Example Of Biography On Abortion Questions/Interviews

1. In essence, I believe that abortion should be an issue left up to the mother, and that it an acceptable practice if it is needed. In a perfect world, abortions would not be necessary - every pregnancy that would occur would yield a life that could be given a good life and be loved by parents who are ready and capable of taking care of them. However, this is not a perfect world, and pregnancies happen every day for less-than-ideal reasons: rape, incest, unplanned pregnancies despite initiatives to use birth control methods. Furthermore, there are complications in pregnancy that can affect the quality of life of both mother and child. Because of these reasons and more, I believe it is necessary to keep abortion as a legal option for women.
I believe that broader social forces have been a large influence on my views in this matter - I am very familiar with the arguments for and against abortion, and I have understood many of the arguments against abortion to be religious in nature. In my experience, many of the pro-life arguments seem to ignore the mother in the equation; it is all about the baby's life, at least until it is born, creating the impression that just the presence of the baby is enough to outweigh all of the myriad problems that might actually be in that mother's circumstances, like financial difficulty or the presence/stability of the father. These religious arguments tend to look at unwanted pregnancies or abortions as evidence of sexual deviance, while pro-choice arguments look at the welfare of the mother, and treat sexuality as something that should not be punished for its own sake.
2. For the purposes of this interview, I interviewed my grandmother, who is 85. She was born in 1928 in California, and worked as a secretary before and during her marriage to my grandfather. She grew up in California, and spent the majority of her childhood with her friends and two sisters. She married her husband (my grandfather) right out of high school, as the only person my grandmother has dated or been with; after that, she went to secretary school and became a typist at the power company where my grandfather also worked (before and after his stint in the military during the Korean War). She spent most of her time with him, making meals, going out once a week to bowl, catching up with others at the VFW office, and eventually was able to retire early along with my grandfather based on their work at the power company. She was around during the Korean War, and watched footage of the JFK assassination and the Vietnam War on television as they came out
The interview, from my end, was very interesting; back in the early-to-mid 20th century, women were much more conservative, as they mostly had their lives planned out by the time they graduated high school. Becoming a secretary was a very common occupation for women of that time, especially when their husbands would go off to war. They were much more concerned with their immediate social circle than we are today; while we have friends from all over the country, people like my grandmother knew their neighbors more than anyone else in the world, more than we do with our today.
3. One person I interviewed was my friend Katie, who is an American woman (an an open lesbian). I understand her to be fairly liberal in her political affiliations, and is very pro-choice. She does not see anything but the most extreme examples of sexuality (pedophilia, bestiality, incest) to be perverse and deserving of scorn; it is her opinion that people have different proclivities, and as long as they are performed between two consenting adults, it is perfectly fine. She believes that a woman has a right to do with her body as she wishes.
I also interviewed Neeraj, an exchange student who comes from a very traditional Indian family. While he is slightly more liberal than his parents, he does say that he feels uncomfortable sometimes around assertive women, and he does tend to judge women who he feels dress more provocatively than they should, or who are open about their sexuality. On the subject of abortion, he said that he would not know what he would do in that situation, but he tends to favor the life of the child, and sees pregnancy as an unavoidable consequence of sex.
The final interview was with Jessica, an Asian-American woman I know. She is also fairly liberal, but has extremely conservative parents, who even feel uncomfortable with her dating outside her race. She feels the need to keep her sex life a secret from her parents, as she believes they think (or hope) she is a virgin. From her, and from the other interviewees, I can gather that openness of sexuality is a slightly more generational thing, where our parents are much more conservative about sex than we do. They also have different definitions of what counts as "sexual perversity."