Grabapple.net

During my semester abroad sophomore year, I knew a guy named Amos* who it was impossible to hate. He was a hard-drinking, partying sardonic type, smart but mostly funny in an extremely bitter way that I’ve always found attractive. We all partied because we were all giddy at being legal and away from home, and because English beer was actually tasty. (some of it…). But Amos got a little drunk every day, and blind-drunk at least once a week. During a school-sponsored boat tour, he got so out of control that the bobbies were called and he was escorted off the boat to dry out. When he went with a bunch of others to Amsterdam during fall break for the obvious reasons, he apparently narrowly escaped a knife fight. None of which seemed to faze him.

A few years ago, my school’s alumni magazine came my way, and I was surprised to see that Amos had become an insurance underwriter.

As you may know, I work for a Giant Insurance Company (That You’ve Heard Of), in the marketing department. And I had forgotten all about Amos until a week or so ago when I had to talk to a guy in our underwriting department. GICTYHO is so big that I barely know the people on my floor, much less the ones across the complex, so I had never met any of the people I emailed all day. I hardly ever call people, because I hate talking on the phone, and because I am paranoid about getting things in writing when it comes to work. Anyway, I had to call Underwriter Guy to demand he send me something, and instead of being a gruff, actuarial sort, he sounded…friendly. Goofy, eager, and most sad, desperate to talk to someone. I could not get him off the phone, without finally pulling the “wellthanksgottagobye” routine.

Huh, I thought. Weird.

And then today, with a different Underwriter Guy…same thing. Desperate attempts to spin out small talk into smaller talk, anything to keep me from hanging up. And while I do, indeed, have a sexy voice, that wasn’t it. They weren’t asking me for my cell number. They just didn’t want to be alone.

And now I have this vision of the underwriting department as some dim hellish place where no one talks to anyone and life is grim beyond description. So much so that talking to a gruff writer from Marketing is like manna from heaven. And I thought of poor Amos, and realized that he’d either found another job by now, or drunk himself to death.

…and I’ve been the bad absent blogger. I think it’s just that a lot of what’s in my head hasn’t been post-able. We’ve been sick, we’ve been busy, blah blah boring cakes. February is like that though…a long blah month with Valentine’s Day a sort of forced-happy-but-not-really holiday in the middle. Never cared for Valentine’s all that much; I like chocolate, but not creme-filled, and I’m not a huge fan of roses, and pink and lacy isn’t ever me. So we mostly didn’t do much, except Matt did make me a hysterically funny homemade card, which helped.

Nathan is out of all things 2T entirely, and a lot of the 3T shirts. At 27 months old. Yikes. But he is still so cute, as you can see from his photo above. (No, I didn’t take that, wish I did; we hired a professional.) I’ve taught him how to do some dancing, or at least rapid stomping to music, which is of course adorable. Then tonight I grabbed his hands to make him dance *with* me, and he just thought that was hilarious. Two people dancing! Holding hands! Whatever will she think of next, that wacky mama! He laughed so hard he stopped dancing and fell to the floor, hanging from my arms, and of course, that was funny too.

As for me, I’m busy at work and still talking to my therapist, and that’s all I know. I’m pretty depressed at the moment for reasons too complicated to describe, but at least I know I’m trying. For February, that’s usually the best I can do.

Are women insane?

I ask because if you think about the question of abortion, eventually you have to confront this question too. You have to confront the inexplicable, overwhelmingly documented willingness of women to hurt themselves to escape an unwanted pregnancy.

At least you do if you are privileged or naive enough to not be able to imagine the fear and desperation that led to this:

The first month of my internship was spent on Ward 41, the septic obstetrics ward. Yes, it’s hard to believe now, but in those days, they had one ward dedicated exclusively to septic complications of pregnancy.

I will never forget the jaundiced woman in liver and kidney failure, in septic shock, with very severe anemia, whose life we were unable to save.

This is an account by a man who became, and remains, a Canadian abortion provider. He saw this nightmare of suffering and decided to do what he could to make it stop. Those who disagree with him have twice made violent attempts on his life, and yet he continues to provide abortions.

Is he a monster? I can’t believe so. Do I want the septic obstetrics ward to exist again? No. If we ban abortion, will it? I think the answer is pretty unequivocally yes.

Do I still feel uneasy about abortion? Yes.

Which is why I’m pro-choice.

When I was vehemntly (though never violently) anti-abortion/pro-life (pick your tag), I could not understand the women in those wards, or the ones who used bleach and coathangers and mangled themselves so horribly. Why not just have the baby? Give it up for adoption?

But then, I have never lived in a family that believed in honor killings. I was not alive at a time when women who were labeled “promiscuous” were sometimes locked up in asylums. Even if I had gotten pregnant, there was little risk of my being shipped off to a “home” to give birth among strangers and then give up my child forever, no matter what I wanted. I was not a woman who already had other children and who worried about feeding another. I am white; if I wanted to give up a baby, it would probably find a home, so long as it was healthy. Were I black or hispanic, it could be trickier. Were my child disabled, trickier still.

Do you know that in an abusive relationship, one of the most common precipitating events for a man to murder a woman is her pregnancy? Or that conversely, surveys of teenage girls in relationships found that some of their boyfriends attempted to control and impregnate them by throwing away their birth control pills?

When I was younger, I did not think about the fact that the history of our civilization is one in which women have mostly been property, not people. And so women’s bodies, even now, remain a battleground. The ability to reproduce is power, and there are still those who think it’s a power women cannot be trusted to administer properly.

And so the battle over abortion is really about power, down at the root, not about stopping a practice that may be inhumane to later-term fetuses. Even I got sucked in to the idea that “conception=person” an idea that does not survive even the smallest bit of thought. An 8-cell blastocyst is genetically unique, yes, but it’s not a person. A woman’s own body rejects multiple embryos before and after implantation, often before she knows she is pregnant. That does not make her body a murderer. That doesn’t make every period a crime scene.

Later-term abortions are more troubling, because we don’t really know where or how to draw the line. They are also more rare (about 1.4% per the CDC), and much more likely to be the result of actual medical problems with the fetus.

I know from my own experience talking to other women that most women seeking abortions want to do so as soon as possible, before they show, before they begin feeling any investment in the fetus. Third trimester women are not lining up for the procedure willy-nilly, if for no other reason than that if you’ve gone through the first two trimesters, you’ve already suffered whatever backlash you’re going to suffer, and giving birth in itself is probably small potatoes. Even if you have a medical emergency, you’re much more likely to get a c/section than any kind of termination at that stage.

I am troubled by the idea of an abortion that takes place when a fetus might feel pain. As of now, the American Medical Association maintains that the nerve and brain structure to feel pain is not in place until the 39th week, which is at term. But still, like a lot of people, I don’t want to be party to any kind of inhumane death of another person.

And so, I’m pro-choice.

But wait!

Oh yes. Because the supreme ironic failure of the pro-life movement is this; countries with easy access to abortion do not have higher rates of abortion than those where it is illegal. What does go down, dramatically, when abortion is outlawed? Women’s safety. Illegal abortions are incredibly dangerous. But women seek them out anyway. Are they insane? Or perhaps, are they driven by the need to save their own life or their children’s lives, or simply to exercise some control over their own bodies?

I don’t believe the organized pro-life forces actually care about real women and children. Otherwise, why would they have also been anti-contraception, anti-pro-child legislation (medical care, daycare, aid for the poor) that enables women to raise children? They cannot even support treatments like Plan B (which prevents an embryo from implanting) or RU-486 (which facilitate very early non-surgical abortion), despite the fact that they are much less ethically dicey than surgical abortions. Because that would mean returning to women some form of control over their own sexual and reproductive decisions. It would mean trusting women, even supporting them, even valuing them. And the pro-life movement doesn’t value them. It doesn’t care if they end up back in the septic ward, if their already-born kids end up orphaned on the street. It doesn’t care. Its attitudes are shaped by ancient religious hangups that have no more relevance for American government than rules about meat on Fridays, no matter how many nicey-nice words it uses. And women die as a result.

To the younger me, the pro-life position (minus the anti-contraception bit) was more “pure” more clear-cut, and therefore better. But human life is none of those things. An ideological purity that causes massive suffering, abortion septic wards, and more abortions is not a better system than a realistic, nuanced, approach that reduces suffering, reduces the need for abortions, and gives women the dignity and power over their own bodies that they deserve.