Monday, January 22, 2007
(Mostly) The Abortions I Didn’t Have
filed under: Strange Bedfellows by Lux Nightmare
I was thirteen and I heard them talking about Plant Parenthood.
Or maybe Planet Parenthood: I wasn’t sure.
Half of me thought it might be a giant gardening store: a sort of Home Depot for green thumbs. The other half assumed that it was a store for new parents: Babies ‘R’ Us, with a futuristic theme.
It took me several years to realize they were saying Planned Parenthood.
It took me several years to realize that they were scheduling her abortion.
I have never had an abortion: this is half because I am smart, and half because I am lucky.
Smart, in that I’ve (mostly) been good about being on a birth control method while sexually active, in that I’ve (mostly) been good about using condoms, in that I’ve (mostly) chosen my partners wisely.
Lucky, in that the few times when I haven’t been smart, when I’ve lapsed and done something stupid (like the few weeks, at age seventeen, when – half convinced I was infertile – I relied on the withdrawal method) it hasn’t come back to bite me in the ass. I’ve never had to deal with the mess of an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy.
I have never had an abortion, but many of the women in my life have.
It’s easy to talk about abortion as an abstract concept: to form opinions about what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s acceptable, when you’re debating the issue in a classroom, far removed from the reality of what it is.
It’s different when your best friend calls you up to tell you that a condom has broken, and now she’s expecting: your best friend who can barely take care of herself, let alone a baby – who doesn’t even like babies, at that.
It’s different when the teenage girl with borderline personality disorder – the one you’ve been trying to get on birth control – finally self destructs just enough and winds up pregnant, in the custody of the city, and completely unable to function.
It’s different when you’re thirteen, and she’s seventeen, and she’s going to Plant Parenthood to have an operation.
It’s different when the faceless statistic of unplanned pregnancy has a face.
I have never had an abortion, and I sincerely hope I never do. But should my luck run out – should I wind up in the same place that some of the women in my life have, should I be faced with that decision – I want to know that my right to choose what happens to my body will remain intact, untouched by the lawmakers, untouched by the courts.
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