For some time now, I've stood by watching as American women's legal rights are eroded.
The landmark Supreme Court ruling in Roe V. Wade happened when I was 12--ironically, the year I got my period and theoretically could become pregnant.
Ever since the passage of Roe, anti-abortionists have worked to get it overturned. They haven't been successful, but they are doing a fine job of chipping away at it's essence, piece by piece.
Women are excellent secret keepers and perhaps this has been to our detriment. If the mother or sister or wife of some of the people who are trying to make abortion illegal again "fessed up" that in a certain circumstance she had an abortion, perhaps those that most intensely push for illegality would at least pause and think a moment.
I had an abortion in California in 1984 (like the vast majority of women who have had abortions, I only had one ). I was married to an abusive drunk, was the mother of an 18-month old son, and was the victim of regular marital rape, sometimes accompanied by beatings.
I was in the throes of abused women's syndrome for years, behaving virtually as a zombie.
It was with deep horror that I discovered that one of the times my husband forced himself on me or perhaps it was one of the times that I just tuned out and "let him" have sex with me, one of these times meant a second pregnancy.
Toward the end of my first pregnancy, my husband punched me in the stomach, but since the baby's birth, he had not laid a hand on him, though my beatings seem to take a turn for the worse.
Having another child with this man would mean one more child at risk and one more child for me to try to save from the misery that was my life--which I couldn't muster the will to do even prior to my first child's birth. This misery included constant wonder about keeping a roof over our head, where the next meal was coming from as well as the full range of battered women's circumstances--cut off from friends and family--deep isolation and depression.
Ironically, my husband helped me make the decision to have an abortion.
I was still breastfeeding my 18 month-old son, when one night when he cried out. My automatic reaction was to get up and check him and sooth him, if necessary. On this night my husband was irate about being awakened and disapproved of me comforting the baby. After shouting at me to "give (him) the baby," he tore my son from my breast and hurled him from several feet away, into his crib. At first the baby was silent, and in the semi-darkness I thought that he may have been knocked unconscious or worse. Within a few more seconds though, the child let loose with a terrified wail. My husband stood between me and the baby as I begged him to let me check on the child's well-being. This went on for I don't know how long. It seemed like an eternity, but as the situation played out, something clicked inside me, something that said if you don't get this baby out of this home you will not survive.
Finally, my husband stepped aside and allowed me to again comfort my son. By now his little body was heaving with sobs, as was mine. I realized that I wouldn't always be able to protect him from his father's wrath and that I must do something. I actually considered obtaining gun and killing my husband--but instead realized that for the first time in a long while that we had some money in the bank account (from the sale of my beater car, which the husband bought and sold without my involvement). While my husband slept I called the airlines and was able to secure a flight to my parent's home in the Midwest. When business hours commenced, I called the telephone number of a doctor that performed abortions in a building adjacent to the one my son was born in.
I was able to make an appointment for the next day. I had the abortion and was on a flight out later that night.
I left behind violence, misery, and possible death for me and my child(ren). That's the story simply stated. There are many more details that flesh out the true horror of my life then and the agony of having to make a choice that would forever bring me great sadness-- even though it was the right choice for me at that time.
And this much I know is true. Women have a reproductive time span of about 30 years. Birth control fails, people make errors in judgment, there are as many reasons for having abortion as there are women who seek help terminating a pregnancy. Every third woman has an abortion sometime in her life. It may not be called an abortion--it may be a scraping of the lining of the uterus--a D & C*--or it may be the "traditional" abortion. Or perhaps that "third woman" isn't a woman at all but a girl--a victim of incest or conversely, parental uninvolvement and non-supervision. Maybe that third woman or girl couldn't get access to her abortion rights and was forced to attempt to terminate the pregnancy herself. Perhaps she even survived.
*This procedure often does not involve a fetus but some doctors, at the patient's request (in early pregnancy) have performed the procedure with the goal of terminating pregnancy.
I do not have a single regret that I left the waste of flesh that I called "husband." I "do" regret having had to have an abortion--and I sometimes think if the fetus had been allowed to turn into a baby, what that child would now be like.
This issue isn't pleasant but it needs to be addressed--over and over again, until one day perhaps it won't be an issue.
It goes without saying that no one is pro abortion. No one. But many of us, indeed the majority, do not want to lose the legal right to choice.
The Abortion Question
OP-ED COLUMNIST
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: April 7, 2004
LISBON — To understand what might happen in America if President Bush gets his way with the Supreme Court, consider recent events in Portugal.
Seven women were tried this year in the northern Portuguese fishing community of Aveiro for getting abortions. They were prosecuted — facing three-year prison sentences — along with 10 "accomplices," including husbands, boyfriends, parents and a taxi driver who had taken a pregnant woman to a clinic.
The police staked out gynecological clinics and investigated those who emerged looking as if they might have had abortions because they looked particularly pale, weak or upset. At the trial, the most intimate aspects of their gynecological history were revealed.
This was the second such mass abortion trial lately in Portugal. The previous one involved 42 defendants, including a girl who had been 16 at the time of the alleged abortion.
Both trials ended in acquittals, except for a nurse who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for performing abortions.
Portugal, like the U.S., is an industrialized democracy with a conservative religious streak, but the trials have repulsed the Portuguese. A recent opinion poll shows that people here now favor abortion rights, 79 percent to 14 percent. In a sign of the changing mood, Portugal's president recently commuted the remainder of the nurse's sentence. There's a growing sense that while abortion may be wrong, criminalization is worse.
"It's very embarrassing," said Sandy Gageiro, a Lisbon journalist who covered the trials. "Lots of reporters came and covered Portugal and said it had this medieval process."
Portugal offers a couple of sobering lessons for Americans who, like Mr. Bush, aim to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The first is that abortion laws are very difficult to enforce in a world as mobile as ours. Some 20,000 Portuguese women still get abortions each year, mostly by crossing the border into Spain. In the U.S., where an overturn of Roe v. Wade would probably mean bans on abortion only in a patchwork of Bible Belt states, pregnant women would travel to places like New York, California and Illinois for their abortions.
The second is that if states did criminalize abortion, they would face a backlash as the public focus shifted from the fetus to the woman. "The fundamentalists have lost the debate" in Portugal, said Helena Pinto, president of UMAR, a Portuguese abortion rights group. "Now the debate has shifted to the rights of women. Do we want to live in a country where women can be in jail for abortion?"
Mr. Bush and other conservatives have chipped away successfully at abortion rights, as Gloria Feldt notes in her new book, "The War on Choice." That's because their strategy has been to focus on procedures like so-called partial-birth abortion and on protecting fetal rights. The strategy succeeds because most Americans share Mr. Bush's aversion to abortion.
As do I.
Like most Americans, I find abortion a difficult issue, because a fetus seems much more than a lump of tissue but considerably less than a human being. Most of us are deeply uncomfortable with abortion, especially in the third trimester, but we still don't equate it with murder.
That's why it makes sense to try to reduce abortions by encouraging sex education and contraception. The conservative impulse to teach abstinence only, without promoting contraception, is probably one reason the U.S. has so many more abortions per capita than Canada or Britain.
Portugal's experience suggests that while many people are offended by abortion on demand, they might be even more troubled by criminalization of abortion.
"Forbidding abortion doesn't save anyone or anything," said Sonia Fertuzinhos, a member of the Portuguese Parliament. "It just gets women arrested and humiliated in the public arena."
The upshot is that many Portuguese seem to be both anti-abortion and pro-choice. They are morally uncomfortable with abortion, especially late in pregnancies, but they don't think the solution is to arrest young women for making agonizing personal choices to end their pregnancies.
As one sensible woman put it in her autobiography: "For me, abortion is a personal issue — between the mother, father and doctor." She added, "Abortion is not a presidential matter."
President Bush, listen to your mother.
I simply avoid him--which isn't that hard to do as he rarely removes his derrière from the Barc-o-lounger in which he sits, in front of the television, sports station tuned in, volume at max. It's a very small home--cottage actually, on a lake near the Wisconsin border, so there's really no truly getting away from anyone. 
I partook of a little weed in my bedroom bathroom, all doors closed, fan on, standing on the toilet seat, just below the ceiling fan (candles lit in the BR--still feeling guilty). Bad Mom. I don't drink at home (only do about five times a year at some type of gathering) or smoke cigarettes. I do curse, but I try not to. Bad MOM :sigh:.
Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2004 3:25 pm Post subject: Status of your day
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am having big fun *insert slight sarcasm* today, oh yes.
Housecleaning is a given, but I have much more fun in store.
Soon, I will pack my son's buddy, who is staying overnight so his parents can go to see a Prince concert, into the car to get my oldest son from work. We'll come back and shortly thereafter drive to get my youngest son from a schoolmate's home where is is working on a "to-scale" model of the arctic area of a zoo.
Meanwhile, my dog is going absolutely nutz because she wants to make friends with the boy here and he's afraid of dogs, even though this one has been trying to make friends with him since we rescued her almost 4 years ago.
Most likely tonight the two twelve year olds will want nothing to do with me, so perhaps I'll watch some more of the "Firefly" DVD collection that my brother lent me. It's a cancelled TV show from Joss Whedon, same guy that did Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. It flopped terribly but has a cult following (surprise) and supposedly has been given the green light to be made into a movie. I find that a bit of a stretch, 'cause at this point having watched about half the series on DVD, I'm not thrilled. But my brother keeps asking what I think of it so I'm going to finish the series just to make him go away (kidding). Maybe by then I'll see more potential as I do realize that both Buffy and Angel took 2-3 seasons to hit their stride. This one never got that chance.
My, what a big exciting life I have . Home alone tonight as spouse is working.
Let's see what trouble me, the two boys, and the dog can get into.
. 
