Forty years ago, I was a young Intern doing my time in an Emergency Room that was often like a battlefield. One night, I saw a young girl checking in at the desk who looked bad. As I went towards her, she collapsed. I caught her and raced to the treatment area, but she died as I carried her and we couldn’t get her back. She was fourteen, and she died from a septic abortion. Later that night, another young girl was pushed back in a wheelchair. We got her to the stretcher, but she also arrested and couldn’t be resuscitated. She was fourteen too. Same cause of death. I’d never even heard of the topic of legalizing abortion in 1967, but I became a proponent that night, without even knowing it.
Years later, in another training program [Psychiatry] in an another Emergency Room in another city, I was asked to evaluate a 16 year old girl who’d taken an overdose. She was in a wheelchair, physically ill from the emetics she’d been given. It was her child’s first birthday. She’d awakened in a foul mood. The baby’s father had said he’d come by, but hadn’t shown up. She was living with her dad, and she was broke. After an argument with her dad, she and the baby went to a girlfriend’s house. There, she argued with her mother on the phone. She left the baby with her friend and went to her sister’s where they fought over the ownership of a dress. After returning to her father’s, another argument ensued, and she took everything in the medicine cabinet.
She was a bright kid, and was as dumbfounded by her behavior as everyone else. She’d been a star student, but dropped out of school to care for her child. Without belaboring the details, she’d attacked everyone around her, unaware that her rage was at the baby – not the baby as a person, but at what becoming an unwed mother had done to her life in the year before this event. This awareness was as upsetting to her as it might be to a reader, but it helped her swallow her pride, and go back to school – the one with a day-care center, and she turned her life around. She attacked herself that day to protect her child from her anger. Many don’t.
After a career in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, I think I can say that a sure prerequisite for a child’s future mental health is being "wanted." Our prisons and mental health facilities are filled with people who were "unwanted," or abused children – children who weren’t cherished by the people who brought them into the world.
So I find abortion personally repugnant. I wouldn’t do one. I wouldn’t ever suggest that solution to someone I was personally involved with. But I believe in the depth of my soul that every woman who knows that they don’t want to raise a child at the time they become pregnant should have the option to choose. And if abortion is her choice, she has the right to have competent health care, rather than be sent to a dark room, an unsterile coat hanger, and possible death; or perhaps even worse, rather than bring a child into an unwelcoming and perhaps toxic environment, an object of resentment.
I think the world needs to be populated with "wanted" people, raised by mothers and fathers who embrace their important role in the child’s developing life. That’s why I will always support Roe vs Wade…
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