Yes. If you think (as I do) that abortion is part of a woman’s moral right to control her own body, then why would you have any particular indignation about Amy Richards’ decision?

Your reaction makes sense on one common anti-abortion view (the view that abortion is a grave evil, but that women who feel constrained to choose it by dire circumstances deserve compassion rather than condemnation). It doesn’t make very much sense on the most common pro-choice views. It seems to me that the disagreement on this case will have a lot to do with general attitudes towards abortion and very little to do with Amy Richards’ circumstances specifically.

The pro-choice position does not depend on whether you feel sorry for the poor girl or not. It’s based on respect for women’s choices.

candace: And the sad thing is, I would bet that Amy Richards’ little boy would, too.

This is preposterous arrogance. You don’t know Amy Richards and you almost certainly will never know her “little boy.” He didn’t ask you to speak on his behalf and I can’t see where you got any particular knowledge or authority that would make it appropriate for you to do so. If you want to make a case against abortion you should feel free, but using a stranger’s child as a ventriloquist’s prop in trying to make it only undermines your efforts.

joe: In getting off the topic, I was hoping to draw a comparison to those of affluence (education) and those less affluent (little education) and its impact on society. Do the enlightened ideals of abortion and contraception, which are probably used mostly by the well-to-do, a benefit to society?

There’s no need to speculate about who “probably” uses abortion and contraception. Data is publicly available. As it happens, you’re correct about contraception but mistaken about abortion: poor and low-income women are more likely than “well-to-do” women to have abortions (see: Alan Guttmacher Institute: Patterns in the Socioeconomic Characteristics of Women Obtaining Abortions in 2000-2001 in the Findings under “Women’s Characteristics”); the rate of abortion per 1,000 women decreases fairly steadily as annual income increases. Anyway, I’m unclear what any of this has to do with whether abortion should or should not be legal. If birth rates decline in proportion to increases in female literacy and education, then that must mean that women, given the resources and options to make a meaningful choice, are choosing not to have as many children as they had previously had. The women making these choices are human beings, not machines for maximizing whatever demographic statistics you happen to find important; each and every one of the women in question has her own life and her own reasons for choosing to have fewer children, and I can’t imagine where policy-makers would get the knowledge or the virtue or the right to tell her that she needs to abandon those reasons in order to make quota.

Forced an abortion?? Your arrogance even dwarfes all the crusading despots throughout history. Feminazi’s are the epitome of coercion and brutality. To hell with you and your twisted demands for power and control. Stalinists to the core, yet even Stalin rejected abortion. Youre the phoniest hypocrits in all human history. The Gulag will suit you best when youre digging those latrines in the mud. Change your nazi ways. Jerks.

If the fetuses are not viable, then any government action necessarily entails taking over control of the woman’s body.

I note all the men’s resistance to anything like castration of serial rapists and child molesters. Funny how the attitudes change when it comes to a man’s body.

Look, if you were to see me in person, you would think I was the picture of health. My ob-gyn certainly thought so, and there was no reason why she shouldn’t have. Being a real gym rat and having a physically active job gave me a very visible muscle tone. I’m a lifelong nonsmoker. Not one drop of alcohol during the pregnancy (or during my breastfeeding later..but I’m getting ahead of myself). Took all my vitamins. I avoid fast food, preferring good old fashioned Sicilian home-cooking. If you had seen me during my pregnancy, you woulda thought, “Hell, bet she could carry two or three….standing on her head, even…and doing pushups besides.”

But it didn’t turn out that way. My cervix dilated early, for no apparent reason. After a week of hospitalized bed rest (I was too far gone for cerclage), I was rapidly wheeled into the operating room, where I delivered a 25-week daughter into the world, a whopping 1 pound, 10 ounces…by emergency c-section.

Have you seen any babies born that early? I mean, up close and personal? My daughter was red…like red meat. Preemies of that gestation do not have body fat, and their skin is translucent, so you see right down to the muscle layer. Her hand was as big as my knuckle….and buddy, I’ve got small hands. Her hand wouldn’t reach all the way around my finger. She was an ‘alphabet soup’ of complications…that’s what I called it, because for convenience’s sake, the long medical terms are shortened….”bronchopulmonary dysplasia” becomes BDP, IVH instead of intraventricular hemmorage, you get the idea. The University of Wisconsin has a section of their website devoted to information for parents of preemies; if you go there and look at the list of common complications—my daughter had almost all of them. About the only thing she didn’t have was any kidney problems; she peed like a trooper from day one (good thing too, because one of the first things her neonatologist told me, immediately after my anesthesia wore off, right as they were wheeling me out of the operating room, was that she had a 50-50 chance of survival, and kidneys are crucial in that statistic…80% of those who died in the first couple of days were due to kidney failure).

I got a crash course in neonatology over the next six months, in two different hospitals. And the ordeals weren’t over when she came home either.

I’m pro-choice. For other people. I never want that for myself. But the fact is, carrying triplets is not so fucking easy. A regular, run-of the mill pregnancy for a young, healthy, “health-nut” turned out to be not so easy. Carrying triplets is a guaranteed trip to the NICU. And usually around the same gestational frame that my daughter made it there in. I am fortunate. A lot of parents I met buried their preemies.

Now, a lot of folks keep coming back to the Costco-mayonnaise comment. I think it is good to keep in mind that Ms. Richards told her story to someone else who wrote the actual article. And how we speak is usually different than how we write; vocal inflections, hand gestures, facial expressions, pauses….all of the modifiers of our speaking voices are not present in print—it’s a naturally colder medium. Being someone’s mama, I didn’t bat an eyelash at that comment, because I thought it was an ironic jab at the vapid stereotypes of motherhood that are presented to us in the media….which is a whole-’nother post of it’s own. Many mothers are angry about not seeing realistic versions of motherhood; I’m one of ‘em! So…there’s that.

I don’t assume that we know the whole story here, and I certainly don’t assume to know what was going through her mind. I do know that in crisis situations, you do a lot of thinking on your feet, and images and scenarios come quickly….just like life itself does at that time. I flashed forward to the disabilities I feared my daughter would have. I started reading books on brain development. Literally, a hundred-thousand different scenarios crossed my mind in the short time I would wait in the anteroom before seeing her. That’s how it works.

I don’t know what I would do in her situation. I’d like to be able to say, “hell no, I wouldn’t selective-abort!”, but I don’t know that to be true. I have a classic c-section, one that doesn’t allow me to tolerate labor without uterine rupture (which tends to be a killer for mother and baby, unless they’re already in the operating room).

People have an almost religious faith in the powers of modern medicine. We see programs on TV and read magazine articles about miracles….like my little miracle. We are not bombarded with the other stories the stories of burials, of institutionalized kids, of marriages that break under the strain, of the suicides of heartbroken parents.

People. She wanted a child. No one expects to have triplets. It’s scary. For very real reasons. She had a healthy, full-term baby. I say congratulations for her. She made a medical decision, even if that wasn’t what came out in the article. For all I revealed, I left a whole helluva lot out.

Think about it. And remember what you-know-who said about casting the first stone.