Why Limit Women's Choices?

Because I live in Kansas, part of a midwestern mental "state" that seems hell-bent on ending women's "equality" (if such a thing actually exists), I feel bombarded on almost a daily basis with anti-choice voices arguing for something they obviously understand very little about.

There's currently a movement in the Kansas legislature to force public schools to teach students about the stages of fetal development, which is, in and of itself, a good idea. I am surprised that all biology classes don't already cover this basic concept. I know mine in south central Kansas did. Kansans, however, have to put a nasty spin on this piece of education legislation because the senator proposing the legislation wants the material to specify how much pain a fetus must feel as it is aborted (as if anyone can measure zygote or fetal pain)!

Signs I often pass as I drive between central Kansas and the Kansas City area are in one farmer's field, and include statements like, "Abortion stops a beating heart." Like much of the anti-choice propaganda that has been aimed--rather effectively, judging by the number of unwed mothers out there--at making women avoid making the tough choice of having an abortion, the claim is both incomplete and emotionally bent. These claims want to add more emotion to a choice that is already extremely emotional for any woman who faces having to decide whether or not having an abortion is the best thing for her to do.

One element that is missing from the anti-choice movement's claims is the fact that no woman (although they will dredge up, or, I believe, make up, women who are routinely and happily having abortions) can ever face the prospect of having an abortion without some fear and lots of anxiety. It has never been an easy decision to make, and these fanatics would like nothing more than to completely take that decision out of all women's hands. They firmly believe we are too stupid to make the right decision for ourselves (hence, my main title, "Intelligent Kansas Women").

Until they admit that women can and will continue to make their own decisions, anti-choicers continue to use misinformation and emotion to sway the less educated. Biologically, for instance, much technical information is missing from the anti-choice's arguments that anyone with a good biological background probably wants to laugh. I know I do.

For instance, as a woman who has experienced infertility issues, I know that I have had at least two "miscarrieages," a.k.a. spontaneous abortions--both of which happened within the first month after conception. According to my physicians over the years, I probably sloughed off a fertilzed zygote once a month while my husband and I were trying to conceive. We are both fertile, in that I have eggs, and he has lots of sperm, but I couldn't carry a child (for the year we tried before one, our son, succeeded in hanging on) because of poor conditions in my womb.

Am I a murderer?

There is no statute of limitation on murder, and, if the rabid legislators in Kansas (like those in South Dakota; my kudos to the president of the Oglala's for having the guts to start her own clinic on reservation lands) have their way and make "conception" the point of when viable human life begins, I could be tried for manslaughter, at the least, for the audacity of having a poor womb!

Is that what these fanatics want? To make women so scared of being accused of being murderers that we won't even report miscarriages to our doctors?

Don't assume such goals are ridiculous, either. Nearly half a dozen states (including Nebraska and South Dakota) have sued women, who were either alcoholics or drug addicts, of child abuse because they continued to abuse drugs while they were pregnant. From what I have been told, the women were all "lucky" that each state already recognized such addictions as diseases, otherwise they would have been convicted.

That Kansas billboard blasts another significant inaccuracy. While it is accurate to state that women are encouraged by physicians to consider the sound they can hear from about the 12th week on as a "beating heart," the fact is that a baby's heart isn't fully developed until much later, and sometimes not even until the month before birth. One of my students told me about how his son was born with an incompletely formed heart valve and would have died within minutes of being separated from his mother, except that the hospital in which he was born was next door to a children's hospital, and the specialist needed to operate on the child was on hand. This incident is proof that the fetus's blood flow is primarily directed by the mother, not its own heart valves.

Such misinformation as is spread by the Kansas farmer about fetal development is rampant in Kansas. Most people can't even name the stages of fetal development, firmly believing that the mass of cells formed immediately after conception is a baby. If wise Mother Nature knows better, how come so many humans are still so ignorant?

I was born to a farm family that lived in a small central Kansas town where the only hospital was Catholic run. My mother was never permitted to get her tubes tied, and birth control was still illegal for married couples back then. I was the tenth baby my mother gave birth to, and her twelfth pregnancy. She had had two mid-term miscarriages between my older sister and me, was 42 when I was born, and had been warned four pregnancies prior (and with each subsequent pregnancy) that she would die, if she didn't stop having babies.

My father was the traditional "head of household" lord and master, and refused to get a vasectomy. He had some sort of "macho" competition with one of his brothers to see who could father the most kids. My father won. He also desperately wanted boys. Out of the ten of us, only three are male.

But I used to love to hear my mother tell the story of my birth. When I was born, Dr. Filley, our family physician, refused to release my mother from the hospital until my father agreed to come down to his clinic for that much needed vasectomy. Dr. Filley, you see, was barely five feet tall, and my father was six foot, two. The image, to me, of little Dr. Filley standing in the doorway refusing to let my father even visit my mother until he had the vasectomy has always amused me. And Mom always told the story with such relish--as though she, too, delighted at the fact that the combination of my father's high sex drive and his fear of Dr. Filley convinced him to have that vasectomy that very afternoon.

Stupid people ask me: well, then, aren't you glad your mother gave birth to you, instead of aborting you?

And I always say: If I knew that my mother's life would have been healthier, happier, and overall less stressful because I had never been born, and if it was actually possible for me to reverse time and make it so, I would give up my life to make my mother's that much better. Don't you love your mother enough to be willing to have made that sacrifice?

As a child, I thought my mother was the most wonderful person on earth, and, if I close my eyes and breathe deeply, I can still smell her slightly floury and slightly flowery scent, still feel her firm arms, and imagine my head resting on her cushy bosom. She's been dead for more than eight years now, and I still feel her loss in my heart and my soul.

She died six months after my father did, just when she was rearranging the house to her own satisfaction...finally. So she never really had a chance to live life like she wanted to.

Even though it would mean giving up my very loving family (my husband, son, and cats), if I could have improved my mother's life by not having been born, I would do it...you guessed it...in a heartbeat!