I clearly remember the day in 1973 when my mom told me that
the Supreme Court voted to make abortion legal, the law of the land, in the Roe
v. Wade decision. I was too young to fully appreciate the import of what was happening,
but my young mind was willing to accept what my trusted parent was telling
me: This was good news because now women
wouldn’t be forced to have “back-alley” abortions performed with coat hangers
by some dirty thief disguised as a doctor.
My mother and those like her, in turn, trusted people like Bernard
Nathanson, one of the founders of NARAL, who in an authoritative way, tried to
lessen the ugliness by declaring that “it” is not a baby but a blob of cells
for the first trimester. So, since the “problem” was not even a baby, the
concern had only to do with the women and their safety. At the time, that was
how the concept was sold – to protect women, especially those who had been
victims of rape or incest. Very little thought was given to the baby because it
wasn’t even considered a baby, anyway.