A Fabulous Mess

     I had an interesting discussion with my mother last week.

     I’ve written lots about my motehr before, but as we’re aging, she’s becoming the woman I always wanted her to be. Or maybe I’m becoming the woman she always wanted me to be. Whatever happened, something has changed and there are no longer fights, there are no longer tears. There’s just me and my mom, the only girls in a family of giant men.

     My family is staunchly liberal. I don’t think I can get through an hour at home without my dad using “fuck” at least twenty times in a conversation about Bush or Cheny and, so help us all if anyone brings up Fox news. My dad is an old hippie, a damn the man kind of guy, and in his old age, he’s become a bigger skeptic than anyone I know. Everything is a trick, everything is a lie, and everyone is full of shit.

     That’s why it’s possible to have arguments with my dad about politics even though we share the same basic opinions. Because he truly does believe that everyone is trying to get us and it’s the reason he doesn’t shop at Wal-Mart.

     My mom, on the other hand, is the woman who will impress me with her knowledge of anything to do with the human heart and the way the human body works, but in the next moment will ask me if Turkmenistan is really a country or ask me for the sixth time in two hours if I work tomorrow. She’s not always brilliant, but she has her moments. She, too, is a liberal because she doesn’t think that Bush has been “very smart or very nice… heavens to Betsy, it’s terrible”, she wanted to go to New York after 9/11 and to Lousiana to help after Katrina (only a few spots were open since someone had to work in the hospitals here, she didn’t get in in time) just because that’s what Americans should do for each other, and the woman who idolizes Bill Mahr more than I do. She’s a liberal. Not because of a buring hatred for Bush, not because of a conspiracy theorists mind, but because “it just makes sense to me”.

     My mother and I agree on most things as far as politics goes. The only things we don’t agree on are gay marriage (she’s against it, I’m not) and abortion.

     She’s very pro-life. And, yes, she uses the Bible as her reasoning, but I’ll let her slide because I honestly believe she’s never had premarital sex, she’s never smoked anything, been drunk once, and yells at me when I swear.

     Yes, yes, I know you’re all wondering where I came from, but apparently you weren’t paying attention when you were reading about my father earlier. Let’s make this clear, I’m not bad mouthing my dad. My dad is my hero. Moving on.

     So, anyway, I was talking about Freakonomics (can you tell I’ve been doing that a lot lately?) and my brothers who have also both read it and I brought up the abortion/decline in crime 20 years later chapter. Then the youngest in the clan started in on my mom, if only to make the discussion more interesting, about how he can’t believe she’s pro-life.

     She has no argument. She just shakes her head and says it’s wrong. “I just don’t think it’s right, it’s murder, and you’ll never change my mind.” Then she looked at me and said “I don’t know how you can do what you do and be pro-choice. Hasn’t it changed your mind at all?”

     Interestingly, it has. But not in the way she was hoping. I would have to think very long and hard about whether or not I’d have a baby if I knew something was wrong with it, and I’ve always said I could never have an abortion. If I found out my baby didn’t have all of its brain or had body parts born on the outside of its body… I don’t think I’d have it. Because I know what that kid’s going to look like in 18 years when it’s vent dependant, contracted, covered in bed sores (which are unavoidable because you can’t spend 18 years in a bed without having some skin breakdown) with tubes in places you can’t imagine. I’m one of those quality of life people, and to me, living is not living if you’re really just laying there kind of breathing on your own because you’ve been trached and only need a vent at night, getting overweight because no one can quite figure out exactly how much or how fast your continual tube feedings need to be going in order to maintain a weight that makes you easy for only two people to lift because the home nurse doesn’t work past five and there’s not always a third set of hands. That’s not life, it’s torture, and I don’t think I would be able to put my kid through that.

     My mom then came back with the argument that the mother in that position should just have the baby and let it die. Like, let God’s plan take course and don’t give the baby medical treatment when it’s born so it dies on its own. Thing is, legally, I don’t think you can do that because, legally, that’s child abuse and the hospital staff would be forced to take care of the kid. Hell, doctors put one person’s organs in another person, can take your rib and use it to reconstruct your esophagus, and take out your skull to let your brain shrink back to normal size and, while you’re waiting for that to happen, sew the skull bone into your abdomen. You know, just so it doesn’t get lost. A doctor is not going to let a baby die if there’s a scalpel and a ready supply of blood. God’s will be damned, they’ll do whatever they can.

     Sometimes I think it’s wrong. Sometimes I think all the ways we manipulate our bodies is kind of a slap in the face of God’s plan, but then I think God gave us the intelligence to come up with this stuff. He must have meant for it to happen.

     But back to the pro-life issue, if a baby was unable to survive on it’s own from the second of conception, I don’t think I could have it, knowing what it would go through. And if there’s any exception to being pro-life, you’re not pro-life. It’s all or nothing.

     What I said to my family that day was something like this: If you’re an unwanted fetus, you’re an unwanted child, and if you’re an unwanted child, you don’t stand much of a chance to grow up to be an upstanding citizen. Yeah, it happens, but it’s not the norm. Those are the babies that should be born and be adopted, the ones that are healthy and can be something if they were put in the right environment. But not all babies develop that way in utero, and much like most of the people who were bitching about the Terry Shiavo thing don’t know what the black spots on her MRI meant, most people can’t grasp that sometimes human beings were not meant to live. In fact, all of the time we weren’t meant to live, that’s why we all die. Yes, you can get better, you can get off a ventilator or a feeding tube, you can survive a long time with someone else’s heart beating in your body, you can see through someone else’s corneas, and you can pop a pill to fix your acid reflux.

     But you can’t grow a new brain. Some things we’ll just never be able to fix. And I hope I’m never forced with making the decision about whether to bring a baby like that into the world because I know what I’d do and it wouldn’t be a very nice experience.

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