The Right to Choose

Who are you pro-life people kidding? Do you even know what happens in the lives of children whose parents should never have been parents? Do you think every kid that isn't aborted lives with two preferably Christian parents in a little house on the prairie? How naive and self-centered you are.

I was a foster parent. The birth mom of my foster family (4 children) had the first child at 16. She was stunned to find out how much responsibility it was, and soon became a drug-addicted welfare mom. Only after her fourth kid got to kindergarten did Child Protective Services finally get involved and realize the kids were starving. By that time, the dad had committed suicide behind a drug deal, and the mom had become a full-fledged crack whore.

One of the few parental responsibilities the mother shouldered was to sign a paper saying she didn't want her children to have sex education in school. She said she wanted to tell them in her own way.

Well, the oldest got pregnant at 16 just like her mom. She had the child and ran away, ending up in prison. She has had a tough life ever since.

The younger three lived on and off in my home after being removed from the birth mother, who was only concerned about losing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

My late husband, who was a physician, consented to become a foster parent only because those kids were stealing from convenience stores to feed themselves while in first grade, and running drugs to make money.

The middle girl also got pregnant at 16, but she was living with me at the time. The boy wanted nothing to do with her or a baby. She didn't want it either. She begged me for help, and I took her to Planned Parenthood, behind the back of the system. They gave her a lot of education and she chose RU486.

If Planned Parenthood hadn't existed, she would also have been a mother at 16. The foster care system had no services for people like her; they only had pediatricians.

She is now 25. She has a toddler, another child born to a man in prison. She's trying very hard to support him with her 8th grade education, but it's not easy. She probably should have waited a few more years before having a child.

When people ask me if I am pro-life, I always say yes. In my own case, when I got pregnant, I carried the child and became a single mom (I later married the father, but that's another story). That's because I was 30, working, with a Ph.D.

It's not fair to bring a child into a world of poverty, drug addiction, and violence such as the world my fosters lived in before I fell in love with them and tried to rescue them. I don't think they would choose to have been brought into that world. They were terrified, like puppies in a puppy mill.

Planned Parenthood, and other counseling services like it, serve a purpose. They are not a convenience for middle class women who choose to terminate pregnancies because they are on a career path. Those people DO have other choices. No, these services are really for the unborn children who are saved from lives of terror, violence and poverty -- from being parented by rapists, drug addicts, and people who are downright irresponsible.

The burden on society of gangs, street crime, homeless children, and the other unintended consequences of forcing women to give birth to unwanted children is far higher than Planned Parenthood's budget.

And for those of you who say, "have the child and put it up for adoption with childless couples desperately wanting a child," you are even more naive. Most of these unfit parents will not give their children up for adoption until it's too late. They keep the cute baby and then want to give away the older child who is already scarred and hard to handle.

I wish people would just open their eyes before speaking, and see what is really around them. Or, if they want to be pro-life, they all ought to be made to serve ten years as foster parents.