When I was nine, I was raped by my best friend’s cousin, a fifteen-year-old football player with a girlfriend and an attitude problem. One moment, I was playing Atari (guess I’m dating myself), the next, I was knocked over my head. The next thing I remember is being face down on a bed, duct tape over my mouth and around my hands (I can’t bear the sound of duct tape being ripped to this day, though I can’t remember hearing it at the time), and the b*stard on top of me.
I was prepubescent, and I sincerely think he had to be sick to want to have sex with me that way, but that’s hardly an excuse for his behavior. My mother had been out drinking with my best friend’s mother (my best friend was somewhere else at the time, but my memory fails me). When she got back, she thought the bruises were from a beating she gave me the previous night. I still haven’t told her about the whole experience – she’s not only Catholic, but she is convinced that rape is always the female’s fault. About two weeks later, I started bleeding from my vagina, and I am convinced that Mother Nature gave me a natural abortion. I didn’t start my period until three years later.
Since then, my period didn’t become regular until I started taking the pill last year. But back in 1997, I was seeing a guy, we were in love, and we didn’t even have sex. We “played” a lot, and I guess some semen got a little to close (aside from the rape, I didn’t have sex without a condom until I started taking birth control, and my husband and I use condoms in addition most of the time). About a month later we broke up (more correctly, he broke up with me – I’ve realized since exactly how awful he was), and because my periods were so irregular, I didn’t even think it was odd when I didn’t get my period. The next month, I started to worry, and then I got the test at the college clinic. You can guess the result.
I started crying on the phone as soon as I found out, and wondering if I should tell him, and so on and so forth. Mother Nature donated her help again – I miscarried before I could get the abortion I was trying to make up my mind over. But my life is definitely better without either of those children. I doubt I would ever have gotten my bachelor’s and almost certainly would never have met my husband if I had either. I’m currently working on my Master’s, and that would only be a dream.
So I’m grateful to Mother Nature for taking care of me, and make sure I do some environmentally responsible things, though I’m not likely to volunteer for Greenpeace. I do wonder occasionally that if I ever want a child (not for several more years) I won’t be able to carry one to term, but then, there are more than enough unwanted children out there to adopt, and I DON’T believe in any of that nonsense about how you can’t properly bond to an adopted child that the fertility clinics hand out. Maybe the bond is closer with one you carried, but if you’ve never carried to term, how could you tell?
In any case, I’ve probably wandered on more than enough, but I support Roe v. Wade. I also support all sorts of other left-wing causes, because I truly believe that most of the restrictions placed on marriage, divorce, and abortion are the result of religious morality, and that the separation of church and state need to be much stricter than certain people in modern politics do.
