Just some reflection...

I don't think I've *ever* watched an election as closely as I'm watching this one. There is so much as stake right now - and I'm absolutely terrified about the possibilities of the future, depending on who is elected. I can't stop reading the news, online and otherwise. I talk about it a lot (to the annoyance of many, I'm sure). I think about it almost constantly...How different our future might be from anything my generation has ever known.

I grew up knowing that my body was my own. I was raised to be respectful and proud of my body - but I was also raised knowing that if something were to happen, I could make the call as to how I would want to be treated. For example - I was raped several years ago, by someone I thought I could call a friend. I still have issues with it and continue to adjust. I can't even fathom if a pregnancy had come out of that. Even worse, if I was then told that I MUST bear the child to term, regardless of whether I plan to take care of it. Hatred can be a dangerous thing, and I guarantee you - had I been pregnant and forced to keep the pregnancy, I don't know how that would have affected me. I honestly don't know if I would have been able to keep the child - and if I had, if I would have been able to look at it as separate from the trauma. How would that be fair to either of us?

I don't think people are aware of the ramifications of Roe vs. Wade being repealed (and yes, it really could happen). Think of all the children that would flood the adoption system. The children that would be abandoned. Even worse - the children that would grow up knowing that they weren't loved like they needed to be, but were kept because that was the only option.

Here's another scenario for you...it's too far back for women my age to remember, but the documentation is certainly there. Back-alley abortion clinics, where the pregnancy was not always the only thing terminated. Women dying a bloody, painful death. In some cases, families left without a vital member if a rape was involved. Now granted, these days it wouldn't be quite that bad. I have little doubt that there would be sympathetic doctors and/or nurses out there somewhere who would set up lucrative practices. But why should it be illegal for a doctor to take care of a patient? Why should it be illegal for a woman to have full control over her own body? And in this day and age, why in the world is this a concern that we should even have?

I've said this before, but I'll say it again: Most religions that I know of require a person to offer themselves, to willingly join and convert. It has to be free will. I don't believe, and I haven't ever seen, that this includes being forced to abide by the rules and by-laws of a religion because someone else says so. If it is a sin to have an abortion, then that sin is between me and my God. I will be the one offering up the accounting in whatever afterlife, not whoever took away my right to choose. Let me make my own mistakes and take the consequences of those actions on my own. You're not my mother and you're not my God - so you have no place in the discussion of what rights I have for my own body.

And yes, I pray every night that this never becomes any more of an issue than it already is. Not only for myself, but for the future of my daughter and her daughter and so on down the line.

Hmm. Makes me wonder - does that mean that if this election turns out as I'm hoping, that God answered my prayers? What does that say for the drive to overturn Roe vs. Wade based on religious ideals?