"For most young girls, sex isn't fun"

It was Christie Todd Whitman on Chris Matthews' "Hardball" on MSNBC  last night who said she suspected both Laura and "the girls" -- not to mention grandma Bar -- disagreed with GW's take on "a woman's right to choose."

We felt strongly about these issues in our salad days -- when we were personally vulnerable to such things -- raging against these MEN's presuming to decide what we women should do with our bodies.

Older but not necessarily wiser, now we are vulnerable to the heartfelt arguments of beloved religious women like La Shawn Barber, who believes it is always wrong to abort.

Then come the deeper, darker implications from ema of The Well-Timed Period, who offers "A History Lesson":

Two reproductive health icons, Drs. Elizabeth Connell and Louise Tyrer, recall what it was like to be an Ob/Gyn before Roe v. Wade, and express fear and rage about the current state of reproductive rights and family planning in this country and what the future may hold.

"It's hard to conceptualize what it was like before Roe v. Wade unless you were actually there," Connell says, barely containing her anger. "In the large hospitals, ward after ward was filled with women suffering and dying from botched abortions.

Not to mention the beautiful young high school pals of our sister in the early sixties in a small New England town -- "on the very CUSP of when it was acceptable to have a baby out of wedlock" -- who got "knocked up" and were farmed out to have their babies, give them up and then return to "normal" life.  A few years later, you could have the baby and raise it on your own.  But, as our sis points out, "it has not panned out too well, for women to be having babies alone, without a father."

We ran this post by our sister, who had this to say:

I think it needs "tightening up" . . . What I get from your post is that you are at a real crossroad, vis a vis abortion, and I think you can examine that more intimately.

I TOTALLY agree with Dr. Connell . . . "It's hard to conceptualize what it was like before Roe v. Wade unless you were actually there."

For most young girls, sex isn't fun. They don't know anything about how much fun it can be.  They use sex as a poker chip to buy into the game.

Yah.  She's right.  It looks like the young gals of today are as clueless in their own way, regarding their own self interest, as the little loves of our own day.

Our mantra has always been that "girls just wanna have fun," but our sis thinks "too many women base their idea of 'fun' on what they think the guy wants." Not the bauer bird females. THEY decide what they like -- beautiful, shiny blue objects and such -- and the guys adapt. As our mother always said, look to the animals.

Comments

[Teresa]

"In the large hospitals, ward after ward was filled with women suffering and dying from botched abortions."

I have been wondering just how true this sentence might be. It's very easy to just throw out numbers... as we know it's so very easy to lie about statistics. Or even just make up numbers out of thin air.

I have no real numbers on how many women died from botched abortions back then. Just as I have no real numbers on how many die from botched abortions now. Oh - did they forget to mention that abortion is a major medical procedure and women can die from it, even in the "best" abortion clinics, even in this wonderfully enlightened time? No, they prefer you to think that the only time women die from abortions are when they are "back alley" and in "bad conditions" - completely and utterly false!

"ward after ward" is a nicely vague and frightening way of characterizing things. The statistics must be out there... it's certainly been long enough - why do they continue to fall back on the huge scare tactics? Because if you saw the real numbers, you might not be as sympathetic to their cause.

I will also mention - that years ago I was a nurse in a Neonatal Intensive Care. I can assure you, after a while you begin to think that all babies are born with medical problems - even if you KNOW intellectually that you are seeing only a tiny percentage of them. I knew NICU nurses who thought every single baby born should be under the watchful eye of a nurse for at least 3 days - to be sure nothing bad happened to them! (parents were not to be trusted) Personally I thought this was hogwash, because I understood how tiny the percentage of sick babies really was... we agreed to disagree.

But my point here is that perfectly good doctors can also have their perception skewed by where they work and what they see. It wouldn't be surprising at all to see many cases concentrated in one area hospital, leading doctors working there to the erroneous conclusion that the problem is huge, when in fact the actual percentage is very small.