4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days

[teaberryblue]

1) I saw this movie tonight. I know I'm preaching to the choir and I don't know if I have anyone on my friendslist who believes in outright banning of abortions, but this film, for those of you who don't know it, is about a young woman in Communist Romania and what she goes through to help her friend get an illegal abortion. I just can't stress enough the importance of films like this both to educate young people about their sexual choices, and to illuminate the reasons why we need to have accessible and safe methods of termination regardless of whether we think it is immoral, amoral, or otherwise. I would highly recommend this movie to anyone curious about the risks and methods involved in black market abortions.

--My grandmother died due to complications from a pregnancy that should have been terminated in a time when that was not a legal option.

--I went with my mother, and my mother said that this movie was eerily reminiscent of the experiences some of her friends had here in this country, in the 1960s.

--We talked at length of the difference of the portrayal of abortion in this movie vs. Juno.

2) On a lighter note, my father= only man in the world who buys his wife smoke detectors for Valentine's Day and doesn't understand why she doesn't find this an AMAZING gift.

Now, to work!

Comments

[abhor.livejournal.com]

This is why I love Roberta Gregory. In one of her comics, she drew about the risks of illegal abortions and it really, REALLY freaked me out. I can't imagine having that done in the conditions she described... I think the story she wrote about took place in the 60's as well. Scary stuff.

And of course, new-born babies being tossed in dumpsters is another reason to support abortion. Just my two cents.

[teaberryblue.livejournal.com]

I think newborn babies being tossed in dumpsters is also a reason to support no-fault abandonment laws if a mother leaves a child at a hospital or women's clinic, since a lot of the time those result when women don't realize they're pregnant until it's too late to get a safe abortion, or get ditched by husbands/boyfriends late in a pregnancy.

[keladry.livejournal.com]

Do you have "baby claps" in the US?

In Germany, many hospitals have a non-supervised backdoor with a sort of door clap that allows desperate mothers to anonymously leave their babies in a heated, padded box behind it. The box has an alarm that rings when something is put into it, and hospital staff are going to wait for a couple of minutes when they hear it, then come check.

I think that's a good solution. The baby is safe, the mother knows that it won't freeze or starve... And as long as this is an easily available solution, hopefully less women will feel driven to more desperate measures.

I'm actually not sure what the laws are, though, but I can't imagine that hospitals would be allowed to offer and even advertise this if it was illegal.

[teaberryblue.livejournal.com]

There has been heated debate about allowing these in the US, especially since they've become more popular in China and Japan lately. Right now, there are certain locations in some states where a woman is allowed to leave her baby without being charged with abandonment-- usually hospitals or police stations. But not everywhere.

[abhor.livejournal.com]

I think no-fault abandonment laws are a good idea too... the more options, the better.

[rowena742.livejournal.com]

My father actually bought my mother a vacuum cleaner for her birthday last year. Don't they cover this in Relationships for Men 101?

[teaberryblue.livejournal.com]

Well, the vacuum cleaner depends on the woman. I think the only thing my grandmother has asked for for the last, like, ten years' worth of holidays is new vacuum cleaners.

[teaberryblue.livejournal.com]

Actually, that I can get behind, because that's not giving in to the commercial pressure.

[teaberryblue.livejournal.com]

See, I'm from a family that goes out and buys Valentine candy the day after.

[kalliona.livejournal.com]

Nothing wrong with reminding the choir why they believe what they do. I think even those of us who are strongly pro-choice (but don't remember 1972) have a tendency to think of the issue in abstract or hypothetical terms...that's definitely true for me, at least. So it is important to be reminded just what illegal abortion looked like for individual women.

[teaberryblue.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think it's hard to imagine what the alternatives were. Especially in a realistic way and not a horror-movie rusty hanger way.

[pachakuti.livejournal.com]

I agree. I am always so... floored by people who don't think abortions need to be an option. I've defriended people on that basis alone. I defriended two women at the same time for trying to argue that abortion was slutty women "using it as birth control". I get so tired of people who can't understand.

[teaberryblue.livejournal.com]

I can understand the sentiment. If you really believe it is murder, I understand not believing that there is ever any okay time to do it-- because even in cases of risk to the mother, if it were any other kind of health risk, we don't approve of, say, killing someone else to take their organs because we need them. Even if the other person is sick and there's a chance they might die anyway.

However, to me, from a Christian perspective, the Bible is clear on this. The Bible says that a mother's life is always more valuable than an unborn child's, it's quite clear on this point, as it goes so far as to assign a comparative value to both.

And furthermore, it's important to realize that as long as not all people have the same belief system, we can't expect everyone to follow the same beliefs. If I believe something is morally wrong (and I personally don't believe abortion is), the onus is on me to choose not to do it for myself. I can't make that choice for other people.

And you know? Yeah. Abortion is a type of birth control. But seriously, I would love to see one woman who wouldn't have preferred to have access to more pleasant means of birth control, or who would have preferred for her birth control to have worked properly so she didn't have to choose an abortion. One of the things this movie stresses is the lack of access to birth control pills for a lot of women.

[liret.livejournal.com]

I want someone to give me a fire alarm. Your mother is a lucky woman. Also, I want to see that movie, but less then I want valentines day fire alarms.

[teaberryblue.livejournal.com]

He offered to give her batteries for them this year to make up for it.

[opaleyes.livejournal.com]

I just popped this on my Netflix list, but it says the release date is unknown. I think that would be good for Sean and me to see.

[teaberryblue.livejournal.com]

It's just come out in theaters here, so you probably have 2-4 months to wait for it on DVD. It was really powerful.

[opaleyes.livejournal.com]

Ahhh ok. I hadn't heard of it, so I wasn't sure.

[pachakuti.livejournal.com]

I wanted you to know: I told one of the people in my class about the movie and was talking about how my friend (ie, you) had seen it and thought it was really important, and that particular woman proceeded to ask me, "What do you have against children? Why do you pro-choicers hate babies?"

Eesh.

[teaberryblue.livejournal.com]

"We love babies. That's why we want them to be born in safe, happy environments where their mommies want them and can afford to take care of them and give them a good life."