Rep. Joe Walsh: Abortion never saves mom's life

[Hekate]

49. True stories...

From a lifetime of being a woman.

My mother didn't "believe in" abortion either, but her generation at least knew all about post-miscarriage D&Cs, and the fact that a miscarriage gone wrong could cause you to die of infection or hemorrhage to death. She was pregnant 7 times in 9 years, with 4 healthy children as the outcome. One full-term stillbirth that she grieved for the rest of her life. Two early miscarriages, at least one of which nearly killed her with bleeding -- she once told me about her out of body experience on the surgical table: looking down at herself and the doctors from the corner of the ceiling, thinking about her two (at the time) children being orphans, and deciding to take that next breath....

Christ on a trailer hitch, I have come to hate the pro-birthers who think so little of women's lives.

A friend who, after escaping an abusive home at 17, conceived from a date-rape had to borrow money to fly to another state to abort her rapist's fetus.

A friend who was so happy at the end of her first trimester, anticipating her second child, until the nurse took a look and blurted, "What IS that on your cervix?!" before running to get the doc. It was a cancer so fast-growing that she was sent to a specialist for the complete hysterectomy immediately -- we lived in Honolulu and the specialist was in San Francisco. A Catholic friend asked me plaintively if "the baby" couldn't have been saved by her waiting to deliver first, and frankly that was the first time (1977) that I understood that so-called pro-lifers are nuts.

The pro-birthers do not care about women, not even a little bit. Even when they are constrained from condemning us to death with their laws, they condemn some of us to death just by their lies and ignorance.

Hekate