Basically, I could put a band-aid on something, give oxygen, and run like mad for the nearest hospital, hoping and praying I got her there in time.  Often, ashamed, they had waited too long to call and were dead by they time we arrived.  Two lives wasted, and a young girl was dead by torture.  And you’d better believe, it was no easy death.  I’d call it torture.

When Roe vs. Wade was decided, I rejoiced along with just about every other medical worker in the country:  At last!  We were doing something that made sense!

There were other cases, too.  I remember a twelve year old girl who lived in the projects. It was her third pregnancy.  The building, room, bedsheets, and she were all filthy.  She’d delivered, lost a lot of blood which she and the child, still connected by the umbilicus, were lying in.  I couldn’t believe this kind of thing was happening in the richest country on earth.

Panicked, bleeding, hurting or dead young women and babies, shame that killed, and the religious right WANTED it that way!  They thought it made for a good object lesson, and was a ‘just’ punishment.  For being ignorant, for being human, for loving, for trusting, it was a just punishment! 

I suppose it was around then that I began to detest organized religion.  It belongs in the living rooms of the faithful, as it was done in the beginning, not in the halls of the government coercing the embedding of their merciless, deadly interpretation of scripture into secular law.  That way, as we have seen over and over again, lies tyranny.

Now, Bush and his cronies want to go back to that: ignorance and lies taught in school, contraception unavailable, abortion unavailable.  There’s more than one way to destroy lives; poverty is another way that’s slower than bleeding to death in agony, but it works just as well. 

I can’t think of a better recipe for mass poverty and misery that never had to be at all.  And if we sit back and do nothing about it, we are complicit in every scream, every pool of blood, every needless, wasteful, horrifying death.  You guys who have such a hard time being there for a delivery: try being there for the bloody, agonized death of mother and child – when the mother often IS a child! – and facing the parents with no answers but, “She was too ashamed to tell you, probably too ashamed to tell anyone.”

I’m too old and too damaged to work ambulance any more, but those young girls and their sisters-in-spirit are still there.  Now they’re deliberately being kept ignorant again, and being punished for it.  We CAN’T go back to that religiously self-righteous savagery again!  They’re being human, that’s all, being what God made them: loving, imbued with the creative power that is a piece of the very fire of the Creator, and are using it by overriding instinct that very little gets in the way of.  Life finds a way, but it doesn’t take the modern world into account, much less the cruel, unnatural dictates of inflexible religious power-grabbers who will exercise it any way they can, whatever the cost to the innocent.

The wrong-headed Right dares to call itself “pro-life”, and a “culture of life”  - well, I can tell you differently.  The deaths far outweigh the lives, especially considering (and nevermind their lies about a fetus being a “thinking being – it isn’t) that we’re talking about adult and near-adult, rational, thinking feeling beings just about to embark on their lives dying horribly which, again, the Right considers this “Just” and “right” and “a good lesson to others”!   It angers me to hear the Corporate Press echoing these terms mindlessly; they are untrue!    They could care less about young mothers and infants stuck in poverty, without medical care or sufficient food or other needs (including hope) – they can starve to death, die of easily-treated sicknesses including malnutrition – no problem; obviously God wants it that way, so they do too.  Culture of life my ass!  To me, the only difference between these fanatics and any other murderers is that a gun is quicker, and the murderer can hang for it.   

And by the way, I don’t recall a daughter of rich people EVER dying this way; not on my watch anyway.

I have to do everything I can to stop this from happening again.  These young women have a right to all the true and correct information they can get, and to all of the latest medical care they need, and the choice has to be theirs all along the way!  They are human, they are women (though sometimes just barely), citizens, and damn it, they are our daughters, our sisters, sometimes our mothers, our friends, all precious.  Now they even want to remove the choice of contraception from married couples!  This isn’t just cruel, it’s INSANE!

Ian MacLeod

August 14th, 2006

Oregon