noodle

Such a loaded question and I had a violent personal reaction to it. I used to be very close friends with a toxic person. She has a beautiful now six year-old daughter with one man and told another that she was his child. The biological father hates the mother, and the other man had no clue he wasn't the father. During the course of one evening she told me in one breath that she'd had four abortions, and that she truly felt her God only "wanted me to have one child". Now, most of our friendship was me challenging her and forcing her to re-examine her choices/beliefs by her own report. When I asked her how should could say that if she'd been pregnant five times, she looked stunned and had no answer. To the last day of our friendship, she still couldn't come up with an answer.

I also work with a woman who has a fairly low IQ, around 70-75, and she's had 6 children. She's 22. She's been pushed around by her family, lovers, friends for years and doesn't have the self-esteem to stand up and say no. For that I don't blame her. She doesn't have the intellect or foresight to demand that the man who is pushing her around put on a condom. She's been begging for a tubal ligation for two years. Florida Medicaid will not pay for a tubal until she has nine children or turns twenty-five. She's trying to get her life together and I do have a lot of respect for her, but she's just lost custody of four of her kids again, despite her best efforts. So now We the People of the State of Florida are paying for her kids. And will be paying for the next few too, instead of a procedure that will cost, what, $500 to Medicaid? She can't afford an abortion, but she's a carrier for a genetic disorder that could cause more of her future children (and there will be more) to have this metabolic problem. She loves those kids, though, with all of her heart.

I just feel that our country is letting us down on so many levels, and when my local government stands up on my local news and says, "We've cut the Medicaid budget for non-essential procedures (read: non-Life-saving)," and "The United Way is cutting funding for Planned Parenthood and other local free clinics due to the negative press associated with the abortion debate..." I wonder what is going to happen to these women and our economy. And to the young women who are so desperate that they seek out illegal, unsanitary places to get their abortions and end up sterile or dead from infections. And to me, if I ever get placed in a situation where I have to decide. I hope that I will never be put in that position

I guess I just can't decide how many is too many. There are too many variables. I keep coming up with my ex-friend being wrong and feeling sorry for this other woman that she couldn't get them.

__________________