I’ve been thinking of a conversation I had with my mother when I was just a young girl. We were discussing her two pregnancies. I remember her telling me how her and Dad avoided going to a Catholic Hospital to have either baby. She told me that at a Catholic hospital, if she was delivering a baby and something went wrong during labor, and the doctor had to choose between the life of the mother or baby, the doctor at the Catholic hospital would choose to save the baby.

I was utterly horrified. Not that they would let the baby die in a non-Catholic hospital (and I could have been the baby in that scenario) I was horrified that a doctor would ever consider letting the mother die in the favor of the baby.

From my child’s perspective (even knowing allowing her baby to die in order to save my mother’s life meant my sister or I would not be born) I felt from the depths of my soul the mother’s life should take precedent. I’ve held to that conviction since first learning women birth babies. 

As a teenager the idea of pregnancy was frightening, yet not terrifying. When I was older and decided to start a family with my husband, I was no longer frightened.  Yet, if I was a young woman facing pregnancy and living in a Red State after the reversal of Roe V Wade, I would be terrified.

Already the horrors of the irresponsible abortion laws snapping into place after the SCOTUS reversed Roe have surfaced, from a ten-year-old rape victim being denied an abortion, and forced to suffer additional trauma to seek a legal abortion in another state, to the woman suffering from a life threatening ectopic pregnancy, also forced to go to another state (reported by the Washington Post) and a Wisconsin woman who bled for ten days from an incomplete miscarriage because the emergency room wouldn’t remove the fetal tissue.

And it’s not just pregnant women who have to fear—it is all women who need a medication, such as for cancer or lupus, who are already being denied the medication because it could cause miscarriage. These women are not even pregnant.

Think about that for a moment. A non-existent fetus takes precedent over an actual, living woman’s health and life.

Members of the GOP are voting against bills guaranteeing the right for birth control and abortion to save the life of the mother.

This is insanity. I am pissed. And I am terrified for my granddaughter and all the young women in our country—even those in Blue States, because the GOP is working to make their draconian abortion laws nationwide.

Photo: My mother with my sister and cousin.