Sunday, January 22, 2006

Blogging For Choice

I was all set to write a post today about how my daughter went to a birthday party last night, and at 10:30pm called and said they were having too much fun to end the party, but everyone else's parents said no to a sleep-over, so please, please, PLEASE could they move the party here? So even though we had no junkfood in the house they all showed up with sleeping bags and half-full bottles of soda, and proceeded to play Dance Dance Revolution right above my head until ungodly hours. That's what I was going to write about. Then I read TB's blog and realized I had a more important entry to write.

Today is the 33rd anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. There's a group out there called Blog For Choice who is asking all bloggers who support the right to choose to write about it today. So even though I can't figure out how to add the graphic to my webpage, which would make me a official participant, I'm going to write about it anyway.

First off, let's get the terminology correct. It seems to me many people confuse the word pro-choice with pro-abortion. To my knowledge, there isn't any group out there who encourages women to go out and have an abortion. Pro-choice groups are not lying in wait outside OB/GYN offices, so that they can intercept pregnant mothers and convince them to abort their babies.

I know several women who have had abortions. One was a friend in high school who was much too young. Two were women who were very early into relationships with men they later married and had children with. Another was a woman facing the inevitable end of her marriage and the prospect of adding an infant to the family she knew she would be single-parenting. None of these women made the decision lightly; all agonized over it, cried until they had no tears left, and in the end made the decision they felt they needed to. Those I'm still in touch with tell me they still think about it today.

If the teenager had chosen to have her baby, would she have given it up for adoption, or would she have ended up on the very difficult road of single-parenting without the means to support herself? The women who were early in their relationships, would they still have married, or would a baby have put too much of a strain on a still-forming foundation? And the woman in the midst of a divorce, whose older children were already struggling, would she have been able give all of them the support they needed with the demands a new baby makes?

I was twenty when I had my daughter. Her father and I had been dating for three years when I got pregnant. We married when she was three years old, and are still together today. I chose to have my child, and although at times it was a very difficult path, it worked out for me. Maybe it would have worked out for these other women too. Maybe it wouldn't have. The bottom line line is, it was their choice to make.

How we form our relationships, how we raise our families, how we live our lives...These are our choices. The government doesn't have any place in that.

Are there woman who abuse it, using abortion as a form of birth control? Of course there are. But there is also the scared teenager who got in over her head, the young woman who knows she's not emotionally or financially ready to raise a child, the mother who can only think about how this will affect her children who are already struggling. And, of course, there are the rape victims. We cannot punish the abusers by denying abortion to everyone, any more than we can punish those who commit welfare fraud by denying help to needy families who have fallen on hard times.

I know, this brings us to the argument that you should not have sex unless you are able to handle the consequences. But think realistically, my friends. Despite all the Catholic Church's ramblings, sex is not for pro-creation only, and I don't know a single person who looks at it that way. And I would be willing to bet that most of us, at one time or another, have had sex at a time that it would have been very difficult to handle a pregnancy, if that were the outcome. If it had been, some of us would have chosen to have the child anyway, and some would not. The important thing is the choice. And as for consequences, there are consequences either way. Abortion is not the easy way out, the "get out of jail free card" that many people think it is. It is terrible, heart-wrenching, and most women who have one will live with the consequences for many years to come, long after a child would have grown up and moved away.

It is very easy to judge other people, and the way we think they should behave. But that doesn't mean we should.

Posted by The Gradual Gardener :: 5:53 PM :: 5 Comments:

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