Posts
A couple of Fridays ago, I walked my older son to school and then my younger son to daycare. Then I crossed over the ice-and-salt encrusted overpass to the metro station and headed downtown. As I emerged back up onto the street, I checked my phone and enjoyed a little lift of triumph. Getting places a bit early or exactly on time is one of my small pleasures. It means all my systems are humming just right. That morning, I was five minutes early for my appointment to have an abortion.
Why am I sharing this with you? Isn’t this personal business, best kept to myself? No. The abortion debate is immeasurably worse off for having been dominated by everyone except the women who actually receive abortions, and any medical procedure whose legality is being debated at the federal level is everyone’s business, besides. There are an estimated 1.2 million abortions performed each year in the United States. That’s more than twice the number of angioplasties performed each year, according to the Center for Disease Control. If angioplasties were suddenly on the chopping block, I imagine some men whose lives had been changed by them would be compelled to speak up.
I found out I was pregnant at my mom’s house, over Christmas. I had an IUD, the copper kind, and after two years of loyal service it went and took a sick day. For weeks I’d been feeling like my legs were filled with wet cement. My emotional state had been ass. Part of me was relieved to learn what was causing that, but mostly I was pissed. I did not want to bring another child into the world. My husband and I had already had this conversation. We have two kids and the younger one isn’t yet two and a half. We’d decided that once he is nearing five, we’d reconsider a third kid. I’ll be 35 then. The little joke I always tell is that I’ll only want to have another if in three years we find ourselves suddenly rich and bored.
No comments:
Post a Comment