Society, Trying To Decide

TWENTY FIVE PERCENT of American women have an abortion, according to numbers provided by the A.M.A. My mother was among them, myfather told me, long ago. He and I became drinking buddies when he was in his sixties and I was in my late teens and early twenties, and sometimes he became revelatory while in the sauce". He provided my enough details that I believed, and still believe him. My mother's abortion would have been sometime shortly before, during, or after World War Two. they got married in the summer of nineteen forty five, when he had returned from military duty in the navy, and she, a registered in our home town, was within days of her twenty fifth birthday. Before they were married, they simply were not ready to have children. Later, they were, for which I have always remained grateful. Throughout the course of my increasingly long life I have at times wondered about the older brother or sister that I would have had, but never had. What would she or he have been like? It may be that my mother aborted my best friend, my older, wiser protector, my role model. I hate abortion. I dream of a world in which abortion is perfectly legal, but vanigshingly rare. Don't we all? Well, not all of us. Our right wing Christian pro birth zealots would probably want abortion outlawed even in nobody ever had one. Their agenda is much more about imposing their twisted religious vies on teh rest of us than protecting life. What do they do to protect it once it is born? Little, other than to assert that "you're on your own", good luck, God be with you, and if you can't afford to have kids, you shouldn't have them. Abortion in America has since the beginning of the republic, like tariffs, been something of a roller coaster. Accepted widely, then not, and so on. During the colonial period it was quite common and accepted. Benjamin Frankin published a well known essay advising pregnant women on the best methods to achieve termination of pregnancy. The methods, by todays's standards, were primitive, a was eighteenth century medicine. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the proceedure was much less widely accepted, and various states began to pass laws prohibiting it. This may have had something to do with the religious fervor which swept through the country in the eighteen forties, the so called "second great awakening". Even this is questionable, since a similar revivalist fad swept through the country a hundred years prior, during Franklin's lifetime, in the seventeen forties. Societal cultural trends can be delineated and explained only in a vague, general sense. You sense that there will never be a final determination. It may be that at some point in the far future our descendants will be horrified by our violent barbarity, by our willignness to rip fetuses from wombs and destroy them, as well as our willingness to engage in never ending wars, our destruction of our own environment, and our willingness to allow humans to starve to death. We can only hope.