Abortion

I've been following the news about the abortion restrictions that just passed in Texas. I think they are a good thing. Not because I want politicians telling women what to do with their bodies, or because I am a Catholic, or because I think have any right to impose my morality on anyone else.  I just still believe that there some things are right, and some things are wrong.

In my early 20's I threw most of my Catholic upbringing out the window.  I was a wild child. And I decided that, although I would never have an abortion, I could understand why some women would. It was all really none of my business.

I got pregnant with a boyfriend who didn't want a baby. My parents asked me to leave home.  I was alone and scared- I flirted with the idea of abortion, but decided I could never live with myself.

My baby was born 3 months early.  About the gestational age at which abortions in Texas were just banned.  She weighed about 2 pounds- all skin and bones, like a baby bird. She broke my heart.  She was sick- massive brain hemorrhaging, surgeries, seizures, months on a respirator.  I didn't get to hold her until she was a month old, on Mother's Day. It felt like I was holding nothing, just a tangle of blankets, tubes and wires, with  a tiny head coming out of the top of it.  She smelled like a baby.

It was hard. Her father, couldn't handle it, so every day I went to see her alone, and put my hand through the opening on the side of her isolette and stroked her frail little body. I sang to her and talked to her and prayed that she would be ok.

The Special Care Nursery was set up with the babies cribs in sort of a horseshoe- when you walked in, the first children you saw were the sickest; as they improved they worked their way around the room.  When they got to the other side, they were ready to go home.  I noticed in the back corner one day that there were a couple of isolettes in the dark, outside of the rows of brightly lit ones. There were no blinking, beeping machines machines, no respirators, no lights, but there were babies in them, who no one ever visited. I wondered if they were dead, but thought they would never leave a dead baby in that room for people to see. I got up the courage one day to ask a nurse about them, and she gave me some vague answer, something about them being the sickest babies in the unit.

A few years later I was at a store and bumped into one of the SCN nurses who I had gotten very close to when my daughter was there. I asked her how work was going and she said she didn't work there any more.  She said there was a very high turnover rate among nurses in that unit. I could understand why, I told her, because what they did was so stressful.  She said that wasn't really the problem.  They also had to care for the babies who survived abortions in that hospital.  She said it happened regularly, and they were brought into that nursery until they died.  The nurses job was to make them comfortable, but to do nothing that might prolong their lives.  She said that the whole thing was kind of schizophrenic- one minute doing anything you could to keep one child alive, and the next deciding not to cover a tiny child with a blanket because it might bring up their body temperature and make them live longer. It was just too hard.

So, that's why I think Texas did the right thing yesterday.