With abortion, consider the end of life, not the beginning
The best way to understand abortion policy is to consider the end rather than beginning of life.
When I walked into the emergency room at Trident Medical Center in North Charleston and looked at the condition my mother was in after being found unresponsive on her living room floor earlier that morning, I knew I’d never have a conversation with her again. I knew enough about brain trauma that I didn’t need confirmation from the doctors and nurses. I could see it in her eyes, eyes that were open but not functioning the way eyes should.
The end wasn’t quick. It took nearly three years before her body gave out last fall, three years of the people who loved her the most grappling and scrambling to figure out how best to honor her. To take every measure possible to see if we could manifest what would be a miracle, essentially restarting her brain. Wouldn’t she do the same for us? To forgo extreme medical intervention. Before falling ill, didn’t she tell us she wouldn’t want to live on a machine? Or some middle route between the two.
Our family has never faced a more excruciating period, not even when my oldest brother went to prison for 32 years for murdering a man or through numerous medical scares and scars and deaths, not even while dodging the slings and arrows of Jim Crow in the Deep South. My mother was definitely a human being, definitely a life, not a clump of cells, not dead weight. She was one of God’s great creations who made life better on Earth during her seven decades no matter the myriad challenges she faced. But for the final stretch of her earthly journey, she had no say in her care, because she couldn’t say anything at all. She had no control over her mouth or limbs or anything else, was on and off feeding tubes and ventilators. She was at the mercy of others. And we – which included 11 children she gave birth to and a bevy of others she raised – couldn’t agree. That’s despite us sharing a deep, abiding faith that helped shepherd us through many dark days, a faith mama cultivated in each of us.
We made mistakes during those three years even as my brother Willie took mama in before my sister Salisa took up the mantle and the rest of us pitched in monetarily or with rotating shifts in the hospital or back bedroom of my sister’s double-wide manufactured home. And sometimes during those disagreements, we said things to and about each other we wish we would not have, not out of hatred, but often because of frustration and a helplessness that nothing we did or could think to do would bring mama back to us. We learned the hard way that such situations can deepen family fractures, inflict emotional scars the likes of which you don’t fully understand until later and test the bounds of love.
Our one saving grace: Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott had no say in any decision we made. Neither did then-President Donald Trump. Or Nancy Pelosi, Susan Collins or S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson. We didn’t have to endure debates among self-described pro-lifers and pro-choicers. Even the medical professionals had to listen our guidance.
As hard as that three-year-period was for our family privately, it would have been hell having those who know little to nothing about mama deciding instead of us. How much harder it must be having strangers deciding for you when it is your own body at the center of their ill-informed deliberations about who you are, what you need and what you should do.
Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer based in Myrtle Beach
