From: Death@yabbs
To: all@yabbs
Subject: re: A problem I'm having...
Date: Wed Jul 20 02:14:49 1994

hmmm... that's wierd, it says you don't exist...
Anyways, I'm sorry to hear about your accident, and I hope that your sight
DOES return. I know what it's like to be without sight in one eye.
As for the subject of abortion, here's my conribution:
I've been raised to believe that Life is sacred and that it should be
protected at all costs. During the last year and a half, however, things
have happened to change that belief. Now, I'm not sure exactly what I
believe. AS for abortion, however, I do have a definite opinion: It should
always be up to the woman (or girl) who is pregnant, although she should
at least listen to the advice of the people around her. This opinion is
the direct result of a personal experience with abortion. While I am a
male, and will never be forced to make the decision myself, I have,
unfortunately, had to help one of my best friends make the decision. To
shorten the story (I HAD typed the whole thing, but before I was finished,
the server kicked me for inactivity) Last April, one of my best friends
was raped. Her parents are devout Roman Catholics, and as such wouldn't
even THINK about abortion if she had gotten pregnant. She herself,
however, couldn't bear to carry the child of the scumbag who had raped
her. I completely agreed with her feeling, after having stayed up the
whole night talking to her. I will never pretend to know what it's like to
be invaded like that, but after that night of holding her, sobbing in my
arms telling me what had happened, I did feel much of the same pain and
her. I completely agreed with her feeling, after having stayed up the
whole night talking to her. I will never pretend to know what it's like to
be invaded like that, but after that night of holding her, sobbing in my
arms telling me what had happened, I did feel much of the same pain and
anger that she did, although most of it was actually her own. She didn't
even want to tell her parents what had happened, lest they despise HER
because of it. Eventually, she agreed that it was better if she did, and
they reacted as parents would, not as she thought they would. They took
her to the doctor, to make sure that she was physically all right.
Luckily, aside from some bad bruises, she was. It was there that the
quesiton came up: What if she was pregnant? At this point, the question
was only a supposition. Sadly, it was a question that had to be answered.
Personally, while I still felt that life is sacred, I also knew, to a
degree, how she felt. Therefore, my opinion was that she should have an
abortion. She herself could not bear to live if she had to bear the child.
Thus, I knew that there can never be ONE answer to hte question. It has to
be answered by each female who faces it, in their own way. Eventually,her
parents saw the emotional pain she was in and gave their consent for her
to have an abortion (parental consent is necesarry for minors in
Pennsylvania). I know now that it was the right choice. While she still
feels guilty about ending the child's life before it even began, she is
far more deeply scarred by the rape itself, and I doubt if she could have
endured the emotional pain of seeing the child born, an ever-present
reminder of what had happened.
Sorry if I rambled on a bit too much, but I didn't realize how much I had
to say.

        --Les

A note to ht:
You have to fix yabbs so that it doesn't kick ppl who are writing long 
messages without a client for inactivity... It happened twice while I was 
trying to post this, until I saved my buffer to a file and endured the 
horrible lag entailed by using a client to actually post it...