|
|
February 14, 2003/Adar 12 5763, Vol. 55, No. 25
Choice distilled to its essence
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
I always have a quart of milk in the fridge.
Maybe even a half gallon.
It's a throwback to my days raising kids, when milk in the fridge, bread and peanut butter in the pantry, and something to pull together for dinner were indispensable, both for the well-being of my kids and my own sense of self worth.
I was a mom. And that was what moms did.
I was well-taught, by a mother who always seemed to have a cache of homemade chocolate chip cookies in the freezer to go along with the requisite icy cold glass of milk, and by a mother-in-law who made sure she had butter and eggs in her larder and always seemed to find something to feed our hungry brood when we arrived.
Those memories came tumbling back with surprising force with the ballyhooed 30th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. In January 1973, when the Supreme Court upheld the right of women to legal abortions, I was 26 years old, a stay-at-home mom with a newly minted lawyer as a husband with his first real job.
It was a change from the first three years of our marriage, when we had gone it alone, insisting stubbornly on our independence, even as we eroded our tiny wedding nest egg and finally resorted to federal assistance to put food on the table.
Two babies in two years, neither pregnancy planned, held its inherent pressures as we struggled to make ends meet and meet our newly assumed responsibilities as parents.
But we did and went on to add two more children to our family before we turned 30. But another baby right then might have been more than we could handle.
So the Roe anniversary stirs up wrenching emotion. I grew up in a time when premarital sex was taboo, when weeknight curfew in my college dorm was 11 p.m., and "blanket permission," parental consent to spend a night off campus, was meted out to only a fortunate few whose parents were more liberal than mine. Still, we all knew the girls who furtively sought prescriptions for birth control pills, those who forged their parents' signatures to stay overnight with boyfriends, and the sorry few who found themselves "in trouble," forced to choose between illegal abortions or shotgun marriages and parenting children when they were often just children themselves.
And so, while I cherish the miracle of giving life, I also cherish the right to choose.
While our tradition reminds again and again of life's sacredness, I still want my daughters to have the right to make conscious, informed decisions about family planning.
Our legal system must assure that they have that choice; and our moral and ethical framework should assure that they will know how to exercise it.
No one knows what life may bring. Yet, I still wish for my children long and happy marriages, children who are as loved and wanted as they were, and an abiding appreciation and understanding of what it means to be a parent, even if it is distilled to its simplest common denominator - cookies and milk.
Contact the writer at vicki_cabot@jewishaz.com.
|
