A Woman's Right to Choose

A detailed Summary of A Woman's Right to Choose

Abortion, a woman's right to choose. The Anti-abortionist wants to take this right away from the many women who face the most complicated decision of their lives. So many women have been placed in very complex situations and sometimes do not have many options. Who has the right to make it more difficult than it already is, the politicians, the president, and the anti-abortionist? Do they have to live with the choice? Women do not say they want to have an abortion, they often say they have to because of very involved circumstances surrounding that decision.

But even in the pre-Roe years, many women found safe abortions. The following story comes from an unnamed mother of three children, who had an unintended fourth pregnancy: "I could barely cope with the three I already had. I absolutely could not handle even the thought of having another baby. My doctor was a compassionate man and a family friend. He put me in the hospital and performed a procedure. The record showed that I'd had an appendectomy (Rahl)."

In 1967, members of the clergy concerned about women had organized the Clergy Consultation Service, referring women to safe abortion providers in the years before R

After my experience with the abortion I did not want to ever be put in that situation again, I went to my gynecologist, and asked him to have my tubes severed. He was very reluctant to do it because I was only 23 years old. He asked me, "What if something should happen to your daughter or if I got married and he wanted children." I told him after my experience that I could never replace my daughter if anything should happen to her and that who ever I marry is going to have to accept that I will not have any children. He clamped my tubes and told me, if I ever changed my mind that I could go back and have them removed, but sometimes the procedure makes it very difficult to get pregnant. I have never changed my mind.

The room had a few other girls and we were all in the fetal position, weeping. I was sent home with no plans to recheck me later and as I walked out with my husband, I bled so badly that it soaked through my pants and down my legs. I arrived home and my husband kept asking how I was. I convinced him that everything was okay, and that I was fine. Quickly, I crawled into my bed and wept feeling sad and empty and saying over and over, "I am so sorry". After that day, the abortion was never mentioned and completely blocked from my mind.

oe v. Wade. When she needed an abortion, Dalia Kraskoff was referred to El Paso, Texas, where her abortion was performed under antiseptic conditions in a hastily set up treatment room. She was "on edge, listening for the sound of police breaking in." Many years later, Krascoff reflected on the meaning of Roe: "When in time, the Supreme Court ruled that abortion is a private matter, I thought wistfully, why it couldn't have been in time for me? But change has come in time for my daughters' generation. The old parental dream of wanting things better for your offspring has been fulfilled" (Rahl).

The following essay by actress Beth Armstrong was also written in 1991: "In July of 1986 my daughter, Lucy, was born with an underdeveloped brain. She was a beautiful little girl - at least to me and my husband - but her disabilities were severe. By the time she was two weeks old we knew that she would never walk, talk, feed herself, or even understand the concept of mother and father. It's impossible to describe the effect that her five-and-a-half-month life had on us; suffice it to say that she was the purest experience of love and pain that we will ever have, that she changed us forever, and that we will never cease to mourn her death, even though we know that for her it was a triumphant passing...no one can tell us why Lucy was born the way she was. There was nothing genetically or chromosomally wrong with her. Her condition, we have been told over and over again, was a fluke. Consequently, no one can promise us that it won't happen again...Stories like mine are not about rights; they are about need - need, because I had to stand by helplessly while my six-pound daughter arched rigid in seizure that no medication could control; need, because she died fighting for breath in my arms. Precisely because I loved her so, shouldn't I have the right to think twice before bringing another such child into the world? The irony is that if so terrible a decision comes for me, I honestly can't say what choice I will make. But I do know that no one else should have the right to make it for me" (Armstrong).

I had a boyfriend; I thought he was the only person that cared about me. Even though I was 18, I was still a virgin. I worked at McDonald's and usually did not have a ride home, so he would come by and pick me up and take me home. We then went to this old abandoned park by my house. He started kissing me and taking my clothes off. I was so scared, he was very strong and I really couldn't fight back much, I told him to stop many times but he did not. When I went home that night I had blood stains on my underwear, I just knew I was pregnant.

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Approximate Word count = 3151
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page double spaced)

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