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Forced Pregnancy, or Family Planning? [1]

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Date: 2022-11-06

We were married at 18 with one baby already, and we felt that was all we could handle. My pay was minimal. The wheel on my car was falling off. Our place was in disarray.

After getting a warning from the health department, we gave our tiny house a cleaning, and vowed to live well.

It was so much better with the place in order, that we relaxed a little and had some easier times, enjoying our growing baby boy and playing house.

One day I had time to take out my Honda 305 Scrambler motorcycle, Old Paint, to explore my area just a little. I didn't get out much by myself except to and from work, and I often studied the Thomas Guide street atlas whenever I had a few minutes. When I detoured it was often to prowl some alternate way to get home.

I found my way to a newly built freeway onramp marked Closed, drove around the sign and then discovered i had the whole empty freeway wide open before me. It looked like the pavement had just been laid down. I rode until I came to a great cut in the hillside, where the incomplete 210 freeway just ended, and there, I turned up the loose slope and climbed the exposed slice of the mountain at an angle that allowed me to climb. As I slowed I dismounted, but left the motorcycle in gear, and walked beside with my hands on the bars, giving just bit of gas while the bike drove itself uphill.

Making the crest, I remounted at last, and found myself driving on an old dirt road, high along the ragged hilltop ridge, which I already knew - from studying the map - would lead me directly to the McGroarty Summit, where every Easter sunrise always used to be observed. In those days the Summit was visible for miles around because of the huge cross mounted on the little hilltop, which protectively overlooked the quaint town of Sunland. Enjoying that vantage spot, I paused with satisfaction, and looked off for miles at the spectacular wilds of Big Tujunga Canyon, while my motor cooled. My village waited for me below, it seemed embraced by crests of the rugged mile high mountains above.

Everything was coming to my life, all gifts from the sky, it appeared. I could see my little house from there, and suddenly felt such a rush of love and confidence and possibility. I wanted to swoop down to my family, from that summit, just an eagle back to its nest.

Everyone in my gaze now seemed deserving of huge blessing. Looking for the shortcut i knew would be there, I found a walking path that seemed to lead me down the hill toward home, and wondered whether the big motorcycle could negotiate the twisty trail. The brakes worked great, and I was able to wrestle the bike down what would have been more of a deer path, widened by occasional human visitors. The engine overheated before I turned it off and let gravity carry me back down that narrow wiggly track which led me through brush and poison oak, opening at last to the edge of tiny forested McGroarty park, blocks from my house.

When I arrived home, I tried to describe my soaring exploration, and how much it seemed to mean to me about being part of a community and its terrain.

But my wife looked pale, and wasn't completely sympathetic, as she had not been feeling well, she said. She had been nauseated all that morning and the day before.

I put aside my cycling adventure tale as I heard that she was becoming concerned that she needed to find a doctor. She needed answers about why she had been feeling off, and she wanted to find out why in the world her darn period might have been late.

Since our house was a lot cleaner by then, we were much more at ease, and found ourselves having lazy barbecues in our yard. It was plain fun. Once I even put my toddler son on my motorcycle between my knees and drove him slowly around the block. Our spinning record player often filled our house with music. Home became more our peaceable kingdom.

Lady the dog, our slender German shepherd, frolicked with Red, the eager Irish Setter male of our neighbors. She immediately got pregnant by that dog.

Sue and Jim owned the dog Red, and lived next door to us. They shared one wall of our duplex house, so we heard all their quarrels and rowdyness. Soon we figured out that we had a problem with our noisy neighbors.

One day, we heard their radio alarm clock go off full volume, and it stayed on for hours, so long that I became concerned, and knocked sharply on their door. When there was no answer, I got in through an open window, very worried what I might find.

I called out, but no answer came. Then I saw with a jolt that she was just lying there, oblivious, right beside the blaring clock radio. Our neighbor Sue had simply passed out across her bed, and was snoring. Likely it was due to seconal or quaaludes. She didn't wake even when I switched off the radio.

Sue and Jim liked to drink, and fight, and do, or take whatever else they thought went along with that.

Our poor dog's pregnancy was going to turn out to be a troubled one. After she had successfuly carried the live pups, when they finally arrived they were all stillborn.

We consulted with a vet and found that our foundling dog had very narrow hips, and so she needed a surgery called a hysterotomy, to prevent any further dangerous pregnancies.

It was back in 1976, and I was still working then at Mike's pizza joint, when I paid out $800 over the next twelve months for that surgery. We sure weren't ready for that, we thought back then.

Still, we kept ourselves happy with our frequent pleasurable drives over to prowl the west valley, where my wife liked to tour around middle class neighborhoods and daydream on the colonial style ranch house she hoped to rent. Baby Michael seemed calmed too, rolling around with us. It had been one rare warm memory of hers, that she had for a short time stayed out there in suburbia, with what she described as her more normal aunt and uncle, and so she imagined us all happier living around there.

Once in a while, we visited one or the other of our fathers, who would always take us out to lunch, and over time would both often give us generous help with expenses. In truth, without them, we were barely making enough to pay rent and buy groceries.

And we would dream of finding a better house, one where we didn't have to share a wall with loud and drunken newlyweds.

There was another reason we dreamed then of moving to a better place. We weren't really so safe. I once took live fire.

One evening, I came home tired from work, and a rough guy from the neighborhood got a big laugh from some local teens, when he fired a .22 rifle shot at me, ripping up into the trees just above my head. When cops eventually showed up an hour later in our rural dirt lane, they leveled their weapons at me.

"Don't shoot, I'm the one who called you," I yelped. After questions, the cops left and the whole matter was dropped. It was the wild west.

It turned out Sue liked to offer those teens beers, and who knows what, and there was no getting clear of them. So we aimed to try to move on again, and find a better place.

We also needed to soon locate a doctor.

Her nausea and missed period let her know that she must either be terribly sick, or else she was certainly pregnant again.

My wife consulted Sue, next door, as to whom she saw as her gynecologist. The neighbor, Sue, told her she always saw Doctor So-&-So over yonder in Eagle Rock.

So we foolishly made the appointment, and drove to the sleepy town of Eagle Rock, and that hick doctor saw this young woman, my wife, who put her trust in him.

She definitely made sure he knew why she was there. She had missed her period and needed to determine whether she was pregnant.

He understood that she was barely nineteen and already had one child, not yet a year old. He understood that she was terrified of childbirth because our son's delivery had been difficult. He must have understood that we were poor, on Medi-Cal like many other of his patients because our modest means were limited to my minimum wage job.

But he asked her what she had planned, if she were to find out she was pregnant.

She told him that she did not want another pregnancy at all, and if so, she would certainly choose to abort.

He ordered some imaging and lab work. Then days went by with no reply.

When we next heard from his clinic, they reassured her that, no she wasn't at all pregnant. They said she would need to return to his clinic in six weeks, for more imaging.

She became worried as to why she had been feeling so awful. She arranged a sooner appointment, and came out very upset.

It seemed the latest imaging had revealed that she was in fact quite pregnant - but she was, by then, so far along that she would have required a saline forced labor, rather than D&C abortion procedure.

Because that doctor misdiagnosed and delayed, she found herself so many weeks in, that she was no longer able to terminate the pregnancy.

When Sue later heard this, she laughed carelessly, and said,

"Oh yeah, did I forget to tell you? Everyone knows that doctor is a fanatic born-again Christian who doesn't believe in abortion - he always does that to women."

That cruel zealot dominionist Jesus-freak country doctor of our drunken neighbor had just played my wife for time, stalling her, once he heard that this young woman was seeking to terminate by her own choice.

We immediately consulted at a more reliable hospital clinic, but quickly we determined that she was so far along by then, that it became reasonable to carry to full term.

So it was, that at nineteen years old, my wife and I were forced to talk about adoption.

Giving up our second child created deep unease and unspoken sorrow, and interfered with something between us. Our relinquishment of a baby girl at birth so disrupted our budding family, that before long my wife packed up and left our home, to move in with another man, and then everything fell apart.

Late on Christmas eve, 1979, she announced that she was in love with him, and planned to stay on with him. I was devastated - this was so saddening, but I felt determined to drive over on Christmas Day to try to bring over gifts with our eighteen month old boy, and try to save our family. A distracted driver ran a light directly in front of me. We hit hard. My toddler son was spared serious injury, but was thrown forward and buried under a pile of wrapped gifts. I broke the steering wheel in half with my face. Our car was totaled. My boy went to stay with his mother. I got out of the emergency room and packed up our belongings. I left the key with the landlord and apologized for the mess. After that, i was just a guy again, not really a dad. Our family was shattered and so was I.

Too many years would pass before I regained my relationship with my son, and even, eventually with my long lost daughter.

But, thanks in some part to a religious antiabortionist quack doctor, our young family just sort of crash landed.

I felt that all my hopes of striving and domestic tranquility, which I thought we once shared, didn't exactly pan out the way I hoped they could. I got a vasectomy after that, and I was then still 19. I never regretted that.

This is not only a women's issue. Every man who loves a woman should be concerned.

Don't let religious political zealots steer your life into the ditch. Family planning is our choice!

Self determination is a human right. Abortion, as necessary health care, matters to men as well as women. If you ever had a sister or a mother, defend choice - defend women - and families of all kinds of people.

Yes! We can!

Vote for democratic issues, yes, for human dignity, vote loudly now for Democracy.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2022/11/6/2134148/-Forced-Pregnancy-or-Family-Planning

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