Girl Talk

Books By Patti Liszkay
​Available On Amazon

​"Equal and Opposite Reactions" http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa
and the sequel, "Hail Mary" https://www.amzn.com/1684334888
​Available on Amazon.

​
​GIRL TALK

     Yesterday morning I received phone calls from two of my daughters; coincidentally, they both called me at the same time; non-coincidentally, they both wanted to talk - and talk, and talk - about the same topic. So we made the call into a three-way conversation about what was still on all our minds.

      We talked for a long time, my two daughters and I. Among other things, we talked about what would happen to women like the friend of one of my daughters who had an abortion at eighteen weeks when it was discovered that the baby she was carrying lacked major organs required to live outside the womb. The baby could well  continue to grow and gestate to full term inside its mother's womb, but it would die shortly after birth. And so the mother, who had two small children, had the choice of  submitting to all the physical risks and psychological trauma of four-and-a-half more months of pregnancy then going through childbirth to deliver a dead child; or she could abort. The mother had dearly wanted this baby. The abortion was devastating for her. But not nearly as devastating as the alternative would have been.
      And so we talked about what would happen to women who lived in abortion-banned states who found themselves in the heartbreaking plight of my daughter's friend.  
      And, we wondered, what would this mean for obstetrician/gynecologists in those states? What obstetrician will even want to practice in a state where they might be put into the kinds of legal and ethical dilemmas that they'll face when the decisions they must make regarding the welfare of their patients are regulated by the state? What OB/GYN would want to weigh ending a pregnancy that could save a woman's life against facing a prison sentence if a state prosecutor decided that the treatment amounted to an illegal abortion? 
        It could well be that women in abortion-banned states may have to cross state lines not only for 
an abortion, but to find a doctor to deliver their baby.
        One of my daughters brought up data that women in all age groups and across all socio-economic spectra have abortions for a myriad of reasons, health-related, economic-related, survival related. I pointed out that if I were of the so-called pro-life persuasion, I would be campaigning for universal contraception, maternal and child health care, the availability of child care, early childhood education, and food security.  But, my daughter pointed out, what would the availability of all those benefits do for a situation's like her friend's?
        My daughters and I talked about how women's situations were invariably much more complicated than the idyllic images of motherhood portrayed in the so-called pro-life literature.

     We talked about these and many more of our concerns over the overturn of Roe v. Wade, though it seemed that no matter how much we talked there was still more to say.
      After we hung up I couldn't help but wonder how many  girls were calling their moms that day.