ABORTIONS
This is such a heated topic and the older I get, the more I
see this decision as strictly personal.
I am not sure I could have ever had an abortion but I can no longer pass
judgment on a woman who made a decision to have one. And I don’t believe our
government should ever be in the middle of this choice. It’s just too personal.
When I worked with high school students, girls confined way
too many details of their sex lives to me. Many of them ended up pregnant and
alone in deciding what comes next. This decision was frequently frightening, volatile,
stressful and secretive.
Students from liberal homes had access to birth control so
they didn’t seem to have to make this tough decision. My poor girls just had the baby and some of
them had babies before they left high school.
My girls from very strict Christian families suffered greatly with this
decision. They just could not tell their
parents about their pending pregnancy.
These were the girls who felt they had no other choice but to have an
abortion.
I remember one girl in particular, she had three abortions
that I knew of. For some reason, her
mother frequently talked to me about the sexual promiscuity of high school
kids. This behavior offended her.
“Some families have
no morals. Parents just don’t care about these things. But I am so lucky I don’t
have to worry about that. My Amanda knows
we would just kill her if she had sex before marriage, Right Amanda?” She would
laugh a little inappropriately.
Amanda would be standing beside me, knowing that I knew that
she already had three abortions and she would have to lie to her mother and
look to me for assurance that her secret was safe with me. It was awkward and a little abusive. I always felt as if the mother was somehow testing
both of us.
