Since I posted my last article: Democrats Should Support Ending Abortion, Just Not Enforcement I have had many comments that indicated that some of you don't know where I'm coming from when it comes to abortion.
This article, which is a republish I wrote back in October of last year on my website, should explain much more about me and my own feelings about abortion.
I was an unwanted child growing up. My mother made it very clear to me from the first time I could understand anything that she didn’t want me, she never wanted me. I actually didn’t discover until I was eighteen that the name of the father on my original birth certificate was not my real father. My real father, my mother decided to tell me at this point in my life, was some stranger that she met and didn’t remember or know his name. He left town shortly afterwards.
So now that I’ve revealed I’m a bastard, I’ll move on.
Most of the time, when a woman is deciding to have an abortion it is because she can’t afford to care for the child, or she just doesn’t want it. Abortions are ugly, but why bring children that aren’t wanted by their mothers into this world of strife and bigotry?
Fortunately for me, I managed to overcome the strife in my life and the fact that my mother didn’t want me. What helped me to overcome my background and my mother’s abusive words to me throughout my childhood was an understanding that life on this world is but a millisecond of time, compared to an eternity beyond this world.
I take a different view of unborn children. Though I’m morally against abortion, I don’t think of it as murder but a moment in that woman’s life that she is making a very serious choice, one way or the other. It’s her choice, no one else can choose for her, or has a right to choose for her. The spirit of a child is always in the hands of God. I don’t know when a fetus becomes a child. I don’t know that answer and I won’t try to answer it because it’s not my place to do so. Neither is it the government’s place to do so.
For myself, I have always believed that if I hadn’t been born into the life that I had been born into, then I would have been born into another life, into a loving family that didn’t fight all the time like mine did. Maybe I’d have a loving earthly father that I could go to for encouragement and support, support that I could have used so many times before.
There are just so many children that are born into poverty around this world. They live dismal lives with little nutrition. Hopefully most of them aren’t like me and at least have a mother and father to love them.
This may seem cold to some, but maybe there are some of those fetuses that have been aborted over the years who are the lucky ones. Sure, maybe some of those women made a mistake and they would have had a wonderful child they would have loved and that child would have had a wonderful life. Sure, fairy tales happen. I believe in fairy tales – for other people. I’m not living in one, though I would love to. My past tells me different.
My mother died last year. I lost any affection for her has I grew older. I did go through a grieving period that I didn’t understand. I had always figured that if she died before me, I would feel nothing. I was wrong. Fortunately I had a boss who gave me a shoulder to cry on and an explanation of why I was feeling the way I did.
Enough of that, but I’m saying here is that the relationship with my mother never did work out, maybe if I hadn’t been born who I am, I’d be somewhere else and in a better life; or, maybe worse; in the life of a child born in the horn of Africa, hungry and afraid. I do thank God I was blessed to be born an American citizen.
So I suppose my feeling about abortion is abstract. I always think about my own life and what might have been, but then I am fortunate to at least be born free and with food aplenty.
Of course, abortion is a tragic thing for a woman to do. But isn’t there better ways to deal with the abortion issue than try to pass laws to ban it? What if we instead made it easier for people to adopt children? I don’t mean make the screening any easier but make the cost much easier. My understanding is that an adoption in this country cost a family over $25,000 to adopt a child. That doesn’t mean all the other cost that’s going to occur once that child becomes yours, there will be cost for clothes, health care, immunizations, school supplies and a whole lot more other cost.
This doesn’t mean that a family who can’t quite afford the cost of that $25K, but can afford the cost of a good home environment and all the needs of that child, plus provide all the love that child could possibly ever need or want. Let us find a way to bring down the cost of adoptions and then push the government for funding to help new mothers go full term by providing financial means for them, and help those new mothers choose good adoptive parents that will love her child forever.
Surely our Congress can find ways to bring down the cost of adoption and find ways that help women make a better choice, a choice of life. Not by trying to ban what they do with their bodies but by providing them with an alternative that has an incentive.
I think if politicians would instead put themselves in the place of a young woman, sometimes a teenage girl, who finds herself impregnated, and without the means to support it, or simply doesn’t want it, then they’re faced with doing what they think is best for their own lives. Surely many of them will regret their decisions later in life but it should always be their decisions. But we can offer them good alternatives.
To sum up what I’m saying here is, if those who care so much about those unborn children and want to stop abortion, then instead of trying to enforce their will on others, find ways to encourage the women who would seek abortion to carry it full term instead. And then make it easier for decent people to adopt children, and this by making it much less expensive. Open the door to adoption in this country. Keep a strict screening process but open the door by lowering the financial burden on newly adoptive parents.
To me, that seems like something that both sides in our political process could agree on. What better for us to do than to assure a child who otherwise might be cut from their mother’s womb, will instead go on and be born and be given to parents that will love them?
Answers may not be easy when it comes to a woman’s decision to abort, but until we are ready to see to her needs at that difficult time in her life, then we have no business telling her what she can or can’t do with her body. Instead lets help her make the right choices and by doing so, at least cut down on the number of children that are aborted in this country every year. Abortion is a horrible thing but maybe it’s better than a horrible life for an unwanted child.