My Story

The chronicle of the journey from infertility, to miscarriage, to finally raising twin girls born in June 2012.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Another thing that makes me go hmmmmmm

There's a lot of right wing ferver lately about shutting down funding to Planned Parenthood and instituting laws that continually tighten up the ability for a woman to terminate a pregnancy. 

All of these right wingers are thumping their bibles and screaming about protecting these helpless little babies.  Protect those who cannot protect themselves!  Abortion is wrong!  Roarrrrrrr!

So some questions for all of the miscarriage mama's out there.  How many of your babies had to die before your doctors would agree to run various tests?  How hard did you have to fight to simply have the reason for your last miscarriage investigated and/or explained?  How many of you were told that you had to go through miscarriage three times before a doctor would run tests and really assist you in carrying a pregnancy to term?

That's three dead babies per household who desperately wants to have a baby before the rich guys in their white coats and those who own the insurance companies will try to prevent it from happening again.  Three babies that could be alive and well, in homes that want them.

But all of the anti-abortion protesters are focusing their efforts on saving individual babies who would be born into homes of those who don't want them and don't have the means to properly care for them.

Now I'm not going to get into a diatribe about the rightness or wrongness of a woman's access to abortion.  I know how I feel about that and those who feel differently than I do are going to feel how they feel about it.

But before focusing on saving the individual babies who are not wanted, wouldn't that same effort be better spent lobbying to force doctors to run the tests needed to prevent a miscarriage mama from experiencing another dead baby?  I mean really, if the goal is to protect the unborn and allow them to come into the world, wouldn't it be do more good to save the next two miscarriage babies rather than protect the one from a woman seeking abortion?  That's 2 lives saved if you focus on that rather than the 1 you think you are saving from protesting abortion.

It seems that no matter what you want to do reproductively, you have to fight tooth and nail and experience massive amounts of heartache to do it.  You want to end a pregnancy?  Tons of red tape, emotional blackmail, and threats from the antiabortionists.  You want to prevent a miscarriage?  You have to fight tooth and nail to get an explanation on how to prevent what has already happened to you once before.

Feel how you want to feel about abortion and fight for what you believe in.  But can we please fight for the one thing we all agree on (we don't want any more miscarriages!) before you spend all of this effort on fighting for something that only a portion of the population wants?

1 comment:

  1. I've never thought about it like that before but it makes so much sense. Even in Canada, in my province, we have to have three miscarriages before they investigate. I hope and pray neither of us has to go through another one :(

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