Reply #108: Thanks, dancingalone

[TygrBright]

Through the sharing of stories like this we might, just might, rediscover the power that rose up and demanded something better. My family was Catholic, but my mother was turfed out of the Church in the early 60s for getting a divorce (gasp!) and she was a smart, determined woman who never completely guzzled the communion koolaid. So I was lucky enough to grow up asking questions, making up my own mind, and deciding that women were not some higher order of domestic livestock, but human beings with the same right to self-determination that men enjoyed.

However, I was always very wary of discussing any controversial issues with my father's mother, who seemed very much a full metal jacket Catholic. My father's family was very much the conventional blue-collar Democrat model family: pro-Civil Rights, pro-War on Poverty, would rather have cut off their hands than vote Republican, but very leery of the whole anti-war thing, the feminism thing, etc. Very disapproving of the whole hippie counterculture free love drugs and hedonism trend.

I naturally assumed that my grandmother would be a staunch anti-choice Catholic, and was I blown away when visiting her around the time of RvW, and she looked at a newspaper headline about the case, and nodded her head. "Good. Good thing." "But... but... Grandma... you *approve*?" I was going to add some snotty remark about what the Church would think, but I noticed that her eyes were filled with tears. And she told me a story very much like your mother's, except that it was a friend of hers in rural Wisconsin. AND a relation (cousin? I can't remember) in Milwaukee. Two. Died of botched illegal (in one case self-induced, hard to imagine the desperation...) abortions in the 1950s.

I'd already heard from my mother, who'd been a nurse and had encountered a good many women suffering the consequences of unsafe, illegal abortions, and my mind was made up. But to hear those stories from my grandmother had the same powerful jolt your post gave me. We tend to forget, I think, in our complacency over the last 30 years, what it was like when abortion was illegal and safe abortion was unavailable to any but the wealthy.

We forget the power of desperation and the determination of human nature. Any fool who thinks that making abortion illegal is going to keep abortion from happening is living in fairyland. They have forgotten the horror. They gloss over the pain in warm self-congratulatory anticipation about all the "innocent lives" they will be "saving" and ignore the lives and innocence they will extract in payment.

somberly,
Bright