My personal take -

[kyburg]

So three, maybe four states, are certain they can outlaw a medical procedure.

I'm curious to see how they plan to enforce it. Really. I'm old enough to remember the world before Roe v. Wade, and I have a mother who was a medical professional since 1942. They patched up the women who presented after the illegal abortions they obtained - if they were done improperly, of course - they had entire wards devoted to the problem.

You heard more about the victims than anyone who actually did the procedures, of course.

I grew up with the idea that if I didn't want to be faced with the issue of abortion, I needed to not get in the position of desiring one.

I was the girl who sat on the edge of the theater seat if a boy put his arm around me.

I never dated. I never attended a school dance, a prom or a party. Of any kind.

I learned to wear makeup in theater arts class - and it was stage makeup. Street makeup? No. To this day, I don't wear *anything* on a daily basis, not even lip gloss.

I lost my virginity at 24, married the fellow at 25 and had no other sex partners until my current husband.

When it came time to be certified by DCFS for adoption, they had concerns about us because they didn't think we were "intimate" correctly and sent us to therapy.

Careful doesn't begin to cut it.

And no, I've never thought anyone had to do what I did to be "moral." It was what I decided to do - a personal choice.

I also know that there is more than one reason to terminate a pregnancy - some of them entire valid for the safety of the woman, and the possibility of future children down the road.

So. You want to make it illegal.

Roll the clock back.

Okay.

Put back all the homes for wayward teens and unwed mothers. Put back the reasonable adoption statues that would allow placements. Make money available for public adoption agencies to house, feed and care for women who want to place their children, but don't want to deal with a private agency that has an agenda. They existed. They don't, anymore. Make it possible for women to complete pregnancies safely - make it illegal to evict, starve or refuse health care to a pregnant woman. Make it illegal to fire one.

C'mon. This is just the start, huh? Let's make the whole abortion industry die of starvation. C'mon.

What.

..

You make it such a crime to have a working female gender. It makes you kind of want to have your tits removed and your zorch sewn shut. Paying me 25% less over a lifetime wasn't enough, huh?

Comments

[bigbigtruck.livejournal.com]

Hey, you sound like me in high school & college. I was so terrified of pregnancy that I came into the game much too late, with too little trust and too much fear.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

Good grief... me too. I'm about to hit perimenopause, and the thought still terrifies me. Worse now, because I found out that my uterus is oddly shaped, and getting pregnant isn't something I want to do if I want to survive.

Not good. I'm celibate, but I am going to see about getting an Essure procedure. My insurance should cover it.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

If that is so FEKKING normal, how did I end up in sex therapy?!

*GRRRS*

(BTW, that last interview? SW agreed we'd been put through the mill, but we had too many red flags in our history...she said. Prior abuse, neglect, etc. Holy merde. Is there ever going to be a time I'm alive when I won't be damaged goods?!)

[moropus.livejournal.com]

The number one reason I've never gotten pregnant in 20 years of marriage is we never had sex frequently enough to cause a pregancy. Also my hormones are so screwy, I'm not sure if I could have gotten pregnant if I had sex every day. I have not enough of one hormone and too much something else. I can't remember which. My periods were insanely erradic and painful until I passed 40, and suddenIy they went normal. Who knows?

Eventually, I decided my life was too complicated to involve caring for a baby, and called doctors until I found one who would give me a tubal ligation without having children first if my husband consented. So about 10 years ago, my husband legally consented to allow me the right to do what I chose to do with my body.

Both of us found it humiliating and disgusting. Suddenly, I'm a child and he was my guardian. He was also ashamed that he was required to do this.

Before the 'consent' appointment, we had many long discussions on how the 'consent' did not affect us personally and that we would never try to control each other. We never had, and never will try to control each other. This ugly 'consent' appointment gave both of us the screaming heebie-jeebies, even though the staff was very quiet and professional. My body is my own. My husband 'consented' to that. Before the 'consent' he got down on one knee and begged me not to take it personally or not to hate him for doing the 'consenting' even though I asked him to 'consent', so I could have the procedure.

Our rights as women are very precarious. They can be taken away without fanfare. First I was the property of my father. The day of my surgery, I was the property of my husband. When I'm old, I won't have a son, so I imagine I will be the property of one of my nephews.

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

*blink* *blink*

*looks utterly incredulous*

The doctor said that you needed your husband's consent? As if your uterus weren't yours, but was under the control of your husband? That's... that's ludicrous. (I understand requiring that your husband be notified... just as I understand a hospital notifying the next of kin before any operation. But I don't understand requiring consent.)

I wonder whether anyone has written a story with the genders reversed -- requring a male to get his wife's consent before an operation -- to help show just how ridiculous the concept is.

[wednesday]

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that I can't afford to emigrate to the US without first getting sterilized.

[bigbigtruck.livejournal.com]

We can be tubal twins - I'm getting mine done as soon as the car foo is paid off. I was going to wait until 30, but why take that risk?

[wednesday]

I am all kinds of down with that.

It still upsets the hell out of me that, in late 2004, I practically begged for sterilization and they *wouldn't do it*, even though I'd been contraindicated for the Pill, condoms broke constantly (internal configuration issues; long story), and diaphragms/cups triggered an N-9 allergy but fierce. They weren't then willing to stick in a Mirena or other IUD/S, either. Meanwhile, David managed to get a referral after some badgering ("well, okay, but they'll say no," and they said yes). What does it take to convince someone that women are not such slaves to their hormones that they'll always change their minds on this?

[bigbigtruck.livejournal.com]

See, that would require acknowledging that women are people.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

And can decide for themselves. Oh, and pay their own way through life. That sort of thing.

Yeah, I remember those days.

[bigbigtruck.livejournal.com]

those days must have come before 1990, because I sure don't remember them...

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

The seventies may have sucked some, but it was a great time to turn 10 - and end them turning 20.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Mom had her tubes tied after my brother - he was born when she was almost 40. And even so, she didn't think it was worth risking after that.

That's after receiving fertility treatments prior. There had been a 9 year split between first and second child, with two miscarriages in there.

You keep asking until you get. That's what I suggest. Always.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

If these forced-birthers have their way, we should enact laws that add taxes to pay for the upbringing of the unwanted children, and lifeling medical care for the mothers who were forced to bring malformed or nonviable babies to term.

There are real reasons for late term abortions. Hydrocelaphy. Anencephaly. Sirenesis. Cyclopia. Limb-body wall malformations. Acardial twins.

There are websites with illustrations that will give you nightmares. They used to call such errors 'monsters'.

I don't think we should have our tits removed, or our undercarriages sewn shut. We should instead start punishing men. Make the men feel the pain. Hit them in the pocketbook, make them scared to slip the seeds into a fertile female. Make them pay the price. It takes two to tango.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what the government of Switzerland did to its population - they put it to them. If you want to outlaw abortion, you have to pay for the outcome. Or - you can okay it up to a point and not take the hit for it.

What do you think they did?

80% of a 30% catholic country voted in favor of legalized abortion up to 12 weeks gestation. Period.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Make them PAY?! Don't make me laugh.

You try to collect child support. Go ahead.

[kuangning]

Amen to that. They couldn't get Richard to show up in court at all, couldn't even FIND him, let alone extract child support from him. Robin's paying but only because they already had him after promising him sole custody once I was out of the way.

[moropus.livejournal.com]

Make who pay? My sister has had so many men, she doesn't even know who the father of one of them is. She's not alone in this. Every watch Maury try to help the find their baby's daddy?

All kinds of sadness here...

[yasha-chan.livejournal.com]

Why can't birth control and sterilization be government sanctioned and provided cheaply and easily? Why is sex a bad thing that people must be punished for having unless they meet a certain criteria? And why is it such a taboo subject, yet so blatantly and repetatively used in the media and hyped up to be forced into everybody's mind constantly?

Why do we promote ignorance as an answer?

Hearing stuff like this scares me. I don't give a shit what you believe, but have some goddamn tolerence and common sense people.

When you make abortion illegal more people die. People either find themselves a back alley or long-distance abortion, or they try to do it themselves because they feel they have no alternative.

Forcing women to carry a dead thing inside of them for months is utterly abhorrent. I can't understand how such a monsterous concept was accepted, nay, encouraged. Gdsf.

The systems in place for families under the poverty line don't work. Adoption is discouraged in this country, because it's not pwecious unles it's your own and unless you're broken and can't have your own it's "just weird" to adopt. Foster care in this country is an appauling joke.

Let's see some pro-lifers put their money where their "beliefs" are, show a little charity and do something to save the millions of kids out there that need food, and shelter, and someone to give a damn about them.

But it's still never okay to take away someone's rights, ESPECIALLY something as personal and important as their reproductive rights.

Re: All kinds of sadness here...

[bigbigtruck.livejournal.com]

Forcing women to carry a dead thing inside of them for months is utterly abhorrent.

Some doctors even here in Austin don't think so. "Stupid bitch had the gall to miscarry; I'll just refuse to give her proper treatment!'

Re: All kinds of sadness here...

[yasha-chan.livejournal.com]

Why are the people who usually do things like that almost always men?

I don't see many women, regardless of their beliefs and political affiliations, going THAT far. I won't say that it couldn't happen, because I know some of these people backing these bills that passed are female (the worst part...)

Why the hell do they care about a dead fetus anyway? Someone went into an in-depth explaination of why really hardcore Catholics forbid it (using the case of a woman whose fetus had died), but for some of the other sects I just don't get it.

Not that I think anyone's religious beliefs should have anything to do with our government, of course.

Re: All kinds of sadness here...

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Obviously, you have not run into the women who think that stuff only happens to "girls who deserve it."

Yanno. The ones "prettier than them, sluttier than them, stupider than them..." The list is endless.

Bad Things happen to Other People.

In this case, it's not just the men doing it to us.

We got a lot of women doing to themselves as well.

Think about it a moment. Who can actually get pregnant? 50% of the world? Not really. Women can only get pregnant reliably for about 20 years of a 70-100 year lifespan. And not all of those between say, 13 and 33 are fertile to begin with.

So there are a LOT more people who can't get pregnant, than those who can.

I'd like to discount the envy factor here, but I'm also afraid I can't.

Re: All kinds of sadness here...

[yasha-chan.livejournal.com]

Yep, you pegged me good. I've never seen that behavior, but I think if some of my other female family members had lived, I would have experienced that kind of attitude.

That said, I still can't really understand it and it scares me because that line of thinking is so ignorant and so destructive. It frightens me such thinking is used in the creation of laws that govern the health of ALL women.

I guess it's just more evidence of the deep, true ignorance in this country, and the way people have been trained to cut off their empathy and find an enemy in almost everything.

[blukat.livejournal.com]

Well if Bush and the rest of the Neocons could make a buck off of abortions, then this wouldn't even be on the table. But for them it's a moral issue/phoney voter appeasement (insert BIG laugh here)

At least Senator Frisk has to be a bit worried.

Nothing like being born a woman. Hum, wonder if they are going to start saying that female genital mutilation in Africa is A-Okay?

SAY IT, SISTER!! SAY IT!!

[ionotter.livejournal.com]

CAN I GET AN "AMEN!!"?!?

I think we should all get some wire hangers, stretch them out, put a wooden dowel on either side, sneak up behind these idiots and twist them around their necks. It'd be the ultimate irony!

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

You want to see something really, truly scary, try reading this post.
http://misia.livejournal.com/955616.html
I love misia's other posts, but this is one of the hardest things I have ever seen, if you follow the link, try reading the original information there.
misia suggests archiving it for future reference.
http://mollysavestheday.blogspot.com/2006/02/for-women-of-south-dakota-abortion.html
Then read the comments.
OFG, the comments say it all, and she edited out some of the trolls.
I could not get through it all. Could not bear it.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

BTW, one of the more recent comments there makes some very good points that it would do a whole lot more good to spend that money on organizing trained professionals and arrange for scholarships for women who can't afford to travel.
That's here.
http://thinkwoman.blogspot.com/2006/03/gut-check.html

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

*reads* Sadly, none of this is new information to me.

Yeah. I knew all of that already - and to be honest, if they think that's not already going on without someone knowing it (or needing to know), they're bigger fools than I thought.

[monkeyfruit.livejournal.com]

Spot on!

[moropus.livejournal.com]

http://www.sisterzeus.com/Abortif.htm

[betnoir.livejournal.com]

Put back all the homes for wayward teens and unwed mothers. Put back the reasonable adoption statues that would allow placements. Make money available for public adoption agencies to house, feed and care for women who want to place their children, but don't want to deal with a private agency that has an agenda. They existed. They don't, anymore. Make it possible for women to complete pregnancies safely - make it illegal to evict, starve or refuse health care to a pregnant woman. Make it illegal to fire one.

If I could be reasonably assured that this is what was on the table in exchange for overturning Roe v. Wade, I might not have my nose so outta joint about it all.

Sadly, that's not the case.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Make it illegal! Make it illegal! Make a statement!

Dude. If I thought this was going to actually do something about the issue, I wouldn't be so pissed off either.

Abortions end when women don't need them. Period.