My mom is "pro life," she even had the license plate frames on her car. But at some moment she and my dad realized the only realistic way of preventing abortions was with birth control and honest explicit sex education. It may have had something to do with having more children than they could handle. (I was changing my youngest sibling's diapers when I was ten. At some point it's impossible to pretend you can't smell it. Whoever breaks down first changes the diaper...) My wife's family is similar. Our parents started out creating big Catholic families and eventually embraced birth control, perhaps just as they were running out of money for groceries and realizing the next car they'd have to buy would be a bus rather than a van or station wagon.
By the time I had even the slightest interest in sex, I knew everything about it; the good, the bad, and the ugly. I knew about birth control, protecting myself from sexually transmitted diseases, even that there were sexual predators in the world who desired children. (The last was the beginning of my mom's continuing war with the Catholic church. My mom had wanted to be a nun until she met a lecherous, smoking, hard drinking Catholic priest who obviously had a fetish for innocent young Catholic girls. Later our community suffered a pedophile priest who was quickly removed to Ireland just before the police came knocking on his door with a warrant.)
Anyways, my mom always told us she'd take in any babies we had. That was such a terrifying thought to me and my siblings, having more children crammed into our already crowded house, that none of us had children before we were married, living on our own, and able to support them. And it's not something we accomplished by abstinence or "natural" family planning.
I am absolutely certain my mom has prevented more abortions than any of the fuckwads protesting in front of Planned Parenthood. Those protesters increase the abortion rate, increase the misery, and there is NOTHING commendable about their regressive, destructive, and yes I'll say EVIL religious beliefs. I'd flip them off as I drive by, throw water balloons at them, maybe even run over any signs they've posted in the street, but I won't give them the pleasure. They get off on being "persecuted." To them that's better than sex. Instead, I'll make sure the children of their community, the children they keep in the dark, have the information they need to avoid the pitfalls of sexual relationships.
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