"Abortions will not let you forget..."

There's a women's clinic that I pass by on occasion. It's a little building on the corner opposite of the VA Fine Arts Museum and beside row houses converted into apartments, where VCU and MCV students probably live. If you are on the cross street right beside it, you can see a little parking lot behind the building and an even smaller sign that says what it is, but otherwise the only way you'd know is from the protestors out front every Saturday morning.

They where giant signs around their bodies and pace the small corner, waving to cars and talking to whoever will listen.

Either my last or next to last semester of college, there were pro-lifers walking and driving around the campus in a van with an aborted fetus painted on the side of it. One of the men had taken up residents in one of the main walk-ways on campus (right outside the main dining hall) with two young boys with him, preaching to whoever would listen. He didn't get a very warm welcome. In fact I saw one student begin to argue with him about it not being his right to tell people what to do and how he should be ashamed for exposing his young children to this while preaching about the value of young life.

I don't think any one would say that abortion is a good thing, but it is nessicary (and a major factor in why I can not support John McCain). I had a professor that taught classes that doubled in religious and women's studies and she used to be an ordained baptise minister (still a rare thing in southern baptise comminities). It was really fascinating to listen to her talk, because it was so obvious that she had an immense love and faith for her God, but she also looked at the world objectively. She was an outspoken Kerry supporter in the 2004 election and really shaped my understanding of feminism and the abortion issue.

Of abortion she said, "I think it's unfortunate that I live in a society where that is nessicary, but we can't go back to back-alley abortions."

I think what many conversatives don't understand about abortion is that it's just a figure head on a much bigger issue. It's like, well if they take that away -- what's next? Do we go back to birth control being inaccesible? Are we then slowing forced back into the kitchen and out of the office? Where does their control end and ours begin?

Just because I am pro-choice doesn't mean that I don't see imprefections in abortion. I think there are women who treat it as an after the fact form of birth control and that there should come a point where people need to take responsibility for their actions, but you can't really force a handful of people to do that with out taking the right away from resonsible, decent people who made a mistake or who's lives are in danger because of their pregnancy.

It's not an easy issue, but it is a fact (and a needed one) of our society.

Below is one of my favorite poems and I think it perfectly paints the ambevilance and complications surrounding abortion. I love how conflicted the speaker is as she tries to rationalize to the children that were never actually children why she did what she did as a mother who was never really a mother. It's interesting because it really could be used for either side of the arguement.

"The Mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never lwind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.