The Way It Was

               Eleanor Cooney in “The Way It Was” describes her own pregnancy at an young age and the horrors during her search for an abortion, pre Roe v Wade. Cooney explains that she waited too long and went to a series of so-called doctors who robbed her and made sexual advances but did not abort the fetus. Eventually, after telling her mother, she was able to have an abortion even at her late stage of gestation. In the essay Cooney describes in graphic detail the procedure known as a partial birth abortion which is often administered late in term. I think Cooney’s purpose in the graphic descriptions is to describe the dangers women face when searching for an illegal abortion. Cooney states a doctor said that deaths from abortions decreased drastically after abortion was legalized. Cooney brings up the late term abortions because she said the largest age group requesting this type of abortion is teenagers. She believes that proper education, and not strictly abstinence based education, is needed particularly around poor and marginalized girls.

                Many states have already, or in the process of tightening anti-abortion regulations. Some states are demanding parent’s signatures even when parental abuse is on the rise. Many states severely limit late term abortions but are also cutting programs that will assist single mothers, an example of “love the fetus, hate the baby” so prevalent in today’s society. Several states have enacted legislation requiring a vaginal wand examination which actually fits the definition of rape. Because the fear that tax payer money may be used for an abortion many states and organizations have cut or are limiting funds to Planned Parenthood making it difficult or impossible to get birth control or an abortion. Poor women, teenagers and women of color are disportiontly affected by these laws and may resort to illegal abortions to prevent pregnancy.

                 Terminating a pregnancy is a private matter, between a women and her doctor, even the laws that allow abortions is based on privacy.  As I have grown older my feelings about abortion are somewhat changing, the viability of a fetus is not quite as black and white to me as before, but my belief  in a women's right to choose has never changed.