Letter from a mother, to her fetus
Dear anthropomorphic collection of cells,
I have brown eyes, and your father has green, but no matter what color your eyes are, they will still see the same world. No matter what color those eyes are, they will still witness our little “family.”
I look forward to saving you from a world churning towards Armageddon. You see, dear, we live a crazy life here and we just keep expanding and sucking the world dry. Our most optimistic hope is to quickly find another world so that we can suck it dry too. Some even pray to an all powerful being for the end to come so that they may have paradise.
We have built enough bombs to destroy all life on this planet hundreds of times over. Yes, that includes you. All the beauty you may want to witness floats on an island surrounded by conflict, death and disease. There is nothing I can tell you, little one, except that this is simply the way things are. I can offer no solutions to you, only a broken world.
I have no education, and I can’t get one with you around my neck. I can’t give you the attention you deserve or even guarantee the things you might need. Food will not be scarce, I work at a grocery store, but my one room apartment may feel crowded as you get older. When you can’t stand to see my face because we fought the night before, I can offer no promise of a door to slam, or a phone to call your friends.
Your father is a little crazy, and I don’t think he’ll be around. He’s pretty much a sociopath, I am sorry to say. I don’t even think I would want you to meet him. He does a lot of drugs and is incapable of the love a child needs. We used protection, but condoms sometime break. The day after pill got banned last year, so I had to wait and see. You’ve been growing now, and didn’t even have to start.
You can’t understand what I am saying, I know. It’ll be another six months at least before you could be born anything but dead. I am getting an abortion soon, so this is all a bit over your head but still…
I am sorry,
Not a mother yet
Dear Fetus;
I'm sorry that I have mental problems that aren't controlled by medication or I wouldn't be talking to a glob little bigger than the dried patch of cum on my sheets this morning.
It was in response to a blog titled 'Letter From The Womb'. It's on the most e-mailed list.
~C
Visit my blog.
I really enjoyed that. Good imagination and a good response to "letter from the womb". I often times wonder why certain religious people would want to bring a child into a world that they are praying for the end of. hmmmm.........
Ceila
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/ceila30
Yeah, I have wondered that too. I guess that's where the prohibition against suicide comes from. After all, if paradise is just a death away there isn't much reason to stick around, is there? But if offing yourself precludes you from paradise you have to tough it out with the ret of us.
Res ipsa loquitur.
memor mori, mahalo.
Very nicely written response dear.
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." -Dr. Seuss
"May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the warm rays of the sun fall upon your home. And may th
Thanks :)
Res ipsa loquitur.
memor mori, mahalo.
ahh yesssss. Thank you. This is an awesome response to the letter from the womb. "Dear anthropomorphic collection of cells," I love it!
Funny and sad and depressing and truthful all at once. This is a great letter that says so much. Even better than a "against abortion" rant. Very original.
For people with some sense!
That "letter to the womb" thing drove me nuts.
This is an interesting concept. I'll go out on a limb here and assume that you're a pro-choicer. =) I'm not sure what kind of feedback you're looking for but if I were writing this piece, I would make the mother's remorse a little more apparent. I thought that your description of our "broken world" is powerful and makes a point.
After seeing no less that a half-dozen of these "letters" to and from "the womb" over the last few weeks, I have finally had enough. A fetus in the early stages of development cannot read, nor can it write a letter. This fact might seem rather rediculously obvious, but it speaks to the absurdity of this kind of emotion-based rhetoric.
The bottom line is that the question of abortion is a LEGAL issue. And, just thinking something is "wrong" is not a sufficient reason to make the practice illegal. To quote the Court in Roe v. Wade...
> "We forthwith acknowledge our awareness of the sensitive and
> emotional nature of the abortion controversy, of the vigorous
> opposing views, even among physicians, and of the deep and
> seemingly absolute convictions that the subject inspires. One's
> philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of
> human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life
> and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes
> and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's
> thinking and conclusions about abortion.
>
> In addition, population growth, pollution, poverty, and racial
> overtones tend to complicate and not to simplify the problem.
>
> Our task, of course, is to resolve the issue by constitutional
> measurement, FREE OF EMPTION AND OF PREDILECTION. We
> seek earnestly to do this, and, because we do, we have inquired
> into, and in this opinion place some emphasis upon, medical and
> medical-legal history and what that history reveals about man's
> attitudes toward the abortion procedure over the centuries. We
> bear in mind, too, Mr. Justice Holmes' admonition in his now-
> vindicated dissent in Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 76 (1905):
>
> '[The Constitution] is made for people of fundamentally differing
> views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and
> familiar or novel and even shocking ought not to conclude our
> judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them
> conflict with the Constitution of the United States.'"
>
> http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=410&invol=113
The kinds of arguments that we see in these blogs are utterly without rational merit. Instead, these "letters" are merely attempts to confound the dispassionate consideration of the issue, and to obscure the law with irrelevancies. When you engage in emotion-laden argumentation, you poison your own cause, since the Courts do not permit the law to be decided on the basis of feelings or other unsubstatiatable quantities.
If you are pro-life, then your only hope to prevail in this argument is to provide objective, dispassionate PROOF that the core premise of your argument, i.e. that "human life AND personhood (including all of the rights so associated) begins at the moment of conception." And, you are going to have to accept that your religion will never be capable of meeting that standard in a country that specifically prohibits the law from allowing you to dictate the religious bliefs of others.
If you are pro-choice, you are in a somewhat stronger position of course, since the law currently supports your position. However, when you choose to engage the opponents of choice, you need to realize that you will never convince them by engaging an irrational argument with more of the same.
percivale
Hmmm, I am pretty sure I acknowledged that a fetus can neither read nor write by addressing an "anthropomorphic collection of cells." Consider this a demonstration that both sides have emotional components to be harped on, not just the pro-lifers.
The logical points are on totally different fronts, so there can't be any real comparison. Maybe some emotion to the choice side isn't so bad. Lifers and choicers spend little time refuting each other's points and much time making their own points. We end up with people arguing on different fronts.
I am simply engaging on the front chosen by others on this site.
Res ipsa loquitur.
memor mori, mahalo.
Muhaha. I think I have a right to find this almost refreshing. Thank you for understanding.
----
Let that resonate,
Moni
“The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.” Don Marquis (1878 - 1937)
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.
First of all, for anyone who believes paragraphs 2 and 3, this kind of thinking would seem to mean that you would never have children. Why abort one now to prevent them from facing a world that one later would face anyway?
Secondly, I hate abortions but for god sakes I think the excuses for both sides are pathetic. I just wish women and men would start taking responsibility for their actions, stop screwing around with people they would never intend to have children with, and just over all have a better knowledge in life.
Sure condoms break, but there is birth control out there. They're pricey yes, but there are options (aka Free Health Centers) all over the place with sliding scale payments. The least a person can do is be prepared with two back up plans.
This is why I don't believe in making abortion illegal, because this nation doesn't need more laws for people to break - it needs a better education system. There are so many people out there who are misinformed about sex and life in general, and usually those are the type of people most likely to be having sex.
I don't ever want to have children. I never will, even if the girl I am sleeping with gets pregnant. I support all options that allow people to have a life with exactly the number of children that they choose to have.
Why should I have children to be economic pawns and religious set pieces?
Res ipsa loquitur.
memor mori, mahalo.
Boy! With all of that unbridled optimism on display I really wonder why the world we live in is turning to shit.
Maybe we should all just hang it up now, get it over with. I'm starting to think killing babies is thew way to go. We should kill lots more, maybe all of them.
Or maybe we should stop exploiting babies for political/religious/economic gain. Maybe we should start trying to give every person the benefit of a loving home and loving parents instead of draping children around people's necks because "they deserve it."
Maybe this world is shit because all you optimists keep breeding out of duty because "children are the future." Maybe this world is shit because not enough people look around and say, "I can't handle myself or this world, and there is no way I can handle a child."
I don't count pointless optimism as a virtue, and I don't find the future particularly bright.
Res ipsa loquitur.
memor mori, mahalo.
This was poetically written. :) And I understand that mothers would like to keep their children from being brought into the darkness the world brings- HOWEVER, what about the good things life has to offer? Are we throwing all hope for humanity now? :(
"I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people."
-Van Gogh