“‘Jane Roe’ later revealed she'd been haunted by
recurring nightmares of “little babies lying around with daggers in
their hearts".
There are two sorts of people
in this world.
The first are those who’ve lived a little and thereby understand
the imperfection of humanity.
We lie, we cheat, we steal, we’re willing actors in a number of
terrible and beastly scenes, although this doesn’t necessarily make
us bad.
Generally, pro-choice.
In the other corner you have those who, whether by privilege or
good luck were protected from life’s cruelties, insist man lives by
an immaculate moral code, and any transgression must be punished
harshly.
Pro-life.
Y’might’ve heard that the US Supreme Court just overturned the
almost-fifty-year old Roe v Wade decision that ruled that the US
Constitution protected a woman’s liberty to choose to have an
abortion, overriding any state law on the matter.
Now that Roe v Wade is history it’s the decision of each state
to make abortion legal or illegal, plunging half of the country,
the red states, into a medieval darkness where kids have to cross
state lines or visit shady illegal surgeries for abortions.
As you might imagine, the conservative south is hot for illegal,
liberal coastal states, California, New York, pro-abortion.
However you slice it, pun intended, abortion is an ugly, ugly
thing.
When you’re sitting in that sterile little beige room, your girl
on the cot, ultra-sound wand over her still flat stomach and you
see that living creature with a beating heart on the screen, and
you play god by deciding it should die, well, it’s gonna mark you
for life.
But better than an unwanted child, I think, a kid discarded by
parents, too young or too ruined or too poor to give ‘em a life
worth living.
And, in a country like the US that
has the highest rate of children living in single-parent households
in the world, a joint that has valorised the
baby-daddy thing, forcing a woman to raise a kid to term is a
catastrophe.
Earlier today, the rather wonderful Jessi Miley-Dyer, the WSL’s
SVP of Tours and Head of Competition, made her thoughts on the
matter clear by posting a provocative image along with instructions
on how to get an abortion if you live in a pro-life state.
The WSL’s colour commentator, Chris Cote, weighed in on Twitter,
suggesting Independence Day celebrations be cancelled in
protest.
On an interesting side note, Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of
the original ruling, hero to millions etc, did a switcharoo twenty
years later, turning vehemently pro-life, explaining that she’d
been haunted by recurring nightmares of “little babies lying around
with daggers in their hearts”.
“(They) never told me that what I was signing would allow women
to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, ‘Thank you for
allowing me to have my five or six abortions. Without you, it
wouldn’t have been possible.’ (They) never mentioned women using
abortions as a form of birth control. We talked about truly
desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity
clothes.”
Thought provoking, yeah?
