the DawnEden abortion discussion, if it deserves that term

[claritylit]

I went to this woman's blog following a disgusted link from raincitygirl. She wrote the following entry in response to an article which states that a fetus at 28 weeks exhibits crying behavior: tears and what the pediatrician described as a trembling bottom lip

Comments

[raincitygirl]

Oh, and you know what made me pro-choice, oddly enough? Dirty Dancing. I was 11, 12 when it came out, and there was that subplot with the dancer who was pregnant and trying to get an abortion. Being 1963, it was illegal, and it got botched. The hero and heroine get there to find her haemmoraging in her room, refusing to allow anyone to call an ambulance because if she goes to hospital they'll call the cops. The heroine's father is a doctor, so she convinces him to patch the girl up and not tell anyone about it. He risks lose his license, his ability to support his family, if anyone finds out, all because he helped this girl who was bleeding out on her bed.

So, you know, it was all shocking and terrible, and I was thinking, "Wow, that's awful," but it was awful like news footage of a tragedy is awful, not like anything which could apply to anyone I knew. Then there's a scene later on where the hero and heroine visit the girl, who's recuperating, and she says the heroine's father gave her a checkup earlier that day and she can still have children. And she's thrilled about that. And it suddenly hit me, she COULDN'T have a baby at that time. It wasn't that she didn't like babies, it wasn't that she didn't want to be a mom someday, it was that she was in a situation where she had no other option. The father wouldn't marry her, which would have been the only respectable option in 1963. If she'd continued the pregnancy, she'd have been fired from her job as soon as she started showing, so pregnant and with no way to support her child. She had no option but to have an abortion.

It's funny. I can't even remember the characters' names (alhtough the heroine's dad was played by that guy from Law and Order and her mom by Emily Gilmore on Gilmore Girls) but I remember that subplot far more than I remember anything of the main plot of the movie. And that was when I realized that maybe girls who wanted to have kids someday had abortions too. That maybe it wasn't as simple as my 11 year old brain was saying: babies are cute, therefore anybody who doesn't want to have one is bad.

[claritylit]

Dirty Dancing
::snorts:: Children of the eighties. Life lessons from movies. It worked, though, didn't it?

Now that I think about it, I don't remember having any issues with abortion one way or the other. I don't remember specifics about a lot of my childhood for some reason. (Matt thinks that's a sign of abuse, except that he's *met* my parents and they sure didn't abuse me. I didn't spend any time at a friendly neighbor-man's house, either. Just a quirk of the brain chemistry, I guess.)

I think maybe because I learned about the birds and the bees from a children's book called Where Did I Come From, I didn't see the fetus as anything but a product of the parents. [OMG, that book is still in print!] And so if the parents decided they didn't want to grow and raise this product, that was their decision. Abortion has always seemed to me to be a fact of life rather than a choice or an issue. Some people aren't ready to or aren't able to have and support children. That's all. So if they make the choice to abort that child, well, it was *their* child.

DawnEden was talking about each child being genetically unique. I wonder what the odds are of parents having two children with the same genetics at different times. There are only so many genes in the human body, so it's not impossible. Only infinitely improbable, I think.

[raincitygirl]

I went through a stage of being very pro-life from the age of 8 or so until Dirty Dancing changed my life (snicker), mostly as a result of my mother's influence. She suffered three very bad miscarriages in a row, all in the first trimester, and was very upset over that.* She became passionately pro-life for a while, but eventually developed an attitude similar to mine. She's more adamant about how she really, really, REALLY thinks abortion at any stage is a bad thing, but nevertheless supports the pro-choice movement politically. Not that she sends them money, but she'd never vote for a pro-life candidate for office.

And yeah, each child is genetically unique, except for identical twins. But there are millions of sperm cells expelled every time a man has an orgasm. And even when one of those millions manages to meet up with an egg that's "ripe", four out of five fertilized eggs don't implant in hte uterus. So I'd say nature "wastes" a lot of potential life. And since God created nature (or Dawn Eden says so), then maybe she should take up with God why He's allowing this carnage to occur, why the miniature human beings (which is what she essentially considers the fertilized egg to be, hence her opposition to the morning-after pill) are being slaughtered on a whim by the body God designed.

*Finally her doctor sat her down and said, "Look, you've got three healthy kids. Your body can obviously no longer tolerate pregnancy, since you nearly died the last time. Quit trying to have another one unless you want to risk the kids you already have losing their mom.