a rant... don't know what else to call it...

while just watching "this week with george stephanopoulos", i was struck by a bunch of iintense thoughts and feelings that came up when the participants were talking about the recent supreme court decision upholding late term aboriton ban. one of the commentators was talking about technology and trimesters and another person said something about calling it a baby and not "fetal matter"...

i don't remember the exact comments, but it got me thinking about my last post in which i referred to my growing fetus as a "baby".

and of course, when they start talking about abortion, i think about my past abortion, which was only a little over 2 years ago.

at first i was thinking, "hmm. what does it mean that i'm calling her a baby..." then i got to my answers. part of what got me angry is the juxtaposition of talking about women (and men, who are often part of the decision, though not always) making a crucial life choice about whether the pregnancy is a welcome one which they choose to follow through with or not, with the talk of the tragic events of the week at v. tech and always the backdrop of the war in iraq where parents have no choice about their young adult offspring going somewhere where they are likely to be killed for no clear reason and to my mind, not a good enough reason to sacrifice one's child for.

for me, being pro-life should mean that you value the life that is living out there and growing up in this world. that you want your offspring to be safe when they go to college, to get proper care that keeps them and others safe if your child unfortunately needs help with emotional pain and mental or physical illness, that your child will not be sent to another country to be killed for false reasons.

i realized that i think of my daughter as my baby already not because she is scientifically already a baby, but because i choose to be ready to be her mother and to want to welcome her to the world as a person. i remember back at the beginning of this pregnancy when we went for the first ultrasound and my former obstetrician (not the one i'm with now) pointed to the screen and said, "there's your pregnancy." it was at six weeks and there was no observation of a heartbeat. i was very upset about it and remember being upset that she called the fertilized egg my "pregnancy" and tried to read meaning into it like, "there probably won't be a heartbeat, she didn't want to get my hopes up or add to my thinking of 'it' as a real embryo or whatever... etc." i realized that i was feeling very irrational and that she was just doing the usual thing of using precise language about the facts, but my reaction was strong because i already had made the choice to continue the pregnancy as i had stopped taking my medications and planned for it.

on the other hand, when i went in to tell her i had to have an abortion because i was on medications that were very dangerous to the "pregnancy", and had no plans to go off the medications (in fact it was at a point where it would have been very dangerous for me to go off them) she also did an ultrasound. it might have only been four or five weeks. she said it was very early and did not specify exact weeks. she did an ultrasound to make sure what was going on and had the sensitivity to not print it out and give it to me. i know if i had been pregnant and in the office that early saying i was going to go through with the pregnancy, she would have given me the photo. it would have been her acknowledgment of our hope that things would work out with a baby being born. her not giving me a photo was her respectful acknowledgment of our decision not to go through with the rest of the pregnancy because of the risks involved.

so part of what i wanted to say just from one expectant mother's point of view having made both "choices" in my life, is that it is intention and choice that creates life that is viable and sustainable, and the first of many choices is the one to continue the pregnancy, but it is by no means the last. i started thinking of my current future daughter as my "baby" long before she was probably even a "fetus" and just an "embryo" or even a "fertilized egg". i called her my baby in the last post because of my choice and my and her father's commitment to her, not because of technology, although technology helps us to see her at 10 ounces looking like a little baby and to see all her organs and count her fingers and toes.

but perhaps if the outcome of that midterm ultrasound had been negative, perhaps if they had found a terrible defect in the fetus, we might have made the decision not to bring her into the world. this would still have been our choice and it would have been based on "quality of life" which i think is part of what it means to think about "pro-life". it would not have been a clear choice that everyone would make; in fact i have no idea what we would have decided as i'm now in "what if" land, but i'm sure others have been put in this kind of position. to me the important thing is that parents have a choice about what they are doing before the child takes its first breath outside of the womb.

once that happens, once the baby really is alive and outside of the mother, it seems that our country, or at least the government, does not take seriously enough the real "life choices" that affect our children. like choices about making guns less easily accessible to people who might kill your child and other choices about sending our children to other countries for dubious reasons to die 18 or 19 or more years after we made the very important choice to bring them into the world in the first place... part of what i'm saying is that our policies about live people need to be a lot more pro-life. in fact i would argue that allowing the potential mother and father to choose whether to go through with a pregnancy on their own and respecting their right to this private decision is ultimately "pro-life" in the real sense of the term as i believe it...