One Small Voice: More nuanced abortion debate needed

When my husband and I had been married for four years, we decided it was time to start our family, because we’d been relocated from Pittsburgh to the Detroit area and knew we’d be settled there for a while.

Getting pregnant wasn’t easy, so by the time the rabbit died our first child was one very-wanted baby.

When he was born six weeks premature, with a ruptured colon and advanced peritonitis and a slim chance of survival, we were devastated.  A child, so beloved already, had a frightening prognosis.  To say the least, it was sobering.

He spent six weeks at Children’s Hospital in Detroit, to which I commuted daily from the second day after his birth.  During the endless hours spent in the NICU, I met many other parents of premature infants.  The ensuing 42 years since then have caused a blurring of my memories of the countless IVs, colostomy bag changes and breathing “rest periods.” But one baby in particular, in that same NICU at the time, remains a vivid memory that came to represent for me a whole raft of children born in those days: drug addicted infants.

This child weighed one pound six ounces and could rest in the palm of an adult hand.  He was dwarfed by the artificial environment of his incubator.  He quaked constantly from the effects of withdrawal from crack, and his chances of survival were even worse than those of my own baby.

No one ever visited him.  The only human touches he knew were those of the neonatal nurses and the Catholic sister who came around to bring comfort to those parents who did haunt the NICU.  If he survived, he was destined to become a ward of the court, placed in foster care, and probably would never know either of his biological parents.  If he survived, the nurses said, he would have serious developmental issues as well as any of a wide array of physical ailments to challenge his existence.  The future didn’t bode well for him.

Our child survived and thrived.  He had everything going in his favor for that survival.  He had a mother who was not an addict.  He had had excellent prenatal care.  After his birth he had great doctors, and parents who visited daily and held him for hours.  In spite of those periods when he stopped breathing, he would have no disabilities to hinder his growing up.  The future did bode well for him.

I honestly don’t remember what happened to that other anonymous baby.  Nick was “promoted” from the NICU as he improved, so I no longer had any contact with the little, struggling boy.  But from time to time I can’t help but wonder how his life turned out, or didn’t, and whether or not it would have been better on many levels if he had been aborted rather than subjected to all the extraordinary medical interventions he received.

Abortion is a very touchy subject.  Some people on both sides of the issue believe that their opinions are the only valid ones, and that their arguments are indisputable.  I wish I could be so sure, so as to be comfortable with taking a firm stance either way.  But all I have right now is the truth that abortion is legal in the United States of America, and the fact that, for some people, abortion is, for them, the only realistic option, no matter how abhorrent nor how hard arrived at.

Among the problems, for me, in overturning Roe v. Wade, are the sorry state of health care, the lack of reliable human reproduction education, the inaccessibility to preventive birth control, the lack of societal commitment to raising unwanted children, and the too-prevalent, Puritanical, head-in-the-sand attitudes toward human sexuality, particularly where teenagers are concerned.

All of these serve, to me, as roadblocks to enacting a total ban on abortion.

Whether or not people want to admit it, women have for millenia practiced forms of birth control and the elimination of unwanted pregnancies.  How and by what means women controlled their bodies and natural functions varied, and most often (until the 20^th century were the province of women who were midwives or well-informed lay people.

The earliest documented descriptions of birth control come from two ancient papyruses, the Ebers  from 1550 BC and the Kahun from 1850 BC. Both document barrier and spermicidal methods of preventing conception.

Abortion, also dating back to antiquity, was largely the province of women, using such methods as extreme physical activity, irritant leaves, fasting, girdling of the abdomen, and bloodletting, until the advent of semi-surgical methods of using piercing tools or methods of external extraction, followed by more modern surgical methods.  Many cultures identified and used naturally occurring abortifacients derived from plants and roots, their extracts and oils.

Just as sex is as old as humankind, so is the desire to control or terminate its results.

The reality that women continue to seek relief from pregnancy speaks to the fact that, even in our wonderful 21^st century, an unwanted baby may create such distress that women are compelled to kill them rather than carry them to term and beyond.

As another contributor to this publication has pointed out, modern technology all but confirms that life begins at conception. There are those who would disagree based on interpretations of when a cluster of cells becomes a human being, but these arguments are academic, dependent on individual beliefs in such concepts as the human soul.

An amateur essayist of Townbroadcast has posed to me the question of when humankind lost an alleged long-held truth that a mother will always offer up her life for her baby’s. This question is flawed for a couple of reasons. First, it is not a universal truth that all mothers will give up their lives for their children. Second, this observation has traditionally held that the mother giving up her life is doing so for a child already born and threatened by an outside danger. 

That contributor also has asked for a list of instances when killing an unborn child is acceptable.  The request for such a definitive list is unreasonable, because the reason for every abortion will not follow an unwavering formula.  The reasons for ending a pregnancy are as varied and complicated as the women (and their partners) who seek abortions.  And who decides the validity of those reasons?  Who determines what is acceptable? Not him, and certainly not me.

If I had my druthers this would be a world where women had free access to birth control.  This would be a world where we treated reproductive health matter-of-factly, without religious undertones or judgement.  It would be a world where incest or rape or child marriage did not result in traumatic pregnancies for women of any age, race, or ethnicity.  It would be a world in which a child born with severe mental or physical disadvantages and his parent(s) would receive generous financial help and moral support.  It would be a world in which impoverished women weren’t penalized for an unwanted pregnancy with a life of continued poverty and no means of escape.  And it would be a world where adoptions were less complicated, less discriminatory, and less punitive to the women surrendering their children.

Unfortunately, those criteria seem to be impossible dreams. 

Then there are the situations that don’t fit into any of those categories, like aborting still-births, or babies whose births will condemn them and their caregivers to months, if not years, of pain at once physical, emotional, and financial, only to end in certain death anyway.

I vacillate in my feelings toward abortion just as I do toward capital punishment and euthanasia.  Death is a very permanent condition, and it should not be entered into lightly.

Do I believe that the opinions of women about abortion should carry more weight than the opinions of men?  Resoundingly, yes.  Women will always have more at stake on every level, and will understand better than men the consequences of such a decision..

But do I have the arrogance to make abortion the black and white issue some would prefer it to be?  No, I do not.

Regardless of one’s opinion, no one has the ultimate right to pass a universal verdict on this until all other shades of grey have been successfully addressed and solved.

So how about we cut through the bullshit and roll up our sleeves and make some positive strides toward making abortion an obsolete alternative?  Then we can tackle the undoing of Roe v. Wade, responsibly.