The day has just passed, but it’s worth celebrating for a while. Especially while “Marches for Life” are going on around the country.
Aren’t we all wanting the same thing? Life?
Even those whose focus is only on the life of the fetus: many of them are at least interested in the lives of women and girls, some of them support education, family planning, healthy people. Some of them will talk about contraception, our mutual wish to make abortion rare, our mutual interest in everyone’s health. Life.
Forty-one years ago the Supreme Court made it legal: women (and girls) like me would never again face the shame, danger and often death that came from trying to end an unintended pregnancy. Though it came too late for me, I was lucky; I survived a back-alley abortion, even to have healthy, wanted children. I mourn those who did not, or who wound up maimed. I am saddened and dismayed by the efforts today to send us straight back to those dark days. It is my hope and prayer that we can find ways to make abortion rare — through diligent work on things like education and contraception — while keeping women and girls safe, healthy and autonomous with protection of the right to choose what happens to their own bodies.
Which brings us back to the celebration, of Roe v Wade. Of life.
Thanks, Fran; another eloquent blog. We are increasingly aware (thanks in no small part to writers like you) that quality of life is often more important than quantity of life – either in years lived (dignity in dying) or number of lives (dignity of choice).
You’re the best!