on the other hand, I’ve made my own choice; I don;t assist anyone in having an abortion, though I will tell them where t get the care they need if they do feel it;s the only option. there is a whole spectrum within :”pro-coice” and I got as bit bothered listening to a radio program a few weeks ago where the male, progressive” commentator was adamantly sure that ” a fetus is not a person” and that any guilt, remorse, or anmbivalence felt by a woman choosing abortion was an artifact of a right-wing and CHurch-uy guilt trip.

it’s way, way more complex than that, and I was driving home from working in Santa Rosa at the time, so I was not in a position to try to call in and say that all points of view needed to be respected here.

looking back at the infertility with which I grappled from age 22 or so to age 38 when I finally had a baby naturally – I have to say that it was probably a gioft of sorts in my sexually active teen eyars – I suspect that I would have had a newly-legal abortion ahd I ebcome pregnant as a teen, and that I would ahve regretted it greatly a few years later. and I don;t ahve a church or family background that would lead me to feel that way – my parents are agnostic to atheistic jewish liberals, and my mother was quite open with me, ;ossibly too open, about her two ilelgal abortions before she ahd me, her eldest. (she was married to my fatehr at the time, I guess it just wasn;t the “:right time.” or something.)

all this being said, I am absolutely hrrified at the assassination of Dr Tiller. Late term abortions are pretty freaky and I don;t ever want to do one or assist at one. the best analogy I can give is that I am vegetarian, definitely not interested in raising animals for slaughter. I have good friends who are omnivorous and raise their own chickens and sheep and a milk cow otr two. (some are successful organic farmers, some homesteaders, urban and rural and in betweem.) I;ve made my choices about what to eat and what to kill based on what seems most congruent with my own values and ethics and spiritual understanding,. but I don;t go condemning my friends who rqaise animals for food, and I find some of the “meat is murder” folks to be incredibly rigid and moralistic in a way that cuts people off from understanding.

I wrote a poem about this, when a young woman I know went to a pro-choice rally, six months pregnant with “MY BABY IS PRO CHOICE” painted on her belly for all to see. I asked myself, “well, how do you know THAT?” if she means she is glad she had the choice to ahve this baby or not, well, sure, if she feels she knows what ehr baby-to-be feels about abortion, well…I calledthe poem EPISTEMOLOGY for exactly that reason.

I do sometimes have a difficult time understnad ing the logic of some strict vegans around me who can;t even share an office with someone who brings a cheese sandwich, who are strongly pro-coioce and thus get very huffy about the idea that a fetus is alive. seems to ne there’s a cognitive dissonance here. we all have to decide/choose what elvels of killing are acceptable…is it okay to euthanize disabled pets? healthy animals who ahve no home or who ahve developed behavior problenms that the petr’;s guardian can;t or won;t deal with? is it even acceptable to talk about whether a feetus feels pain? fear? and since they can die inside you, can we deny that theya re alive? is it okay to raise chickens and cows for the tqable on a small scale? on a larger one? can euthanbasia, a la Dr Kevorkian, be abused to get rid of people who are percieved as burdens? is a woman who has mixed feelings about a completed abortion, or misgivings about continuing and about discontinuing a surprise pregancy, really a brainwash victim for feeling what she feels? do good people sometiems choose practices very differnt from what other good people feel is right?

*sigh* it’s hard to learn to be human sometimes, but what choice do we have? the examined life IS the only one worth living.

that segues into a point i couldn’t quite shoehorn into the post–that women who do not wish to be pregnant have a right to “A life,” just as newborn babies do…to be born and raised unwanted or into extreme 3rd world poverty is not “a life,” and it is, imho, demonic to insist that children be born into situations likely to twist them.

in other words, the right to “a life” supersedes the “right to life”…….

at the same time, i have to recognize, from the experiences of women i have known, that abortion is not always an easy choice to make…the body is strongly cued to want to keep the pregnancy, even as the mind recognizes that the situation the baby would be born into is far from nurturing….at a more personal level, my daughter-in-law was quite young when she was carrying my grandson, and many of our “friends” suggested she get an abortion so she could” have a life”….she chose to keep him, and he just graduated from high school with honors and is going off to college on scholarship…wants to be a math/music teacher/musician, and i think he’s smart enough to do about anything he wants to do…but hey, i’m not objective, i’m his grandpa!…anyway, that just goes to show that it’s hard to predict the future…and that “freedom to chose” really does mean choice, not knee-jerk abortion…