Roe v. Wade

I was 17 when Roe v. Wade was passed on January 22, 1973.

I was a senior in high school and had just become engaged on my birthday less than a month later when I knew the worst had happened. I was pregnant. I had to decide whether or not to keep the child I was carrying and fear was definitely a factor. I didn't have the money, so I kept the child.

Meanwhile, my best friend also got pregnant at about the same time. Her parents paid for an abortion while my parents allowed me to use my savings to pay for my wedding.

Roe v. Wade changed a lot of lives, and not always in a good way, but it hasn't been because of the decision to make abortion available. It has been because people do not understand what exactly Roe v. Wade means to women and what it is at its heart all about. Roe v. Wade is about upholding the right of choice, the choice to keep or terminate a pregnancy. It is a personal choice and one that no government, Supreme Court, church or individual has a right to contravene.

I've heard all the arguments for and against, and participated in more than one debate on this issue, but people still do not get it, especially not the people who bomb clinics where doctors perform abortions, kill doctors and nurses and even the mothers carrying unborn children, or people at the clinics for other reasons. These extremists are so certain of their right to end another's life to save an unborn fetus that they will destroy anyone who gets in their way. How is this respectful of life?

I will not get into the argument about when life begins; it is the equivalent of determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. When did people who were born and have lived less valuable and less worthy of life than a fetus that may or may not come to full term if not aborted? Where is the logic in that?

Women have for centuries aborted unwanted children and it has been no one's business but their own. Women who could not afford a child or carried a child of rape, incest or of a diseased sire went to a midwife or wise woman and aborted the fetus. There are many reasons for doing so, but it is no one's business but the woman carrying the child.

Adoption has not always been available and was made popular during the 1930s and 1940s when Georgia Tann made it popular to Hollywood actors and the wealthy and famous, often taking children from their parents by force and through deceit to make the adoptions possible. Today, adoption is much more accepted than it was before Georgia Tann's day and has provided a means to give homes to unwanted children from Russia, Eastern Europe, China and other countries where female children are often warehoused or killed outright, males being more valuable. But adoption is not the answer for everyone, and it still comes down to choice. Couples or singles unable to have their own children, for whatever reason, choose to adopt. That does not mean that women who wish to abort their children should be forced to carry a fetus to full term and give birth just to satisfy some religious belief that all life is sacred, except when that life is involved in offering and maintaining a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body and her own life.

I have a son because I could not afford an abortion and I'm not sure whether or not I would have been able to go through with an abortion; however, other than not being able to afford an abortion, I had a choice because Roe v. Wade made upheld my right to choose. My best friend had an abortion and she says she regrets it; maybe she does, but she had a choice.

It all comes down to choice in this as in every other aspect of life. We choose to steal or not to steal, murder or not to murder, but no one stops us from making the choice. There are always consequences, but first there is a choice. If you want to use a religious point, according to Christian beliefs, and the beliefs of many other religions, we are all born with Free Will -- the right to choose. What we do with that Free Will is up to us and as a god-given right, no man has the right to take it away. Men try all the time because, in their ignorance and pride, they believe they have the right to herd us like cattle or deny us like children unable or unintelligent enough to use our Free Will wisely. They do not have the right. We as individuals have the right to exercise our Free Will in whichever way we choose. No government, Supreme Court, man, church or individual has the right to take away anyone's Free Will, their choice. No one can live another man's -- or woman's -- life.

If I have cancer and choose not to go through chemotherapy or radiation therapy or surgery, do you have the right to force me to do what you would do in my place? If choose to have chemotherapy or radiation or surgery and it will endanger my life, do you have the right to choose differently for me? I could name a thousand different scenarios and come up with more when I'm done, but it all comes down to choice. My choice. Your choice. A woman's choice to decide what to do with her own body. From the beginning of time, women have chosen whether or not to bear or not to bear children. This time is no different just because we know more about the process and feel we know what is right or better for someone than they do for themselves. How much simpler and better life would be if I make my own choices and you make yours.

Let's make a pact. I won't deny you your right to choose the path your life will take and you do not deny me mine. It's a simple pact and one that works as long as everyone lets everyone else live their own lives.As for me, I have enough to do dealing with my own choices without making choices for everyone else.

That is all. Disperse.

And then came the rains...

After two years of slogging uphill alone, people are finally starting to catch on and send in articles and requests to write columns for the local ham club newsletter. I have beaten the bushes for two years and managed to buttonhole only a few people and now the flood gates are opening. I have two new columns in the December issue and a new format for the web version that has been applauded as innovative. I don't know why they're surprised since I mentioned changing things months ago. All I needed were the articles and features that would work well on the web and I finally found them. Editing a club newsletter is nothing like editing a magazine and dealing with professionals who at least know how things work. It looks like my article about free lunches and keeping the lights on had an impact on people and they realize how close they came to having to find someone else to edit their newsletter. Sometimes it takes a wake-up call and a blast of cold water in the face when asleep to make people realize what they could lose.

The up side of all this is that I've managed to dissuade the club members from buying my Xmas dinner at the annual party or giving me a plaque or award. I think they finally understand I don't want recognition but input because that tells me they want to be involved. It's so easy sometimes to sit back and let someone else do the job, especially when the job they're doing is so good no one feels like they have anything to contribute, but if there is one thing I think I have proven it's that everyone has a story to tell and that the story can be interesting and enlightening. The readers have seen how something they thought was insignificant can be made significant and give people something to think and talk about. If this trend continues, I won't have to write too many more editorials and can stick to interviews, profiles and articles.

Out of all this hassle came a couple opportunities to break into completely new markets. A staff writer on the Wall Street Journal suggested I send my work to him to give to his editor to be published. He said I am a very good writer with a flair for profiles. Not too shabby considering it was his article that got me asking questions of one of his profile subjects and getting a different take on the story, but my focus was ham radio and Morse code and his was only peripherally so. He told me he was impressed. Not too shabby.

I also offered a longer version of the article, with pictures, to QST which is the ARRL's magazine and I'll get paid for that, too. One of the things I love most about writing is how accessible some stories can be if you change the slant just a little. I've gotten quite a bit of mileage out of an idea when I turned it around just a little bit or took some information and dug around in a different direction.

I thought about sending some of my articles to QST but ruled it out because I didn't have the time, but I found out it didn't take that much time. So, I'm going to profile a few more interesting people, like the guy who backpacks with his goats when he takes his radios into the field, and the mini-keyer that went to St. Peter's Island on a DXpedition (that's long distance radio expedition for the uninitiated). I have found yet another avenue to market my work and expand my base audience doing what I do best -- writing about people. And that's just one of the things I am so grateful for having, not just at Thanksgiving, but every day.

In many ways, it's like a crab venturing out of a cramped shell in search of a bigger, roomier shell and finding it no longer needs the shell at all and has evolved past the need of confined quarters.

That is all. Disperse.

No time like now

Alexander Graham Bell:

When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.

Katherine Mansfield:

Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can't build on it; it's only for wallowing in.

Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Sydney J. Harris:

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

A friend recently told me he regrets missing out on being with the one person who made his life happy and interesting. He said he had made so many mistakes he wanted to take back but didn't know how, and if he had it to do all over again... I stopped him right there. "Why," I asked, "are you wasting so much time and energy moaning and groaning over what you can't change? If the opportunity is still available, stop regretting what you cannot change and change what you can right now."

Until there is a time machine available to everyone (and wouldn't that cause a ripple effect from which we'd never recover?) and we can erase the past, we must live with the knowledge that the past cannot be changed but the future is still a blank canvas waiting for whatever we want to put on it. The problem is that we get so mired in the past we can't see the moment right in front of us or the possibilities just past the end of our noses. Learn from the past, repeat what worked, and learn from what didn't work, but keep moving forward.

It's like that faint, flickering glimmer of hope in the farthest and darkest corner of Pandora's box that would have been lost had Pandora not looked inside and simply shut the lid to make sure nothing else evil or bad got out. Stop looking at what got away and look for what's still there.

My friend made a choice to put a relationship on hold while he made 1000% certain that he was sure of everything and he chose the perfect time. The biggest problem with that kind of thinking is that you cannot ever be 1000% certain of anything and there is no perfect time; there is only this time, this moment, and this choice. Time and tide -- and life -- wait for no wo/man. I know it all sounds like nothing more than clichéd bromides, but they are clichés because they are true.

I have made mistakes, quite a lot of them over the years, but each mistake brought me to this moment and I regret none of them because at the time they seemed like a good idea and either taught me something or simply gave me insight into myself or someone else. Those are mine to keep, like Fate's door prizes, and like some door prizes they aren't what I wanted, just what I got. I also know that my biggest enemy -- if you can really term it an enemy -- is me because I sometimes forget that as long as there is the next breath, the next moment, the next heartbeat there is still hope and I can change things. Oh, I fall into old habits and once I notice that I do my best to change what I'm doing, but for the most part I am a work in progress and I keep learning and changing and, hopefully, growing. It all sounds so Pollyanna but I prefer Pollyanna to regret and spending my life in the sloughs of despond, and it gives me a new lease on life and a new way of looking at things, and I love to look.

I don't know whether or not my friend will take my advice and stop regretting the past, but I do know that all he needs to do is look up and see that what he wants most in the deepest part of his heart is still available if he has the courage to step up to the plate and take his shot. It won't be easy because there are questions to be answered and reasons to be given, but what he wants is within his grasp if he wants it badly enough and doesn't keep waiting to be 1000% sure or for the perfect time; he's not going to get that kind of sign.

For me, it's like writing. I fret over starting but once I get started the words come and at the end I have something worth sending out and being published. The first step is always the hardest because I agonize over it so much, trying to order things in my mind and plan out what I'm going to write, but I'm stalling, spending too much time thinking about what I am going to do than just doing it. It's that way for many things that I think are going to hurt, but I usually find out I wasted a lot of energy for nothing. Pain is sometimes good because it means growth, but more often than not I find that the pain is inconsequential or nonexistent and the growth is more than I ever hoped was possible.

I hope my friend stops waiting and takes that first step and follows it with more steps because otherwise he will spend his life regretting what he could have had all along.

What do you regret?