7 thoughts on “The Backstory”

  1. Thanks for that, Athenae. An important story for a lot of reasons. I never cease to be amazed by the sheer thoughtlessness of some people.

  4. I really enjoyed this article, because it’s important for me (and others) to see how “the other half lives,” as it were. I’m an adoptee who doesn’t want kids, and disabled besides, and when I think of the bad old days with no abortion, I think of babies being coercively taken from their birth mothers and given to nice, white, wealthy, Christian couples (as I almost certainly was, and my adoptive parents are); of married women forced into having far more children than they either wanted or could afford, and of families and lives (usually women’s) made drastically worse by a special-needs child who may not even have lived very long, or required expensive and/or time-consuming care. (Heck, I’m not eventhat affected, and I still needed about a million hours of physio and three operations at a young age, and the kind of care you just can’t give if you have both parents working.)
    Call me self-hating if you want, but after hearing my mom’s exhaustive and exhausting descriptions of all the “extra” stuff that went into raising me, I don’t want anybody roped into that if they feel they can’t handle it, and will do a bad job of it.
    Any way you slice it, these “personhood” things are bad for everybody, sometimes even the very (alleged) “person” they’re trying to protect.

  5. Oh, A. it took a bunch of courage to write that. But damn skippy, it takes a hell of a lot more to live it every day.

  7. Aw, Athenae.
    I’d help if I could; but knowing I can’t, at least I can try not to make it worse.
    So I’ll just say this: I think you’d make a hell of a good mom, and I don’t think you’re at all wrong. At all.

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