...Then All Hell Broke Loose

I suppose the title "Be Careful What You Wish For" would be a bit obvious, but there we are.  

When I put together that last post, I was concerned that I would appear to be violating HIPAA for any patient I ever dealt with, even though I haven't knowingly dealt with any who were pregnant and in any sort of situation that might need to consider an abortion.

But there is the small matter of my own personal history.  I believe it must have been 1974 or so, a year after Roe V. Wade, when we were required to use up our black crayons making black wreaths out of newspaper to bring to a weekly all-school Mass to sadly commemorate the Roe V. Wade decision.  

Mind you, in 1974, I was 10 years old for most of it.  And at the then-rather-tender age of ten, I do not recall ever having heard the words rape, incest, abortion, or fetus in any sort of context at all.  I was brainwashed into thinking that abortion was murder, that those who committed abortion should be guilty of murder, and those who sought abortions were evil.

It's really rather neat and tidy when you're a sheltered, ignorant child.  As I have long persisted in believing, however, I do still understand that to deliver a particularly prejudiced viewpoint without ever exposing the victim to any other potential knowledge that could change that person's mind is likely to render the bedrock belief that one attempted to install would become, later, the ultimate in betrayal.

And right there, you have me.  For about ten years, from ten to twenty, you would have a real hard time talking to me and making any sort of sense of the situation.  I gleefully parroted the party line that abortion was wrong.

Then I became a more fully aware human being, an adult, and I suddenly came to the realization that unlike the rather tight reality I was raised in, there are situations where men who have the ability to father children choose not to assist the mothers of those children in raising families.  That is, there were situations where pregnancies arose outside of marriages, and in those cases, my particular viewpoint was to condemn that girl to nine months of sheer terror, agony, and discomfort, only to result in them being responsible for a baby - often when they were barely out of puberty themselves.

As long as I'm rolling out the whole "full disclosure" thing, I suppose the four years I spent in a Catholic High School were somewhat eye-opening.  I do mean to say that if there was any sort of pre-internet social media discussions going on about people, those discussions were happening about as far from me as they needed to be held so I wouldn't become aware of them.  Why?  Well, I expect that my rather ignorant and uncompromising ideas, which had not really encountered anything close to a challenge, were probably about as poorly formed as, well, a turd.  That is, one does not regularly look to form anything like a blob of shit into anything - at all.  

And that's where I sat, in the middle of an open field, pretty much.  Wide bearth was given.  But then, I kept living, and encountered, well, some challenges to those positions.  And as what so often happens to a house of cards when a slight puff of wind passes by, whoops, all fall down go boom.  

That's right.  None of my alleged beliefs had any sort of logic, conviction, or reason behind them.  They were installed by people looking to convince me, without reason or logic, that their position was correct.  I expect, at best, they sought to prevent me from encountering some of the more terrible things of this world, like the crimes that might cause a girl to become pregnant without her knowledge or willing participation.  So I suppose when I did start learning about those terrible crimes, I probably learned a lot more quickly than some that there are people out there who really need to be done away with.

So I'm sure some folks would call me an absolutist, which I really don't see as accurate.  I do, today, still view abortion as something that I really do not want to see happen if at all possible.  But being an adult who has had some experience in the world, I can now say, with full knowledge, that there are certainly some terrible situations where abortion does need to be something that is available because due to crime, medical reasons, or just flat out because the mother is not capable of delivering and raising a child, that should remain available.  

And so when I look around and see all the folks who might have been able to prevent this particular collection of idiots we rather laughingly call the "Supreme" Court are wringing their hands and saying "it wasn't obvious" all I'm going to say is "bullshit."  Especially for people like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, two Republican women who wavered and dithered about their decision to put the last three conservative yokels on the Supreme Court, well, ladies, you've certainly greased the skids on your way to hell, and you're letting the rest of us share your ride.

The bottom line here is that there are at least three people who are sitting on the "Supreme" Court who have publicly lied in testimony to Congress, and they have jobs they'll continue to hold for life.  Mind you, as their homes are known locations, I do not suppose that they will continue to live the same care-free lives they had before this preliminary opinion was leaked.  I am not an advocate for violence, but as we saw when some assassins started killing doctors because they performed abortions, well, I don't suppose that turnabout will be unexpected.  The sad part is that the unbalanced court is no longer considered to be "supreme" in any way.  An inferior collection of intellects who chose to apply some warped ideology they never chose to question or investigate, well, that was me.  Back at the age of ten to about eighteen, before I started to question a few things.  

I mean, I was pretty fat, dumb, and happy until I was working a part-time job and I met a young lady whose name has now gone lost in the archives of my memory.  I do remember having some rather profoundly deep conversations while I was on break with her or walking out into the parking lot, and she told me some of the things she had to endure to get to where she was - in my home town.  

Then there were more than a few women whom I met through - rather laughingly, I guess - some retreat experiences I've had, where they've come to try to heal from decisions they had to make.  I can say, with a complete and total honesty, that I know that I have only two children walking this earth, because the only woman with whom I have had sex is upstairs in my living room.  Yeah, I'm sure that makes me pathetic to some people, but I did take to heart the advice to save yourself for someone.  And I suppose it also helped that I was such an awkward, pathetic, dorky goon that until college, a majority of the girls I asked out for a date usually had to reconsider and give in to some pressure from someone other than me or one of my friends, to go on the date with me.

That is, in High School, I had a net total of three dates.  That's right, folks, three.  I tried asking about a dozen times, but three accepted.  There was my junior year Homecoming date, which was a young lady who was friendly to me, which made me feel rather terrible when I learned some weeks later that she'd been pressured by someone else to change her mind and go with me.  There was my senior prom, when I went out with a young lady whose friend wanted to date a friend of mine, and she wanted to double-date, so I was sort of set up with it.  She was a nice young lady, but she was quite a ways out of my league.  Yup, that's right.  

There was another young lady, who was actually a year older than I was, who asked me to partner with her and one other girl as a trio so we could advance into the self-study section of our high school chemistry class.  I was the nerd, one of two kids total, who did not take Sophomore biology because, quite simply, I had a terrible experience with junior high "life science" and did not want to spend every day of my sophomore year regretting the mistake.  So I took Chem in my Junior year, read the books, worked hard, knew I was going to need good grades to get into college, and when the opportunity to do the advanced study, I jumped at it.  And I found myself the lone junior in a row of Seniors - the back row, where the Advanced Study kids got to go, and I turned out to have some skills in Chemistry.  

And as that year rolled to a close and I was holding onto an A in Chem, I wanted to thank the young lady for inviting me to join the trio.  So I made a miniature, what my mother called a "shadow box" which had furniture I'd made myself, lighting I'd figured out and wired in, and we went out to a movie, had pizza afterwards, and I gave her the shadow box.  And that was the last time I saw her.

After high school, in college, I was pretty sad as a prospective partner for most of the girls I met.  And then, as it often happens in the sappy romance novels, I got lucky by meeting the young lady who absolutely captivated me.  And nearly blew it by not realizing she was trying to reach me when she left and spent the summer out on the East Coast, working at an insurance company.  Then when she came back to college for her final year, and I met her again, the very best fortune was that she and her roommate were looking to have lofts in their rooms, and had absolutely no idea how to build them. 

Guess who used to have a business building lofts for college kids.  Yup.

So anyway, back to our core point here, abortion is something that is, unfortunately terribly necessary.  No one likes it, no one wants it, but everyone knows in their heart of hearts that there are terrible situations where young ladies should never be forced to endure even more terrible crimes because of one.  I am aware that there are people who will insist that it was God's will that the rapist impregnates a twelve-year-old, but I am not one who is going to ruin that twelve-year-olds life by requiring them to give birth then try to raise a baby before they're legally old enough to work outside the home and make enough money to pay for food and diapers for the baby, let alone themselves.

And there are too many assholes who proclaim themselves to be pro-life who are just flat out pro-birth.  They don't give a hoot in hell about how that young future mother is going to get the health care she needs or the support - it's her fault, after all, she was born into poverty, they'll say.  But I will put this out there.

If we ban abortions, then there are a number of other medical procedures and medications we need to ban.  The first stop being any and all drugs for male impotence or dysfunction.  Because if it's God's wish that every pregnancy end in birth, then it's also God's wish that the broken pee-pee stay broken.  If your penis doesn't work, that's how God wants it.  

Oh, and since we're headed down that road, let's also legally require all healthcare in this country - pre-natal through hospice - is free.  Because that's how God intended it.  I do not recall Jesus asking for a coverage card or a co-pay before healing anyone.  So if that's what God wants, then we should make it so.  

Oh, and for those who choose to rape and commit crimes that make women pregnant?  Well, then, it would be fair that every single pregnant woman and every single fetus be tested.  I mean, we have the technology to establish the father of the infant, so let it be so.  And if the father is known and alive, the father should be assessed the costs involved in feeding and raising that child from birth to the age of 25.  Why 25?  Because some kids need help getting a good job.  So yeah, college tuition would be included.  If the father wishes to have some control over where the child goes to college, then the father needs to be part of the child's life.  And if the father can't comport himself in such a way that he can't be trusted to behave appropriately and as the community standard dictates, then he should be jailed, and his properties confiscated and given to the mother and child.  And if he hasn't got enough, well, then, his parents should be held responsible.  Why parents?  Well, doesn't everything spring from God and Family?  Yup.  If that's what they want, that's what they get.