Dearest Jessica, As a physician and a father of two girls, now women, I totally admire and am in awe of your up to date and comprehensive monitoring of the movement to disrespect women in the name of religion and protecting life.
BTW I especially admire your terse, blunt asides when recounting horrible policies or actions.
Today your column brought me to tears as I vicariously relived the horrible circumstances of your eclampsia during your pregnancy. OMG there is no worse torture that an expectant mom should have to go through. --- and now circumstances like yours are being made exponentially worse by Taliban politicians. I want to thank you, so, so much for sharing your personal trial with all of us. Thank God it all turned out well. My heart aches for what some moms in similar circumstances now must face.
Argh. A woman is a person. The stuff in a pregnant woman's uterus is a -potential- person, to become a person if and when she decides it to be. It's not a baby or a child or whatever they want to call it. So long as people are too stupid to understand this we will have a problem. And the 'god' nutters, which I think a majority of these people are, can't seem to grasp that if their god wanted someone else to make the decision, they (but it's always a he, isn't it?) wouldn't have put it in her body and made it completely and totally dependent on her.
Women can ask a doctor for 'equal care' depending on their own desire for a child and/or their personal beliefs. No one is forbidding that. But to force that on someone else is just about the ultimate dehumanization you could do to a woman.
Brilliant column! Nailed it! The forced birthers will always sacrifice the mother. No matter how slim of a chance the pregnancy has, they will force the mother to attempt it.
Dearest Jessica, As a physician and a father of two girls, now women, I totally admire and am in awe of your up to date and comprehensive monitoring of the movement to disrespect women in the name of religion and protecting life.
BTW I especially admire your terse, blunt asides when recounting horrible policies or actions.
Today your column brought me to tears as I vicariously relived the horrible circumstances of your eclampsia during your pregnancy. OMG there is no worse torture that an expectant mom should have to go through. --- and now circumstances like yours are being made exponentially worse by Taliban politicians. I want to thank you, so, so much for sharing your personal trial with all of us. Thank God it all turned out well. My heart aches for what some moms in similar circumstances now must face.
Argh. A woman is a person. The stuff in a pregnant woman's uterus is a -potential- person, to become a person if and when she decides it to be. It's not a baby or a child or whatever they want to call it. So long as people are too stupid to understand this we will have a problem. And the 'god' nutters, which I think a majority of these people are, can't seem to grasp that if their god wanted someone else to make the decision, they (but it's always a he, isn't it?) wouldn't have put it in her body and made it completely and totally dependent on her.
Women can ask a doctor for 'equal care' depending on their own desire for a child and/or their personal beliefs. No one is forbidding that. But to force that on someone else is just about the ultimate dehumanization you could do to a woman.
Brilliant column! Nailed it! The forced birthers will always sacrifice the mother. No matter how slim of a chance the pregnancy has, they will force the mother to attempt it.