I don't plan to post but this article comes up today. It hit me hard so here it is (warning: long article):
On the day I was supposed to leave for summer classes at my university, I received a bit of information that suddenly changed my life and my relationship with my family. My mother and I were standing on the driveway, waving to my grandparents as they pulled out and onto the street, when she burst into tears. The grandparents had been in town for my sister's graduation, and my grandmother had been very ill recently, so I assumed my mother was broken up at the prospect of that moment being the last time she would see her mother alive. I put my arm around her as we walked back in the house and told her in the most comforting manner possible that granny was going to be fine. She looked at me and told me, in a rather pained manner, that she was not crying because of her mother. Confused, I asked what it was. She told me it was about my sister.
My mother told me later that when she said that my face turned ghost white, and I have no reason to doubt this claim, as I remember feeling at that instant, all the blood drain out of my face. She merely had to mention that it was about my sister and I immediately knew why she was crying. But I asked anyway.
"What about her?"
Her expression became even more hopeless. "It's bad."
I continued to prod, knowing full well what it was about.
"What is it?"
"Guess."
"She's pregnant." I said it in that matter-of-fact way, too.
My sister had been in an on-again-off-again relationship since she was 15 with a fellow whom none of us particularly cared for but nonetheless permitted her to see regularly. He was, to put it bluntly, the product of poverty and neglect. He lived with his mother on the other end of town, away from all the fineries of white suburbia. His mother worked pretty much from sun up to late at night to support him, but as a consequence, she was rarely home. He hung out until all hours of the night with some less than admirable individuals. It wasn't long before he went to jail for burglary. No one was terribly surprised.
He made a brief return from his program in the spring of my sister's senior year (he, sadly, was 18 and still in 9th grade). They had not been corresponding regularly while he was in prison, and they were not on the best of terms when he got out. They saw each other only once after he returned, but apparently that was enough. Within a week he was picked up for possession and hauled back to jail. And again no one was terribly surprised.
My sister was happy to be graduating. She seemed radiant in the spring when we celebrated my brother's graduation from college. But there was something there that did not seem quite right. As I pored over pictures of her later, it did seem crystal clear that she had a bit of excess fat around her belly. But her weight had always fluctuated, so no one paid it any mind. She briefly quit smoking, too, which everyone thought was a good thing. But her abstinence was brief.
She had been aware for a while that she was pregnant. That's why she stopped smoking. She had known for at least two months before she told my mother the week she graduated. She admitted that she was terribly frightened and did not know what to do. As wise as it seemed for her to stop smoking, she soon reversed course. She began not only to smoke, but to drink and abuse narcotics as well. She wasn't doing these things for fun, either. She had a plan.
But it was fruitless. Trying to poison the life inside her was doing nothing except possibly damaging the fetus. It wasn't killing it. By the time month four arrived, she was desperate. My mom knew something was up, and confronted her about it on the Wednesday before her big day. Seeing no other option, she admitted to it.
The next day she walked across the stage and smiled as she picked up her diploma. My mother wept the whole time.
As hard as it was to leave my devastated mother and frightened sister, I did. My mother insisted. So I went back to college.
Over the next month, things became unbearable for my mother. She had told my father, who proceeded to explode with rage. My mother and sister had decided that there was only one option, and when they told my dad, he - despite being a longtime advocate of abortion rights - became hostile. For the next month, he and my mother were not on speaking terms, save for his occasional remark about how she was killing her unborn grandson. I only learned about his hostility later. Had I been living with them at the time, I might very well have killed him.
But his protestations did not stop my mother and sister. Because she was in her second trimester, she had to go to a clinic in San Antonio, one of the few in the state that perform abortions that late. So it was arranged. My brother and sister-in-law booked a hotel. I mapped out the trip from Houston to San Antonio. Everything was set in motion.
When they arrived, my sister and mother were subjected to the worst sort of pseudo-scientific lectures about higher instances of breast cancer in women who underwent the procedure and such. To his credit, the doctor, a young African-American male, repeatedly told them that he was required by the State to tell them this, and that he himself did not believe it. My sister became angry. My mother did as well. When the doctor finished his state-mandated Bible-science lecture, they began. I do not wish to recount the procedure. It involved seaweed and a lot of vomiting. That's really all my mother could remember. My sister vomited all night. That was what stuck in her mind.
My brother was in the clinic with them as the doctors were operating. What he remembered was seeing a gurney go by with a woman on it bleeding from her vagina. She was unconscious, and they were moving her out to an ambulance so that she could be taken to a nearby hospital. One of the nurses later explained that the women on the gurney had two children and could not afford to have another one. There had been a complication during the operation, and she began hemorrhaging. He never found out what happened to her.
The next day, the doctors finished what they had started and she went home that afternoon.
The logic behind my decision to be pro-choice is simple. I don't have ovaries. I am incapable of giving birth. I will never know what it is like to be pregnant. Therefore, I do not feel justified in telling a woman what to do with her body. Whether or not I personally would do it is another matter. I believe that a woman's body should not be the property of the state.
I have grown increasingly weary of moralizers, of Bible-thumpers, of self-righteous men telling me why abortion is wrong. Morality seems to be something that is cherry-picked by many. I understand the moral opposition to abortion. However, what is moral for some is not for others. The truth is that this is a very gray area. That I why I believe the only logical position is a pro-choice position. Some people think abortion is murder. That's fine. They don't have to have them.
I do not need to be lectured by those who have not seen the effects of abortion up close - the way is can tear apart families, the way it changes the woman involved. I asked my mom after the procedure whether or not it had made her less pro-choice. She thought about it, and told me that it did make her question the morality of it, that it did force her to confront the issue head on, but that in the end it made her more pro-choice. She told me that she realized just how important the right to choose was when she was sitting through the junk science lecture, being forced to hear a man who didn't believe in any of that bunk recite it as fact. She became angry. Who do these religious people think they are, she asked herself, telling my daughter why she shouldn't do this? If my sister had been forced to carry the child to full term, there was a good chance that it was going to have some sort of disability. And what of the effect on my sister? She was not even mature enough to have sex, let alone care for a child.
If one is divorced from a situation, it is extremely easy to make judgments about the actions of others. There is a perception, propagated by the religious right, that women simply fuck around and get pregnant and turn around and have an abortion. It's all so very easy. Abortion on demand, they say, a sort of amoral, sexually free existence right out of Brave New World. Abortion encourages sexual promiscuity. Why won't anyone think of the children?
Well, what if those children are inside the belly of children? As much as I would hate to destroy anyone's precious world-view, the process of getting an abortion is not easy, simple, or free of hardship. It is, quite simply, awful. But people will continue to stick their fingers in their ears and scream about the hidden holocaust and how much God disapproves. That's not going to change. But we can try and educate them about what the true nature of abortion is, and attempt, however vain it may be, to alter their illusions.
Source:
Why I am a pro-choice man
one of these members mentioned about this book,
Back Rooms: Voices from the Illegal Abortion Era. I completely forget about this book, I read it several years ago. It is highly recommend for anyone to pick up and read to see how many women suffered during pre-Roe v. Wade era. I recommend that book because it will be much worser than pre-Roe v. Wade era when Religious Right destroys women's rights.