You Had To See This Coming

Roe v. Wade:
Argued December 13, 1973
Reargued October 11, 1972
Decided January 22, 1973

Seriously, you had to know I wasn't going to leave this alone.

First things first: I will probably never have an abortion. I don't believe for a second that a fetus is a person from the word go (i.e, sperm meets egg), but on the other hand, I have no idea when it DOES count as a person. My youth group leader is pregnant right now (due to give birth any day now, actually) and for the past 37 weeks, she's been putting up pics on Facebook of the baby bump; her statuses have been all about how she saw the baby's heartbeat on the ultrasound, et cetera. It's really quite sweet. (I keep telling her she should name it after me. Except it's a boy. But I still think she could give him my name, and maybe just call him by his first name instead? What do you think?) And at some point, you have to realize it IS another person. You can't fairly call it "a mass of tissue" at, say, nineteen weeks. I mean, by then, it not only looks like a person, it's moving around, its brain is starting to do fancy stuff that I just looked up and forgot- it's a bit iffier at, like, four weeks or something. Rather than make the call, I would probably have the baby, and then put it up for adoption (No way I'm keeping it. Ick. I really don't like kids.)
But the thing is, I've made a CHOICE here. I have a choice. How wonderful is that? Forty years ago, if I got pregnant, I was fucked (metaphorically. Well, literally, too, I suppose). I'd be stuck with it. And I'd probably hate that kid every bloody day of my life. I can hold a grudge for a really long time. My family would be stuck with the burden of another kid (seriously, we've got enough issues just affording the six of us already in this family) that no one wants, I'd be jobless in a heartbeat, I wouldn't have been able to join the Navy, I'd have to take time out of school, probaly wind up repeating a year- to which I say HELL NAW. SO not worth it.
There's a lot to be said on this subject, and rather than making this post even longer than it already is (I'm going to change the format so that it makes it look like a shorter post, jsut to satisfy my OCD), I'm going to split everything (most) of what I have to say on it into several posts over the course of this coming week.
'Cause, seriously, if you thought I was gonna leave this one alone, you're NUTS.
UPDATE: am fully aware this post is going up the day after the anniversary. Mom confiscated my computer yesterday before I could get this posted. Long story there, but I'm still close enough, right?