There will be no images in this post.
The images were always the worst.

In the summer of 1999, in Jackson, Mississippi, I entered the culture wars in a way I'd never imagined.

I had been married for five years and had two children, the youngest was one year old. I found out I was pregnant. I had pre-eclampsia with both children, so I went in to the ob/gyn early to be sure I had the right care.

Everything the doctor said in that appointment sounded like it came from the depths, like hearing someone talking to me with my head underwater. I was only six weeks along, but my blood pressure was already sky-high. I had early onset pre-eclampsia, the doctor said. He told me I probably would not make it through the pregnancy, the baby certainly would not. My body hadn't "figured out yet" that I wasn't pregnant anymore, so it just carried on the symptoms from my last baby. I didn't know that was a possibility. I had waited the recommended year before getting pregnant again.

 I was told by the doctor that he "could not recommend" I have an abortion. This was Mississippi after all. I had to have a life threatening reason to get an abortion from a hospital. I asked what that meant. I was told I had to have a stroke first.

 I looked up abortion clinics in the phone book. I called and made an appointment. The first time you go in, they give you a pregnancy test and there is an entrance session involving brochures about adoption and public assistance. Then there is a 24 hour waiting period. The next day you go back and have the abortion.

The first day I chickened out. I saw the line of people on the sidewalk, holding signs and screaming. I knew what was coming. I had been an escort at the 9th Avenue clinic in Pensacola when I was a teenager. That was before Dr. Gunn was killed. Back then we could feel feminist and dangerous without actually thinking someone was going to gun us down in the parking lot.

The second day, I was just angry. I blasted my way through, hearing the people scream at my husband, "What kind of MAN would let their woman do this to their child?"

I did what I had to do, then left. The third day, I went again. It was like a trial by fire. I was even angrier. And I felt guilty. Very, very guilty. Abortion is not easy. Especially if you don't have the extra $100 for sedation. You basically get a mild sedative, then have your insides sucked out with what feels like a garden hose. I hated myself but I hated those people outside more. I had lost my baby and they had made it harder.

As I sat in the recovery room, I saw the "Help Wanted" sign up on the wall. They needed an intake counselor. The state's laws required that someone sit down with each woman and lay out the options, adoption, WIC, state assistance. The duties also included telling each woman what their due date would be and answering any questions.

I'll be honest. I took that job for two reasons.
1. I believed that the women who went through that should have a kind person there to answer their questions.
2. I wanted to see, feel and touch what I had just done. I hated myself and I hated the way I felt. I wanted to roll around in it and force myself to see what I had done. It was a path to absolution. It was self-torture.

My first day on the job, I was screamed at in a way I simply did not believe was possible. The team of "screamers" as we called them, was led by a husband and wife. The wife was a Catholic ob/gyn who did not prescribe birth control. The husband was a man who had nothing better to do than stand on a chair and scream.

I walked directly up to the woman and told her I was the new intake counselor. I reminded her  that they had lobbied for the law which forced clinics to have these counsellors in every practice. I was the only person in that building giving women the alternatives to abortion. I was the person they had wanted to be in there. Please don't kill me.

Somehow the woman got the idea that I was one of them. A mole on the inside working for Jesus and His little fetuses. I did not disabuse her of this notion. She said everyone had their path to walk and I had chosen one that wasn't safe. I could be contaminated by the abortionists.

She evidently didn't remember that just last Tuesday, I was one of them. I suppose all the faces start to run together after awhile.

I saw a veritable parade of women. Dozens a day. Little tiny white girls clutching teddy bears, no more than 14, big-eyed and terrified, dragged in by their fathers. Young black women in flip-flops, their tears were so shiny they were like mirrors on their dark skin. Older professional women in suits, going back to work as soon as it was over, iron-jawed and unhappy. Women my age, in their twenties, obviously already mothers, mothers of many, who just looked tired and poor.

Every one of them had something in common: They needed to tell me why. It wasn't my business. I never, ever asked. But they needed to tell me why. My office was the confessional in this anti-church. They needed me to know that they were not bad people. They needed me to know why it wasn't their fault. And every last one of them said they were sorry. They apologized to me because they didn't know how else to do it.

About a month after I started, the clinic owner's son tied a rope around the chair the husband stood on so he could look over the fence at the people going in and out. He sat on the other side of the fence, waited until it was funny, then pulled the rope. The husband fell on his butt in the grass, much to my horror. But, the worst was the jar.

The jar had a baby in it. It was filled with what could only be pickling fluid and a small, very dead, baby. This jar fascinated me. I wondered where they put it when they went home. Was there a special shelf in the living room next to the family photos? Did the baby stay in the car, waiting for the next day's work? Did the baby sit on the table like some horrible centerpiece?

As he fell off the chair onto his rear, he let go of that jar. Really, the jar flew out of his hand. Up and over his head, over the sidewalk, out onto the road, where a car was coming. The jar shattered on the asphalt and the little old lady driving what could have only been the largest 1970's land barge on the road RAN OVER THE BABY.

The look of horror on everyone's face played out in slow motion. The land barge screeched to a halt. The little old lady jumped out of the car. He dashed out into traffic, and picked the baby up from underneath the tires.

I expected absolute carnage. I mean, how do you run over a pickled fetus and not squish out the insides? I was horrified. Then I saw the tire tracks. Then he dropped the baby again. It bounced. The baby was plastic.

It was the most terrifyingly hilarious thing I had ever witnessed. Sociologists say that laughter is a fear response and everything we laugh at is funny because it isn't happening to us. Our horror at putting ourselves in the place of the guy getting hit in the face with a pie makes us laugh. Oh, I laughed. I laughed until tears came streaming down my face. Then I cried until I laughed.

Two months later, I came home from work and a man was standing on the sidewalk outside of my apartment. He said hello and told me I "didn't want to go to work tomorrow." I went inside and called the police. They were unimpressed. It takes a lot to impress the Jackson, Mississippi police department.

The next morning, I went to work. I had developed the almost obsessive habit of checking the dumpster outside my office. It sat on the other side of a brick wall from my desk. Someone had left a present. Literally.

It was square and yellow with a big blue bow. It looked fake, like it had been created by Martha Stewart as a stage prop. I ran inside, told the manager and the police were called. Six hours later they showed up and took the package away. It was blown up in a field somewhere, yielding nothing but a lot of pieces of cardboard box.

I never went back to work.

Every single day I regret the abortion I had. I wish it had been different. And every single day I regret that I can't do that job. I loved that job. And I wish the screamers could have seen what I saw.

 Today I have four children, healthy and perfect. I wonder what my baby would have been like, who they would have been, if it was a mistake. Sarah Palin's candidacy has reopened this argument in America. The rhetoric has become shrill and accusatory. I do not question Ms. Palin's choices as a mother. I can't. All I ask is that she not question mine.

That, my friends, is feminism. It is choice. The debate about a Palin Vice-Presidency should not begin and end with what sort of mother she is. There are many, many issues other than abortion when it comes to running this country. But until you've held a 13 year old rape victim's hand, looked into her eyes and told her it'll all be over soon, keep your hands off my uterus.