In the second month of 2007, I went to Springfield to hear Obama announce his candidacy with youngsters who count me among their aunties and his girls among their friends. We joined scores of parents, theirs included, who had gathered friends and family and headed to the capital. Kids were perched on their fathers' shoulders. High-schoolers disembarked from buses, scarved and bundled up against the buffeting wind, ready to learn about civics first hand. It was a perfect picture of a more inclusive American democracy. But when we turned the corner on the way to the capital steps, the festive mood darkened. There in front of us were other earnest people with their own pictures-huge mutilated fetuses held up high.
Just months before, I had absorbed the news that Sarah Palin also had to face-my baby, the one the nurse had called photogenic as she handed us another ultra-sound photo, the one whose growth I had read about each night as its heart, legs, sex, ears and fingernails developed, had an extra chromosome. It wasn't down syndrome, we had screened for that weeks earlier. It was T-18, the genetics counselor explained, the worse of the Trisomies. 90% of T-18 pregnancies don't make it to term; most babies who are born alive die within days. The few who live-if only for months-suffer; they never leave the hospital. We "said good-bye early," as the support website put it, making our way, during a nauseating three day procedure, to clinics we never wanted to see and couldn't imagine facing. It was a wrenching "choice" that felt, then, as if it were only masquerading as one.
Friends helped. Prayer helped. The kindness and humanity of the nurses and doctors and attendants in the abortion clinics helped. My husband woke at my slightest sound, holding me night after night and that helped. Still, I could not think or pray away the fact that no compromise, no mother's plea, no divine or medical intervention would make our baby live.
In the end, choice helped. I respect Sarah Palin's choice-but neither it, nor her circumstances, were mine. Choice matters. Our choices, this election, matter.
In the fertile imaginations of many of those who herald Sarah Palin as their hero, I didn't lose a baby I loved, I was, instead, a "baby killer." The D&E I had was "barbaric" and "brutal" and "offensive to our moral sensibilities," to borrow from Bill Frist, the former Senate Majority Leader. Never mind that only about 2% of abortions happen as late as mine did. As a first step, McCain Palin would reinstitute the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act signed into law by Bush and then overturned by a narrowly split Supreme Court. If they have their way, there will be an advocate in the White House who would have women give birth despite our babies' fetal viability, despite the risk to our health, even if we were survivors of rape or incest. Health insurance will absorb the high cost of overseeing these tragic pregnancies, underwrite our babies' suffering and deaths, while countless children who could be helped-but are not insured-go untreated.
Are these our moral sensibilities? The larger "brutality" overrides all else, is what the protesters told me when I asked what family values they were upholding parading blown-up pictures of mutilated fetuses around school age children. They could only repeat themselves when I shared that I, too, wanted to see fewer abortions, but knew that women faced all kinds of circumstances and needed to have choices, including the choice to introduce this topic to their living children under better, less bloody, circumstances.
On that cold Saturday, Sarah Palin had been Governor for just two months. Now, fewer than two weeks after she has been named the Republican Vice Presidential candidate, I worry about the Right's images, language and policies, the Left's own orthodoxies and what is too often an inability for everyone to cede the point that on this issue there are many shades of gray. Obama is brave enough to say so. Yet, there are no nuances, no room for compromise or compassion, for Sarah Palin and her most fervent supporters.
Why publish this I ask myself, remembering the warning I was given to take home the name-tagged bag that had held my clothes at the clinic on that last ugly day. "They go through the garbage, look up patients and harass them," the clinician shared as I stared at her dubious and dazed. Why share such a painful, personal story? Because many women don't and silence isn't an option--perhaps. But mostly because the held-high posters that punctuated the cold air that February brought home for me again how deeply personal our politics are and how important it is to remember this as we ponder our choices, your choices, Sarah Palin's and mine.