MUST READ----Throwing Out Progress - and Babies, Young Girls, and Lives

[bobbieinok]

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/9/1/164153/7417

Throwing Out Progress - and Babies, Young Girls, and Lives
By Ian MacLeod Fri Sep 01, 2006

Back in the early to mid-seventies I worked ambulance. I don’t know how many times I was called to the scene of an intelligent, lovely, sweet young girl, just barely a woman, who had been lied to by her parents and her boyfriend, not told anything worth knowing in school, and had gotten pregnant. Understand too, that these were not all poor kids in poor neighborhoods – many were middle-class, with two cars in the garage and two frightened parents standing by. Once I had to break down the bathroom door – the girl was bleeding to death (which she did), and was too ashamed to face her parents! Too often, by the time I got there, she was well on her way to bleeding out and dying, or already had died.

....

Basically, I could put a band-aid on something, give oxygen, and run like mad for the nearest hospital, hoping and praying I got her there in time. Often, ashamed, they had waited too long to call and were dead by they time we arrived. Two lives wasted, and a young girl was dead by torture. And you’d better believe, it was no easy death. I’d call it torture.

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There were other cases, too. I remember a twelve year old girl who lived in the projects. It was her third pregnancy. The building, room, bedsheets, and she were all filthy. She’d delivered, lost a lot of blood which she and the child, still connected by the umbilicus, were lying in. I couldn’t believe this kind of thing was happening in the richest country on earth.

Panicked, bleeding, hurting or dead young women and babies, shame that killed, and the religious right WANTED it that way! They thought it made for a good object lesson, and was a ‘just’ punishment. For being ignorant, for being human, for loving, for trusting, it was a just punishment!

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Now, Bush and his cronies want to go back to that: ignorance and lies taught in school, contraception unavailable, abortion unavailable. There’s more than one way to destroy lives; poverty is another way that’s slower than bleeding to death in agony, but it works just as well.

I can’t think of a better recipe for mass poverty and misery that never had to be at all. And if we sit back and do nothing about it, we are complicit in every scream, every pool of blood, every needless, wasteful, horrifying death. You guys who have such a hard time being there for a delivery: try being there for the bloody, agonized death of mother and child – when the mother often IS a child! – and facing the parents with no answers but, “She was too ashamed to tell you, probably too ashamed to tell anyone.”

more....

[Demeter]

1. Ah, the Good Old Days, That Golden Era of Yore, The Wish of the GOP

May their dreams be filled with death and despair.

[ismnotwasm]

2. And he's right

It still happens. The more the current crop of assholes in charge are allowed to dictate our policies, the more it WILL happen. Plenty of websites now for do-it-yourself abortion. I shudder in horror--literally to think of any woman of any age having to try this, in fear, or shame, or ignorance.

Thanks for posting this, very powerful.