John McCain your air quotes around the term “health of the mother” were real personal to me.
I hesitate to even post this blog because as I’ve noted in the past it is becoming very unhip teacher mom. After posting this blog it will be unhip teacher mom who frequently almost dies.
I am so working on being healthy.
I had an unplanned “oops” pregnancy at 41 when I should not have been pregnant. That pregnancy was dangerous to my health because of a condition called placenta previa.
According to this medical website
http://www.emedicine.com/emerg/topic427.Htm
placenta previa is “an obstetric complication that occurs in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. It may cause serious morbidity and mortality to both the fetus and the mother.”
Having this beautiful baby
nearly killed me.
John McCain POW Camp is horrible and my experience does not equate. But carrying a baby for six months with placenta previa is akin to six months of low level labor without painkillers. It is not recess and it is not for sissies.
I can teach online so I could work during those six months. I could not adequately care for my twelve-year-old daughter because I was in bed. She was in the care of her father who was dealing with grief the wrong way. His mother had died around Thanksgiving the previous year and at the time of my diagnosis with placenta previa he was in the process of losing his father who would die six months later. My daughter’s father was often too drunk to express his grief but drunk enough to express his anger.
My ob/gyn pleaded with me to abort the baby in order to be able to spend more time caring for my twelve-year-old and leaving the marriage.
I am liberal and pro-choice.
I asked if the baby I was carrying was healthy. The ob/gyn said she was healthy. I was the one who was ailing.
I did not abort the baby. Social workers were assigned to observe me and my husband to determine if we could take the baby home after delivery.
The family situation has gotten better. We have divorced and he is properly dealing with his grief.
I deserved the right to make that choice. John McCain you might have made the same choice for me. Even the you don’t deserve to make choices for women in that situation. It was not your experience and not your life.
Mind your own business.
Stop using the stupid air quotes to denigrate human experience. They are obscene.
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A high school friend died in childbirth. I lost a nephew who was stillborn at full-term, with no warning signs. People think these situations are far-fetched and exaggerated, but they are all too common and real. The "health of the mother" is not a hypothetical and only a woman and her family can make the choice for what is right for her and them.
I'm so glad you wrote this post and I'm so angry that his idiocy brought back a flood of emotions and hard memories for you.
What a thing to have to go through! Like you, when I hear men pontificating about abortion scenarios as if they know it all, or would care to begin to empathize with any of the real life situations, I become infuriated.
Will you please send your post to the McCain Campaign? Likely, the effort will not amount to anything tangible, maybe even reinforce their high and mighty position. If even one person thinks about "the health of the mother" issue differently, it will be worth your time.
McCain is no lover of women -- many, many issues. He doesn't care about abortion, he cares about controlling and restricting women's rights. All up, that is even more frightening if he should by some long shot win the Presidency.
It’s like he showing how he can’t see a deep, human, and nuanced view of anything.
Powerful post.
Thank God you had the right to make the choice you made. It shouldn't be a choice decided by politicians. John McCain's disdain for women should bother everyone, party affiliation not withstanding. He is so offensive.
John McCain is not the only person ever to survive a POW camp, just as you are not the only woman to be faced with life-and-death decisions and possibly, god forbid, horrendous outcomes. Trying to compare the two is apples and oranges. And if McCain is as Pro-Life as he says he is, he'd say you went though a Worse experience than he did.
I am so eternally tired of McCain using his POW status to give himself special status. He was a lousy pilot, got shot down, lived in execrable conditions, refused as ALL his fellow prisoners refused to slam the USA in return for a ticket out. Good for them. But he's no better, no worse.
You, on the other hand, had to face your decision alone, with the system stacked against you and your life on the line. Look what you accomplished. Please, don't waste another minute thinking about McCain's air quotes. Just focus on your last three paragraphs here ... and your beautiful daughters.
Sen. McCain has an essential humanity we all need to take notice of. He has suffered, and there have been moments throughout his career when compassion has been evident. But "the leader of the free world" cannot be a person who simply dismisses as political pandering the issue of whether people live or die.
As a man, I think it is fair to say, no man can rightly force a woman to do with her body something she does not wish to do, and it is obscene to think that people who defend as highest values democracy, individual liberty and "small government", believe the government should tell a woman she has an obligation to put her life at risk so their own beliefs can be felt to be prevailing...
I think you're a courageous human being, and I have great respect for the story you tell. I've been close to more than one person with metastasized lung cancer, and I know how difficult and how uncertain the journey can be. I wish you the best, and thank you for this brave and important post.
"Mind your own business."
Dorinda, right on! Having faced this choice point myself, I have a difficult time with anyone in McCain's position telling me how I should manage my life and my health. I think "Mind your own business" is a much nicer way of phrase for my feelings on what he, and other "anti-choice" proponents should do.
I never expected such a response. Many thanks.
The difficult pregnancy happened before my cancer year.
My friend Debbie who smartly summarizes better than me noted "thank God for Tyler. She is the reason you get up in the morning and why you keep going."
That is true. Sappy as it sounds I want Tyler to remember me.
Paws up. Wishing you and your daughters joy and happiness.
She is lovely and aren't you the lucky one? Give her a hug and kiss from all of us!
And just a bit offpoint, my sister was in the trials for herceptin, and is doing great five years later. All best.
You have no right to judge him for his desire to love and help the helpless babies.
You put a very human face on the issue at hand. Yours is one among thousands of such stories, stories that are none of our business, unless YOU say so. That is as it should be.