I've had a pretty busy, intense past week. Last Tuesday this time, I was headed to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, to board a plane to Kisumu, a city on Kenya's western border. I spent 4 days there with a group of a dozen journalists from Uganda and Kenya who cover health issues.
We were invited there by the Population Reference Bureau to get information about family planning and reproductive health services in Kenya. It's an especially timely topic, because for most of the past decade, Bush Administration policies denied funding to any international family planning organization that offered information about...or even mentioned...that "dirty" little word:
"Abortion."
You know, I have to say that my feelings about that word are actually quite detached. Oh, don't get me wrong...I'm staunchly pro-choice. I also think religious leaders who condemn any type of family planning in desperately poor developing countries are committing crimes against humanity.
But I've never had an abortion, or needed one. Amongst friends and aquaintances, only a few have shared that gut-wrenching decision with me, and each time I was intensely grateful they'd had the information, support and strength to do what they felt was right for their lives.
Still, even though I've never had personal experience with an unwanted pregnancy, I wonder how many anti-choice activists around the world have actually entered a ramshackle clinic in a Third World country and seen starving women and children queued up for basic health care. That's just one of the many sights I witnessed during last week's briefing. Some of those women cradling skeletal, weak, raggedly dressed babies and children were also there to get birth control pills, or Depo Provera shots, or other tools to help them just rest a minute.
I mean, imagine being 25 years old, with no education or skills, living in a mud and straw hut, and you already have 6 sickly, poorly-fed kids who you can't afford to send to school, and your husband, who ain't got a pot to piss in just like you, is threatening to beat you bloody if you do anything to keep from getting pregnant, but he won't keep his freakin' hands off you, and your pastor or priest or village chief or nosy-assed, half-starving-her-OWN-damn-self mother-in-law is warning that you will burn in HELL if you do anything to stop producing babies who will eventually die slowly and painfully before your eyes...........
Trust me, I try to keep an open mind about these things. After all, I've frequently acknowledged that if the Birth Control Pill had been introduced in 1951 instead of 1961, and had been easily accessible across America, I and about 5 or 6 of my siblings never would have been born. If Eloise Jones had had even one of the dozens of amazing opportunities I experienced in my early adult life, she would have stopped getting pregnant after the first one or two deliveries. She would have done what many of those desperately poor women in that Kisumu clinic were doing the day we visited...obtaining pills and shots and IUD's and tubal ligations behind their husband's backs.
(After all, I respected my father growing up, but he didn't have a pot to piss in, either. AND he couldn't keep his damn hands to himself. Thank goodness, huh???)
I know, that makes me sound like a hypocrite. Glad my mother didn't have access to abortion, but unwilling to support keeping other women from "ending some kid's life." But stay with me for a minute. Just imagine me standing in that Kisumu clinic, born the 9th of 10 children to two poor Americans all those many years ago, watching those desperately poor Kenyan women, and thinking, "What's the difference between Eloise Jones's experience and theirs?"
One word: EDUCATION. Or put another way, knowledge of, and a reasonable proximity to, a better life. Awareness that even if your life sucks ass, it doesn't have to be that way for your kids. From the first delivery to the 10th, my mother was determined that her children's lives would be better than hers. And she knew learning, and being aware of a better way of life...and making us believe that we could actually get there...was the only way to survive.
But what if you're born in abject, mind-bending squalor in a Western Kenya village, as opposed to a small town in Southern Illinois? I mean, in America in the 1940's, 50's and 60's, when Mama was having her children, the main thing keeping her and people like her from having a chance to succeed was black skin. Not a Third World government with limited economic resources, lack of infrastructure, no access to decent health care for the majority of its population, and scant access to education. She worked for many years as a maid for an affluent white family and knew that her own children were just as smart--if not smarter--and just as deserving as those white children. Eloise Jones was determined that her children would have just as much of a shot at America's version of success as they did.
So here's my official position on family planning, abortion, et al. Not that you asked for it or anything, but you're gonna get it anyway.
"If the women in that Kisumu clinic weren't almost starving to death themselves, and if they lived in minimally decent houses or apartments instead of squalid mud huts, and they weren't plagued by malaria and cholera and HIV and TB and a host of other ailments, and their husbands had jobs and could provide for their families, and their kids could eat and go to school, then okay, maybe I could open up a corner of my consciousness to understanding arguments against family planning, religious or otherwise. I might even be able to at least entertain the prospect of a world where the right to choose was completely eliminated."
But as long as those sickly, malnourished babies' faces remain in my mind's eye, I just can't get there. That's why I'm quite relieved that President Obama removed those Bush Adminstration restrictions around family planning practices. Heck, just because I'm glad Eloise Jones didn't pursue access to legal, safe birth control or abortion doesn't mean I'm glad there are millions of children in the world who not only probably won't even live until the age of 3, they'll suffer every single second of their existence.
For some reason, I just can't glean a drop of comfort from that thought.
We were invited there by the Population Reference Bureau to get information about family planning and reproductive health services in Kenya. It's an especially timely topic, because for most of the past decade, Bush Administration policies denied funding to any international family planning organization that offered information about...or even mentioned...that "dirty" little word:
"Abortion."
You know, I have to say that my feelings about that word are actually quite detached. Oh, don't get me wrong...I'm staunchly pro-choice. I also think religious leaders who condemn any type of family planning in desperately poor developing countries are committing crimes against humanity.
But I've never had an abortion, or needed one. Amongst friends and aquaintances, only a few have shared that gut-wrenching decision with me, and each time I was intensely grateful they'd had the information, support and strength to do what they felt was right for their lives.
Still, even though I've never had personal experience with an unwanted pregnancy, I wonder how many anti-choice activists around the world have actually entered a ramshackle clinic in a Third World country and seen starving women and children queued up for basic health care. That's just one of the many sights I witnessed during last week's briefing. Some of those women cradling skeletal, weak, raggedly dressed babies and children were also there to get birth control pills, or Depo Provera shots, or other tools to help them just rest a minute.
I mean, imagine being 25 years old, with no education or skills, living in a mud and straw hut, and you already have 6 sickly, poorly-fed kids who you can't afford to send to school, and your husband, who ain't got a pot to piss in just like you, is threatening to beat you bloody if you do anything to keep from getting pregnant, but he won't keep his freakin' hands off you, and your pastor or priest or village chief or nosy-assed, half-starving-her-OWN-damn-self mother-in-law is warning that you will burn in HELL if you do anything to stop producing babies who will eventually die slowly and painfully before your eyes...........
Trust me, I try to keep an open mind about these things. After all, I've frequently acknowledged that if the Birth Control Pill had been introduced in 1951 instead of 1961, and had been easily accessible across America, I and about 5 or 6 of my siblings never would have been born. If Eloise Jones had had even one of the dozens of amazing opportunities I experienced in my early adult life, she would have stopped getting pregnant after the first one or two deliveries. She would have done what many of those desperately poor women in that Kisumu clinic were doing the day we visited...obtaining pills and shots and IUD's and tubal ligations behind their husband's backs.
(After all, I respected my father growing up, but he didn't have a pot to piss in, either. AND he couldn't keep his damn hands to himself. Thank goodness, huh???)
I know, that makes me sound like a hypocrite. Glad my mother didn't have access to abortion, but unwilling to support keeping other women from "ending some kid's life." But stay with me for a minute. Just imagine me standing in that Kisumu clinic, born the 9th of 10 children to two poor Americans all those many years ago, watching those desperately poor Kenyan women, and thinking, "What's the difference between Eloise Jones's experience and theirs?"
One word: EDUCATION. Or put another way, knowledge of, and a reasonable proximity to, a better life. Awareness that even if your life sucks ass, it doesn't have to be that way for your kids. From the first delivery to the 10th, my mother was determined that her children's lives would be better than hers. And she knew learning, and being aware of a better way of life...and making us believe that we could actually get there...was the only way to survive.
But what if you're born in abject, mind-bending squalor in a Western Kenya village, as opposed to a small town in Southern Illinois? I mean, in America in the 1940's, 50's and 60's, when Mama was having her children, the main thing keeping her and people like her from having a chance to succeed was black skin. Not a Third World government with limited economic resources, lack of infrastructure, no access to decent health care for the majority of its population, and scant access to education. She worked for many years as a maid for an affluent white family and knew that her own children were just as smart--if not smarter--and just as deserving as those white children. Eloise Jones was determined that her children would have just as much of a shot at America's version of success as they did.
So here's my official position on family planning, abortion, et al. Not that you asked for it or anything, but you're gonna get it anyway.
"If the women in that Kisumu clinic weren't almost starving to death themselves, and if they lived in minimally decent houses or apartments instead of squalid mud huts, and they weren't plagued by malaria and cholera and HIV and TB and a host of other ailments, and their husbands had jobs and could provide for their families, and their kids could eat and go to school, then okay, maybe I could open up a corner of my consciousness to understanding arguments against family planning, religious or otherwise. I might even be able to at least entertain the prospect of a world where the right to choose was completely eliminated."
But as long as those sickly, malnourished babies' faces remain in my mind's eye, I just can't get there. That's why I'm quite relieved that President Obama removed those Bush Adminstration restrictions around family planning practices. Heck, just because I'm glad Eloise Jones didn't pursue access to legal, safe birth control or abortion doesn't mean I'm glad there are millions of children in the world who not only probably won't even live until the age of 3, they'll suffer every single second of their existence.
For some reason, I just can't glean a drop of comfort from that thought.
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