I have always been one who could not keep a secret. In fact, I told anyone who was about to tell me a secret, “Please don’t tell me your secrets because I am going to tell folks what you told me. So, if you don’t want your secrets to get out, then don’t tell me.” However, they still told me their secrets. This story is about abortion and it is a story that involves me only because I know the person who got an abortion. Here goes.
I worked with a woman who was well educated; she had been to college and unfortunately, her parents had to take her out of college because she had slept with men in her college dorm and she got pregnant. She gave birth to a baby girl. Well, fast forward many years and she starts working at this company; the same company I worked for. We, somehow, became friends. We went out to lunch together and we spoke on the phone lots of times after work. Well, she told me about this guy she was seeing and I suggested that they come to my house and we could all have dinner and listen to music and chill.
On a Friday night, they both came over to me and my ex-husband’s house. It didn’t go well at all. First off, the man insulted her by calling my friend and coworker out of her name. It was beyond disrespectful. I invited him to leave. I said that I was not going to allow him to disrespect her and that he was no longer welcome in my home. My ex-husband pipes up and disagrees with me and I told him that he could go with him but that he was getting out of my house for disrespecting my friend. The dinner party broke up. And I told my friend that she should kick his butt to the curb because he is a complete loser; a jerk and an inconsiderate asshole. Unfortunately, she did not take my advice and continued to see him.
The next thing I know, I get a phone call from her. She asks me if we can go to lunch together. While we are sitting at the restaurant waiting for our order, she tells me that she is pregnant. I am aghast because I know who the father is and I had warned her about him. She tells me that she has told this jerk that she is pregnant and the first thing he did was tell her that he would quit his job before he would EVER pay her any child support for that baby. Now, remember, he had a hand in conceiving that baby, but now that she is pregnant, he does not want to have anything to do with her and he has already stated that he would not be in the child’s life and would rather quit his job than have to pay child support.
My friend flags a waiter over to our table and orders a stiff drink. But I’m like, “You are pregnant, you should not be drinking!” She tells me that she is going to have an abortion and so what does it matter. I am shocked and appalled because as far as I am concerned, an innocent life should not be snuffed out so thoughtlessly over the folly of the parents who both knew what it took to conceive a baby and yet did the deed anyway. Against my objections, my ‘friend’ drank the stiff drink and even ordered another one. The entire time we are at the restaurant, I’m like, “How could you? You’ve been pregnant before. You are not 15 years old and frightened and didn’t know about birth control. You are 37 years old, a bit long in the tooth wouldn’t you say for someone to get pregnant again as if they did not know how to make sure that didn’t happen?” My ‘friend’ tells me that she cannot bring further disgrace on her parents, who by the way, had adopted her and were certainly, the most decent people you’d ever hope to meet. They treated my ‘friend’ as if she was their birth child, educated her, made sure she always had everything she needed and they both had good jobs because they were well educated and loaded down with college degrees. She could not have asked for better parents. Hell! I wish they had been MY parents! As usual, I digress. My ‘friend’ refused to carry the baby to term. She was drinking heavily at this point because despite telling that jerk who got her pregnant that she was going to get an abortion, he still did not want to have anything to do with her. Finally, I got a phone call while I was at work from my ‘friend’. She was calling to ask me if I would go with her when she got the abortion. I am completely stunned, AGAIN because she knew how I felt about what she intended to do. It was not the fault of that innocent little baby growing inside her, that she laid down and had unprotected sex with a complete dickhead jerk. But yet my ‘friend’ expected me to co-sign her abortion that had nothing to do with rape or incest, but had everything to do with CONVENIENCE. Her ears are still ringing to this very day from what I said to her; they have to be.
And yet, the heifer even had the nerve to call me AFTER the procedure was done because, she did indeed, get someone to go with her when she got the abortion. I will not name her here, and I never laid eyes on her and I’m glad I did not because I would have cussed her out. My ‘friend’ told me about the procedure and the fact that when the doctor took the baby out and went out of the room, she looked over at the baby and she said, “As tiny as it was, I could see that it was a baby.” Now, at this point in the story people, I am crying and as I type this, I am crying because an innocent little life was destroyed before it even had time to know what was going on. That baby had done no wrong. That baby had a right to live. That baby was no mistake. That baby wanted to be born. That baby wanted to learn to roll over, to crawl, to walk to talk, to love to live. What was taken out of my ‘friend’s’ body was no mere sack of cells. What was taken out of her was a BABY and that baby should have had rights; protections under the law. Regardless of what your stance is as far as abortion is concerned and even on this blog, I have championed women’s rights over their bodies and the life inside it when they become pregnant even though a man, most definitely has a hand in impregnating a woman and even little girls, but still, think about the innocence and vulnerability of a baby who has been conceived and whose life should not be snuffed out because the baby is an inconvenience.
Oh, but the story does not end there. This ‘friend’ goes on to the next man. This man has a child and is living with the child’s mother. My friend deliberately goes after this man. She snags him and she takes him from his child and the child’s mother. They actually get married. I was invited to the wedding and refused to go, of course. And from what I understand, the entire ceremony was a shitshow from the person delivering the cake getting into an accident on the highway with a tractor trailer and cake was all up and down the highway to the preacher losing the marriage license or certificate or what have you to the groom losing the rings. But, apparently, everything finally came together and the marriage took place. Now remember, my ‘friend’ and I worked together and so one day, she comes by my desk and wants me to go with her on break. In order not to make a scene at work, I go with her. Now she tells me that she is pregnant again. I don’t know what to say and so I turn away and go back to my desk. A few weeks later, someone comes up to me at work and asks me if I have seen my ‘friend’. Of course I had not seen her either. The next thing I know, I get a phone call from my ‘friend’ and she tells me that she had a miscarriage and that her husband has left her and gone back with his little girl and her mother. I couldn’t even pretend to be surprised.
Fast forward to many years later, and this is after I had left this town and came back and my mother knew this woman who had been my ‘friend’ and my mother proceeded to tell me that my ‘friend’ was in the hospital with pancreatic cancer and that it would be nice if I went to see her. I did. She was in ‘good’ spirits. In fact, while I was there, the Reverend and a few church members showed up at the hospital and they prayed over my ‘friend’. I left town after that and when I came back to town almost a decade later, I was in Kroger and I saw my ‘friend’ and she looked well and she even told me that she had beat pancreatic cancer and that she was really religious now and of course, can’t drink anymore. We exchanged numbers but that was over three years ago and we never called each other. We knew when we exchanged numbers that we would never call each other. She would not call me because I know about what she did and I am associated with her past and now she is pretending that none of that happened because she has discovered RELIGION. I was not going to call her because one thing I remembered before I left that company we both worked at, I had gone by this lady’s cubicle and there was a little piece of paper tacked to a board on the outside of her cubicle and the only thing I can remember is reading it out loud and I can only recollect that the gist of what it said was, and I am paraphrasing here, “I would have been the one to cure cancer, but I was not allowed to be born.” And there was more of the like and as I finished reading it, I turned to go back to my desk and my ‘friend’ was standing there. She had heard the whole thing. I looked past her and kept walking.
I have got to stop here because the tears are freely flowing. I know that our system for adopting children is broken, messed up and some more stuff, but I would rather have a broken system that we try and fix than think of innocent babies being destroyed and treated like some unwanted inconvenience because two people don’t have the sense God gave a grape and will lie down and not even think about the consequences of their actions and because they don’t want to pay child support or they don’t want to disgrace their relatives, they decide to abort an innocent baby.
People think long and hard about the choices you make especially when those choices impact the LIFE of another. Getting abortions because of the ‘convenience’ of getting rid of what you only think of as a ‘mistake’ is something that if you have a conscience, it is going to haunt you for the rest of your life. That baby is innocent. That baby did not make you lie down and have unprotected sex with someone who now wants no part of you or the baby. There are birth control options out there. And for you women out there, it is high time that you made the man take a more proactive role in contraception. And an abortion should not be used because you are inconvenienced by having a baby.
And as for that former ‘friend’ of mine, her life is most likely a living hell because she can get ‘religion’ all she wants, but what she cannot get, is the sight of that baby lying on a table that was just taken out of her body, out of her mind. She cannot get rid of that sight. No amount of religion, Reverends, prayers, church going, song wailing, getting hit with the holy spirit or whatever goes on inside churches these days can take the sight of a baby she ELECTED to TERMINATE by way of abortion out of her mind. And the baby she said she WANTED, she miscarried since she was all ‘married’ and had taken a man away from his girlfriend and their baby and expected to live, happily ever after. Everything but “happily ever after” happened. What you do will have consequences and if you have a conscience, what you do will tear you up for life. A life you abort will haunt you for life. Ask my former ‘friend’.
shelbycourtland 