem like genuine problems independant of perception to me - are reasons women might have an abortion, not reasons they might do so without their husbands’ knowledge. Whether a married woman discusses her decision with her husband depends less on her reasons for not wanting to continue the pregnancy as on the nature of the relationship between them.

It’s likely that in many cases, a woman will want to avoid telling her husband for the same reason the Pennsylvania legislature might theoretically find it desirable: a belief that he will try to talk her out of it. A fear that he will brush aside her reasons for not wanting to continue the pregnancy or even insist that he is better qualified than she to make this decision. The kind of rational arguments my ex-boyfriend used on my decision to continue with my pregnancy would be no more pleasant for a woman who made a different decision but faced similar opposition.

Trying to enforce “rational” behaviour by law doesn’t work because a decision looks different depending whether it’s viewed from the inside or the outside. When I rejected my ex-boyfriend’s suggestion that I should have an abortion, my fear that I would never have such an opportunity to become a parent and the fact that I already imagined my baby as the person it might become were both factors that influenced me. For me, these were more important than the economic factors that pointed to the conclusion that an abortion was the better choice. For him, the economic factors were all; my reasons for refusing had no place in his analysis. Neither of us could be said in an absolute way to be correct, but I was better able to weigh the factors that made a difference to me and therefore make the decision that was right for me.

As with abortion, so with husband notification. The worry that your husband will dismiss your reasons for wanting an abortion and try to manipulate you into continuing with the pregnancy may sound trivial to an outsider, but only the woman facing it can judge how far it could go or how badly it could affect her. Forcing a woman to convince outsiders that she has good reason to fear her husband’s reaction, when they know nothing about her or the relationship she has with him, undermines her ability to make her own choices based on what she knows. It replaces her judgement with the judgement of a court or panel. I don’t know the precise legal meaning of “undue burden”, but it certainly fits my layman’s understanding of the term.