Agree with it.
Disagree with it.
I’m not here to persuade you either way, because personally I don’t know where I stand.
I want to say, though, that I watched a documentary on Fox News tonight about it. They didn’t have “officials” or “speakers;” the simply interviewed three women over the course of the year.
The first girl aborted her child. It was hard watching her lie in the bed, crying, as they performed the procedure. Her mom, who was in the room with her, found out when the doctor let it slip that it was actually the girl’s second abortion.
The second girl was pregnant with her 7th child by the time the interview was done. Her first four kids were taken away since she was using cocaine after they were born. Her fifth child was born with a drug addiction and given up for adoption. The sixth child was a miscarriage. She was pregnant with her seventh child as the interview ended. She said that she continued getting pregnant because she had been that way for so long she felt incomplete when she wasn’t.
The third woman was pregnant with her second child. Her and her husband had been trying for years, and when she finally became pregnant, the child developed a chromosomal disorder. The doctors offered to abort the child, but the mother refused. The child would have lived for maybe only a few days at the most, but the parents decided to go through with the birth so they could at least see and hold the little girl, Marlee. Marlee died about twenty minutes before she was born, and it was again hard to see the mom and dad in the room holding the child.
Abortion is a tough subject. I think that before anyone decides one way or another how they stand on it, it is important to see what people go through who HAVE had to deal with it. It’s easy to say you would or wouldn’t have an abortion when you’re not in the situation when you actually have to make the decision.
Jere
Very thoughtful blog. Deep. I’m enjoying your writing and the range of your subjects.
I became a diehard prolifer because I faced the choice. I thought abortion was my only option, but I was too paralyzed to make an apointment. A friend found out how desperate I was and he was able to think clearly enough to see that the problem wasn’t that I was pregnant; it was that I had an expensive apartment too far from work and shopping and without a refrigerator. I didn’t think it was possible to find better, since it had taken a difficult search to find the one I was living in, but he kicked me and my husband in the butt and we found a great place the first day out looking.
He saved my son’s life. A prochoice friend would have heard my tears, reassured me that I was just doing the responsible thing, and helped me make the appointment that would have ended my son’s life.
A lot of my friends are prolifers now because they have been through abortions themselves and learned the hard way.
I can’t reconcile helping a woman commit a tearful act of despair as “empowering” her. How is it empowering, and embracing “choice”, to help women do something they don’t want to do?