All my life my mom has told me the miraculous story of a donut and the almost-abortion. My mother was 19 when she found out she was pregnant with me. Unmarried and dirt poor in West Virginia, one of the poorest states in the US, she thought that abortion was really the best thing she could do at the moment. My dad, always supportive, offered to take her to her appointment. On the way to the abortion clinic, my mom was hungry, so they stopped at a Dunkin Donuts and grabbed some coffee and donuts. When they arrived at the clinic one of the first questions was, "Have you eaten anything in the past 24 hours?" Oh shit, I just had a donut. So they had to reschedule the appointment for the next morning. That evening, stomach growling, my mom was hanging out with a good friend and that young woman asked if my mom was really sure she wanted to have an abortion. "Have you talked to your boyfriend about it?" So that night they had a heart-to-heart and my dad said that he would support whatever my mom chose, but that he would kind of like to keep it. He thought that they could very possibly be good parents and get out of West Virginia if they played their cards right and worked hard. So they kept me. My mom often tells this story as if some kind of miracle happened in either the donut or the friend. As if God himself reached down and made her stomach rumble so she would buy that donut. It was also framed in a way for me to understand that although I wasn't planned or even wanted at first, my mom is very happy things turned out the way they did. I am too. I kind of like being alive. One would think with this type of beginning, I would be fully Pro-life. I am not. See, if my mother had chosen to go ahead with an abortion, I would completely understand. There was no guarantee that anything would have worked out, that my dad would have gotten his act together, that their marriage would last, or that they would have been able to escape West Virginia and the pervasive poverty there. For almost all of their family and her friends, things didn't turn out so well for them. And the first two years of my life were rather chaotic to say the least. Having a baby didn't magically make my parents become more mature. Nevermind that my mother didn't have a clue on how to parent and had to deal with the consequences of that throughout most of my childhood. When a woman makes a choice to have an abortion, it is rarely because they are just using it as some kind of birth control the way many Pro-life people choose to display it as. The circumstances are often dire and the decision is hard. Some people come to regret it. Some don't. Just because one woman is glad she didn't have an abortion, doesn't mean that all women feel that way. Cognitive dissonance also plays a part where, even if you made the "wrong" decision, you continue to tell yourself that you made the right one in order to have peace within yourself. My mother, at the time of her choice, was not a Christian. I don't think that she would have had regrets at the time. However, once she became a Christian, she most definitely would have been told that she should regret her decisions. What I always took away from my story was how loving and supportive my dad was. He was going to support her no matter what her decision was. That's true choice and even though he preferred she have the baby, he was not going to pressure her either way. I love that. I have always loved that. My husband and I don't really see eye to eye on this matter. He used to volunteer at an adult for a crisis pregnancy center, a Christian-centric organization that has a bad habit of coercing women into not aborting through some very shady tactics. Their motto seems to be, "The end justifies the means." So this has always been an area that we have disagreed on. Personally, I feel like we should measure life the way we measure if someone is dead, brainwaves and heartbeat. There is some debate as to when that happens with a fetus, but most doctors agree that it is sometime between 9 and 12 weeks. The CDC reports that 80.5% of abortions are performed before the 10 week mark with another 8.3% before 12 weeks. The other 10% happen after 12 weeks. For me, this means that the vast majority of abortions are performed on fetuses who are not viable or alive yet. Yes, they have the potential for life, but their potentiality for life doesn't trump the decision making of the person who already exists, is alive, and is making the decisions. The potential for life should never trump already existing life. I don't even bother discussing late term abortions with people because we all know that those abortions are not performed because some woman out there wants to "kill" her baby and just decided too late. I had a friend who had an abortion at 20 weeks when they found out her baby had no brain. She was devastated. The decision to abort was agonizing and horrible. Yet she is somehow being lumped into the same category as women who are using abortions as a (very expensive) means of birth control. I hate that and I hate the people who make her feel shitty for the awful choice she had to make. Now, here is where I am straddling the fence. I think abortions should be treated like a medical procedure. Just like any other medical procedure there should be strict guidelines for health and safety. Abortion clinics should be run like hospitals. There should be laws in place about what happens when a fetus is born clinically "alive". Teenagers should have some kind of parental or adult consent. I understand that this means that the very person who got them pregnant, like a father, may be the same person giving consent, but I find the idea of performing medical procedures on children without the consent of an adult to be absolutely ridiculous. My husband, of course, thinks I am wrong. He thinks that I don't value life like I should. That stating one life is more important than another is playing God. Perhaps that is what I am doing. Children can be quite wonderful. I love holding a newborn in my arms and making faces at them in hopes of seeing that gummy smile. But I can think of no greater tragedy than bringing such an innocent life into this world who will not be loved and cherished. There are people who have abortions for the wrong reasons, just as there are people who birth children for the wrong reasons. Those reasons, whether good or bad, are a woman's choice to make. It is not up to me to determine to decide whether she is making the right decision. It is up to me to be supportive, champion for her safety, and listen without judgement. This may mean that my support may lead to someone changing their mind about having an abortion. It may mean something else. I'm okay with this.
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AuthorThis is a personal, but secret, blog archiving my deconversion from a Christian to a non-believer. Archives
December 2020
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