The existentialists would call this Bad Faith. The writer, one Dana L., blames George Bush because she just had to abort an unwanted pregnancy, don't you see, and the reason she had to abort was that, because of George Bush, there is no morning after pill available to her, or something like that:
The conservative politics of the Bush administration forced me to have an abortion I didn't want. Well, not literally, but let me explain. I am a 42-year-old happily married mother of two elementary-schoolers. My husband and I both work, and like many couples, we're starved for time together. One Thursday evening this past March, we managed to snag some rare couple time and, in a sudden rush of passion, I failed to insert my diaphragm.
Concerned that she might conceive, which she did, she tried to get hold of Plan B:
...the emergency contraceptive pill that can prevent a pregnancy -- but only if taken within 72 hours of intercourse. As we're both in our forties, my husband and I had considered our family complete, and we weren't planning to have another child, which is why, as a rule, we use contraception. I wanted to make sure that our momentary lapse didn't result in a pregnancy.
But she couldn't get it because the FDA, for unspecified but no doubt insidious religious reasons, had not yet approved it for over-the-counter sales.
Meanwhile, I hadn't even been able to get Plan B with a prescription that Friday, because in Virginia, health-care practitioners apparently are allowed to refuse to prescribe any drug that goes against their beliefs. Although I had heard of pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control on religious grounds, I was dumbfounded to find that doctors could do the same thing.
Moreover, they aren't even required to tell the patient why they won't provide the drug. Nor do they have to provide a list of alternative sources. I had asked the ob-gyn's receptionist if politics was the reason the doctor wouldn't prescribe Plan B for me. She refused to answer or offer any reason, no matter how much I pressed her. By the time I got on the phone with my internist's office and found that he would not fill a Plan B prescription either, I figured it was a waste of time to fight with the office staff. To this day, I don't know why my doctors wouldn't prescribe Plan B -- whether it was because of moral opposition to contraception or out of fear of political protesters or just because they preferred not to go there.
In any event, they were also partly responsible for why I was stuck that Friday, and why I was ultimately forced to confront the decision to terminate my third pregnancy.
Imagine the injustice of it all. A doctor is allowed to follow his conscience and not prescribe certain drugs which he/she feels to be immoral. This religious freedom business is just going too far. Now this woman, who consented to unprotected sex, is forced, forced to have an abortion, and it's not her fault. It brings us to the brink of tears to read this. But her tale grows even more tragic:
After making the decision with my husband, I was plunged into an even murkier world -- that of finding an abortion provider. If information on Plan B was hard to come by, and practitioners were evasive on emergency contraception, trying to get information on how to abort a pregnancy in 2006 is an even more Byzantine experience.
On the Internet, most of what I found was political in nature or otherwise unhelpful: pictures of what your baby looks like in the womb from week one, and so on.
Calling doctors, I felt like a pariah when I asked whether they provided termination services. Finally, I decided to check the Planned Parenthood Web site to see whether its clinics performed abortions. They did, but I learned that if I had the abortion in Virginia, the procedure would take two days because of a mandatory 24-hour waiting period, which requires that you go in first for a day of counseling and then wait a day to think things over before returning to have the abortion. Because of work and the children, I couldn't afford two days off, so I opted to have the procedure done on a Saturday in downtown D.C. while my husband took the kids to the Smithsonian.
The hidden world of abortion services soon became even more subterranean. I called Planned Parenthood two days in advance to confirm the appointment. The receptionist politely informed me that the organization never confirms appointments, for "security reasons," and that I would have to just show up.
I arrived shortly before 10 a.m. in a bleak downpour, trusting that someone had recorded my appointment. I shuffled to the front door through a phalanx of umbrellaed protesters, who chanted loudly about Jesus and chided me not to go into that house of abortion.
All the while, I was thinking that if religion hadn't been allowed to seep into American politics the way it has, I wouldn't even be there. This all could have been stopped way before this baby was conceived if they had just let me have that damn pill.
Or if you had used your damned diaphragm, Dana. It's worth noting the tacit assumption that is being made here: The only people who care about innocent life, evidently, are religious people. All that the non-religious care about, we may suppose, is their own convenience.
After passing through the metal detector inside the building, I entered the Planned Parenthood waiting room; it was like the waiting room for a budget airline -- crammed full of people, of all races, and getting busier by the moment. I was by far the oldest person there (other than one girl's mom). The wait seemed endless. No one looked happy. We were told that the lone doctor was stuck in Cherry Blossom Parade traffic.
He finally arrived, an hour and a half late. The procedure itself took about five minutes. I finally walked out of the building at 4:30, 6 1/2 hours after I had arrived.
It was a decision I am sorry I had to make. It was awful, painful, sickening. But I feel that this administration gave me practically no choice but to have an unwanted abortion because the way it has politicized religion made it well-nigh impossible for me to get emergency contraception that would have prevented the pregnancy in the first place.
Or, let's see, maybe she could have had the child, but that option probably never occured to Ms L. She prefers to blame her plight on everyone except the one who is really responsible for it.
This is not about whether abortion should be legal or illegal. It's about how this self-centered woman demands not only a right to abortion, but demands that everyone else do all they can to facilitate it, to make it as easy as possible for her, and throw their principles out the window in order to accommodate her and compensate for her own recklessness.
Her essay is a monumental piece of self-indulgent narcissism.
