Proverbial Wife: A Counterculture of Death

Proverbial Wife: A Counterculture of Death

A few months after my birthday, Roe v. Wade turns another year older, making us the same age (now we're both 32). Legal executions in the womb began with the slaughter of my generation, known as "X," perhaps because so many of us were x'd out.



The masses who succeeded in securing abortion rights for the nation would not have existed if their own parents had believed so strongly in so-called "choice." Had the murder of the unborn been legalized one generation earlier, numerous defenders of reproductive freedom wouldn't have had any voice at all. I wonder if they ever think about it that way...



The baby boomers (I'm generalizing, I know) obviously didn't value the sacrifices their parents made to birth them and raise them because they weren't ready to make those same sacrifices for their own children. Instead, many chose to dwell on the dysfunctions and repressions of what they attributed to a "patriarchal" society.



The end result was that one of the biggest generations in our history (my parents') produced one of the smallest (mine). They boast of what their "revolution" accomplished and fret that we "slackers" aren't overthrowing the culture like they did. It takes numbers to start a movement...and to stop one.



That was all I had written from my time in the waiting room during my last pre-natal appointment, and I was hoping more would come to me for this momentous and tragic day, so that I could actually make some sort of meaningful point, but as it turns out, it had to come from my mother, herself a poster child in many ways for the 60s--Berkeley student, boyfriend one of the ringleaders of the Vietnam protest, Mario Savio groupee, and later...after I was born...a heroin addict who aborted my two younger siblings.



Her drug addiction was relatively brief (and induced by my now deceased stepdad), though she did almost die from an overdose (was brought back to life by a counter-injection), but her anguish over taking the lives of her children took many years of grieving and healing prayer. It was also bittersweet that when they did want another child, she couldn't conceive again. For anyone in her place, I suggest the novella Tilly which I haven't read in years but it comforted me when I mourned the absence of siblings in a home with a tyrannical parent where I longed for solace and comraderie.



But as I shared with my mom today about what I had sketched out for this post, she brought up something that hadn't occured me, but that her own life testifies too. The people from her generation weren't just out for themselves, but actually out to get themselves. So many of her peers kept on the path of self-destruction and ultimately took their own lives by their drug use, like my stepdad whose Hepatitis-C, transmitted via needle in the late 60s, and alcohol abuse destroyed his liver. My mom said it was like they had a deathwish. So many of her generation have died prematurely as a result of their choices.



It's also ironic that they were so impassioned about protecting the lives of invisible people half way across the world in Vietname, yet felt no sense of obligation to preserve the lives of invisible human beings within their own borders...and bodies. "A woman's right to her body" somehow extended to include her unborn baby's body as well, but it almost makes sense in a culture where those same bodies are being pumped full of drugs and alcohol and other toxic substances. And then we encounter yet another irony. The whole natural health movement initiated by hippies like my parents were. My stepdad died having taken several dozen different vitamins every day, a protein shake, wheatgrass juice, you name it...all while he was still taking methadone, a.k.a. legal heroin.



It's not realistic for me (or anyone) to try to cover all aspects of the abortion controversy and its connection with the counterculture, both of which have long and complex histories, but I thought it was at least worth posting a window into these overlapping worlds on this day when I, a survivor (merely because I was wanted), and Roe v. Wade coincide in the length of our existence.



Check out the timeline I wrote last year on this day detailing my experiences with this issue since my birth.



January 22, 2005 at 04:31 PM in Abortion | Permalink

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» Let Us Mourn - 32 years of Death from ProLifeBlogs

In the United States, over 45 million pre-born boys and girls have been killed since the Jan. 22, 1973 Supreme Court Decision that legalized abortion. Each year, nearly 20,000 abortions are performed after the 21st week of pregnancy.