Again, We Remember

 

By The Sword?

So, a few days ago, Politico broke the news that the Supreme Court appears likely to overturn Roe v. Wade this summer.  We can't say this is surprising.  It was the entire goal of the Republican Party, starting in the 70's, and culminating in 2020, with the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett.  The 6-3 majority is the wet dream conceived and cherished by the Republicans in 2016 when they cynically blocked the 2016 election year nomination of Merrick Garland after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

The fear among many who may not be directly affected by abortion rights is if SCOTUS can overturn Roe v. Wade because the Constitution did not specifically confer the right to abortion, what other rights assumed, via Supreme Court decisions, to be conferred by the Constitution may be re-visited and overturned?  This Daily Kos story gives a hint -- and I will quote from it directly: "As such, the draft ruling intrinsically calls into question other unenumerated rights the Supreme Court has conferred on Americans, such as the right to privacy, raise children, use contraception, or marry the person of their choosing regardless of the color of their skin or their gender."  Yep, definitely a "live by the sword, die by the sword" kinda sitch.

Is anybody besides me amused by the irony that many, not the least among them Chief Justice John Roberts, are pissed off right now because someone betrayed the Court's right to privacy, and leaked a document about their preliminary ruling on Roe v. Wade, which case itself was predicated on the concept that a woman's right to privacy was grounded in personal liberty and/or due process (thinkwy.org/post/the-right-to-privacy-and-the-road-to-roe-v-wade)?

And polls conducted in recent years indicate most Americans want to keep Roe v. Wade firmly in place as is, as this recent CBS News poll indicates. The poll, conducted in November 2021, shows a whopping 62% of Americans want Roe v. Wade.  How do we feel about one party hijacking the court to impose its will, which is contrary to the will of the majority of Americans, not to mention the mission statement of our country?  And how do those 38% who may approve of the repeal of Roe v. Wade feel about the way the repeal is being carried out?  Are they cool with a future Supreme Court ruling that affects how they raise their kids or under what circumstances they can use birth control?  The sword cuts both ways.

And ladies, do we really want to trust primarily menfolk to make these decisions?  Before you answer, bear in mind men have proven they don't really know their way around a woman's body.

Even those of us that may not seem to, have skin in the game.  My mother, for example.  What the hell does an 83-year old care about abortion being legal?  My mother began her nursing career as a student in 1956.  In those days the nursing schools used their students as cheap labor, so they cleaned and did some patient care.  Abortions weren't legal until 1973, so my mother as a young nurse saw the consequences of back-alley abortions more than once. 

"Women who have unsafe abortions are at risk of serious medical problems, including incomplete abortion, hemorrhage (heavy bleeding), infection, uterine perforation (caused when the uterus is pierced by a sharp object), and damage to the genital tract and internal organs (by inserting dangerous objects such as sticks, knitting needles, or broken glass into the vagina or anus). Each year around 7 million women are admitted to hospitals for complications of unsafe abortion and between 4.7% – 13.2% of maternal deaths can be attributed to unsafe abortion."

https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/book-excerpts/health-article/impact-of-illegal-abortion/  

Imagine being an 18-year-old and seeing someone bleed out, or worse yet, die from septicemia.  Since I was a teenager my mother has drummed into my head how calamitous it would be if Roe v. Wade were overturned.

Now I will tell you my experience.  No, I've never had an abortion.  My experience is a little more complicated.  

My mother was unwed when she had me.  Being an unwed mother was a lot less accepted in 1965 than it is now.  Before my mother became pregnant with me, she was an ER nurse.  She loved it there -- the ER was where the action was.  But in 1965, being visibly pregnant while wearing a nametag that said Miss So-and-So was not done.  My mother was forced out of the ER, and she never had a job that she really enjoyed for the rest of her nursing career, which spanned nearly 30 more years.  My father had bailed, and he was the only man my mother ever loved.  Too bad he evidently didn't love her back.  My mum didn't really want children.  She didn't like children, and didn't think she'd be good with them.  Remember there were no safe, legal abortions then.  My mother had me because she didn't want to put me up for adoption and worry and wonder if I was OK and being well taken care of.  And because she hoped that if she kept me, I would love her, unlike my father.  Are these good reasons to keep a child you really don't want?

Early on, my grandmother was available to help raise me.  But my mother decided I needed a father, so she married my stepfather.  Grandma didn't like John, she and my mum argued, and next thing you know, grandma was on her way out of my life.  She died of metastasized breast cancer when I was not quite six.  

Regular readers of this blog know what happened next: more than twelve years spent with a controlling, physically, verbally, and sexually abusive alcoholic, twelve years I am still recovering from.  After my mother's divorce in 1982, I spent the next five years extremely depressed.  I got a job at age 18 and didn't get another one for four years because my stepfather had profoundly eroded (and my first employer all but finished destroying) my confidence that I had anything to offer a workplace.  Fortunately I rebounded after subsequent jobs.

Rebounding from the rest has not happened yet; I suffer from low-level depression and anxiety to this day.  Unfortunately most of the 90's were spent keeping my mother from losing her house, and by the time her finances were on an even keel again, my mum had had three back surgeries and other ailments that forced an early retirement. That late in the game, college was not realistic for me -- how would I pay back student loans before retirement?

Looking at the whole thing logically and dispassionately, it simply would have been better for my mother to have aborted me.  Better for her, so that she would have been able to forge the career path she had been headed on and deserved.  She wouldn't have dissipated her energies raising a child (though I was a very good and easy child to raise -- an "old soul" and a "little adult" from the get-go, by my mother's own words).  And not being an unwed mother would have given my mum a much better pool of men to marry, or the choice to not get married at all.  She may have decided to devote herself to going into college, in order to work herself more easily into a supervisory position.  Which would have helped insure that she didn't retire poor, and with her body broken down, which is exactly what happened to her.  And my mother wouldn't have had a daily visual reminder that a man that said that he loved her and wanted to have children then had bailed when the chips were down.  

And as for me, I never would have been molested, verbally or physically abused.  Never would have been taken inside a bar at age nine, and then another time conversely left inside a hot truck for an hour or two, under strict orders not to open the door or roll down the window, while my stepfather drank in a bar, then taken home sick from the heat.  I would have never had to watch my mother rise up righteous in rage for once, and then watch her slam around all day and evening till I believed she was mad at me, too, due to that incident.  And after another incident, (one of many times he drove drunk with me in the car), I never would have spent part of a night hearing my stepfather throwing up from drinking till he burst a blood vessel in his throat, and the rest of the night and some of the morning in the ER waiting room while he was being treated and admitted.

I never would have experienced my mother at first defending me from my stepfather's attacks and abuse, then the betrayal in later years of her going silent about it, and finally at times participating in it.  I never would have had my self-confidence snuffed out, nor the aformentioned anxiety and depression that I still struggle with, nor the resultant health problems.  I would never have spent most of my life feeling out of place and out of step with other people -- awkward, incompatible, and unassimilable.

And I never would have spent so many years of my life trying to make up to my mother that my father didn't love her, and knocking myself out trying to prove to her that she made the right decision keeping me.

Which is less harrowing and more expedient?  And which is the greater sin, the abortion that didn't happen, or the years of abuse, of deprivations, of mental and physical issues that did happen and still are happening?

Yes, I know, it is possible to save a child from an unfortunate birth situation without having an abortion -- one can give the child up for adoption.  When a child is placed with an adoptive family, we hope that family is investigated for fitness to adopt, but fitness according to whom, and to what criteria?

I am familiar with some folks who have four children.  The eldest two, both males, are their biological children.  The youngest two, both adopted, are female.  The girls were raised totally differently from the boys -- they had much fewer responsibilities, and alot more swag.  The girls were even raised very differently from each other -- one cast in the role as the pretty, bright achiever, and the other who was never quite as successful in the worldly sense.  The mother was very aggressive about setting the sisters against each other in competition, and I was upon occasion thrown into this mix, compared unfavorably to the achiever.  Although I was independent enough to openly (and at times, loudly) resist such manipulation, the two sisters were not.  Now both have weight and self-confidence issues.  The achiever is an insecure people-pleaser, a sad woman who fears intimacy.  Her sister spent several years being unhappily married to a child molester.  She is every bit as bright as her sister (as well as the family's second son, who are both doctors), and she could have been a damn fine doctor herself (or anything else she wanted to be) if only her mother hadn't told her a million times in a million ways that she wasn't good enough.

Is this little homily an indictment of adoption?  Not at all.  Am I saying an abortion would have been better?  Absolutely not.  Just that if you really want to stop abortions, you're not going to succeed in doing it in the courts, via laws.  You're going to have to change hearts.  And you're gonna have to get a helluva lot better at contingencies, and details.  And that brings me to my closing.

If the SCOTUS follows up and reverses Roe v. Wade, those of you who helped bring that change by voting, marching, stumping, opining, bankrolling and praying, might feel tempted to take a victory lap.  I wouldn't advise it.  You're going to need your strength.  For a couple of reasons.

Did you ever hear that old Chinese saying, "When you save a life, you're responsible for it?"  Yep.  Now the child needs to be fed, clothed, kept dry and warm, taught the three R's, how to navigate a car, a computer, social media, how to take care of himself, how to work, how to treat people, how to love.  Maybe sent to college. Who's gonna do all that?  The adoptive family?  Well, we hope so. Adoption agencies are overburdened, underfunded and understaffed.  And alot of people don't qualify to adopt -- LGBTQ, POC, singles, "too old", etc.  What then?  Where will y'all be?  Are you in for a penny, or a pound?  What good does it do the child if you save him from the abortion and then just go carve another notch wherever it is you carve 'em, and never think about the child again?  Not your responsibility?  But it was yours to stop the abortion?  Let us consider our labels carefully -- anti-abortion, pro-life.  Which label belongs to the one who saves the fetus, and which belongs to the one who commits to seeing that the child is properly raised and provided for?  

An Anglican minister's definition of pro-life:

And another reason to forgo your victory lap:  Those of us who are on the other side of this issue WERE asleep.  We took for granted that the Supreme Court, though it might now heavily favor one political persuasion, was provident enough not to amend the rights heretofore considered inherent in the 9th and 14th Amendments.  We assumed they would not be so disrespectful to the institution of The Supreme Court as to politicize it by diluting or annulling decades of rulings that were based on the right to privacy, and compromising the faith American citizens have in, and the security they rightfully derive from, the pillars of settled law.

Now that we see the lengths these folks are willing to go to, and how little their integrity means to them when they can trade it to manipulate The American System and turn it into a mockery -- holding up a Supreme Court nomination for eight months in one election year when it suits them, and speeding one through in another, (and in the middle of a pandemic) when that suits them; gerrymandering and restricting voting rights, especially those of people of color, the poor, and the elderly, even to the extent of forbidding voters standing in long lines on hot days to be given water.  Yeah, a real honorable bunch.

Well, courtesy of the latest of these tactics, now we're awake, and in record numbers.  AND WE'RE PISSED!  Those who a week ago may have predicted a red wave in the midterms are not bragging quite so loudly now.  And some of us think that was the motive of the leaker.  Stay tuned.

Of course, we could just grow a pair and end this BS one and for all, and in a decisive way.  How 'bout we put it on a national referendum in 2024, and Let The People Decide?  It'd be alot better than letting such a thing as the vagaries of the political makeup of the Supreme Court do it by taking away Americans' right to privacy.  Or worse yet, signaling that sometimes we have a right to privacy, sometimes we don't -- rights to be decided and rescindable at any time, on any whim, with any shift in SCOTUS makeup.  And my fellow Americans, do we really want abortion to become a States Rights issue?  Are you really cool with the way the US is being fragmented and trivialized by States Rights?  What is stronger, the United States, or Fifty Nifty Little Fiefdoms?  Think about it.

Abortion poll stats from the last ten years.

Some religions do support abortion rights.

And to end this post on a lighter note, more of the clueless menfolk.

And still more, with a sprinkling of clueless womenfolk just for the hell of it.