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On Birth Defects and Abortion [1]

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Date: 2022-07-21

Today’s diary by oscarsmom about abortion bans resulting in children with birth defects reminds me of a Girl Scout outing long ago. We were going to bake cookies to take to the state facility for the handicapped and sing for the residents and bring a little Girl Scout cheer into the dull lives of the people there.

I imagine that our leaders expected a group of cheerful but lonely little girls, disabled but a lot like us, who would love our cookies and songs. Meeting them would open our eyes to the different lives of others.

We arrived and were led into a rather dingy cinder block basement where the residents were gathered. But the residents there were men, old enough to be our fathers or grandfathers, and profoundly disabled. Several were microcephalic, with heads the size of a baby’s on grown men’s bodies. One man wandered aimlessly but most sat immobile in wheelchairs staring into space, drooling, with no sign that they noticed that we were there. One was strapped to a hand truck contraption, standing (in a way) but as still as a statue.

They were all dressed in grubby tatters. None had socks. They had what looked like old t-shirts over their feet tied around the ankles with string. Some groaned but none of them spoke. One man ate a cookie but that seemed to be above the skill level of the rest. We sang our songs, stayed half an hour, and then it was over. No one talked in the car on the way home. Our leaders never said another word about what we saw that day and neither did we.

Our preconceptions about that situation were way wrong, which brings me back to the anti-abortion movement, or forced birth, or whatever you choose to call it. It’s based on the bright eyed expectation that all abortions involve a healthy but selfish woman who doesn’t think she wants a child but she would fall in love with it as soon as she saw it. She may not think that she can provide for the child but she’d love it so much that she’d find a way, somehow, and her life would be wondrously enriched by the experience. And everyone would be happy.

But there are so many other stories around unwanted pregnancies: women who die for lack of an abortion. Women who are killed because husband/boyfriend don’t want the responsibility. Women whose careers falter or who lose their jobs altogether, either because of the responsibilities of motherhood or because of prejudice against mothers in their workplaces. Children who fall into a foster system that’s already overburdened. Children who are abused either in foster care or by the mothers and/or fathers who never wanted them. There are, as oscarsmom points out in her diary today, babies who suffer from severe birth defects who live only briefly and never know anything but suffering. And there are the men in the basement of the state home for the handicapped.

Our scout leaders were right about one thing: the outing did open our eyes. Similarly, people are trying to open the eyes of the anti-abortion right. We need to keep pushing on that front, to keep countering the fairy tales with stories from real life.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/21/2111810/-On-Birth-Defects-and-Abortion

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