Abortion: The Argument No One Can Win

Since the earliest times… since women first realized what was growing in their bellies and decided they already had too many mouths to feed, or no room for another child in the cave, the tent, the hut, or the hogan, they have found ways to eliminate fetuses they either could not, or chose not to support. Before wire coat hangers were invented, they used sticks or twigs, or herbal concoctions to induce miscarriages.

My great-aunt, born in the late 1800s, used wire coat hangers or knitting needles. Her husband was a handy-man and an alcoholic. She alone raised most of the food her family ate. And she raised her daughter’s son, the one her daughter abandoned when she decided she didn’t want a baby after all. Shortly thereafter, the baby’s father, my uncle, abandoned him too, leaving my great-aunt with the full responsibility of another child, just what she’d risked her life so many times to avoid.

After Roe v. Wade, women no longer had to try to abort themselves or sneak off to some quack’s garage for an abortion, or have the procedure performed on a kitchen table by someone untrained and working in conditions that were neither clean nor safe and sterile. Many pregnant girls died from infections. Some lived until they got home, then collapsed and bled to death in front of their horrified families.

Then a law was passed that allowed women access to real doctors and sterile environments. If any of you were ever young, consider what you might have chosen to do when you were thirteen or fifteen and had to go home and tell your parents you were pregnant. Might you have panicked enough to do what you had to in order to keep from having that terrifying conversation, and possibly being forced to become an unmarried, teen-age mother?

What if, when you were older, your doctor told you that if you carried the baby to term, you would die, leaving your other small children without a mother (and maybe even a father, if you were already a single mom)? Would you tell the doctor that you would be happy to die so the fetus could be born, then raised by your ten-year-old son or stuck in a foster home, probably permanently separated from the only family he or she had? When faced with a life or death situation, our survival instinct almost always wins.