Gerri's sisters

I've always been pro-choice on the abortion issue. Most of the women we hear about who have had illegal abortions are no longer young. When a civil rights issue benefits you and you haven't had to fight for it yourself, maybe your generation tends to forget. I never felt I had to go to a pro-choice march until recently. Earlier this month, a group of well-intended people from out of town came to my city to try and persuade me and others that fetuses were babies, and that the lives of these fetuses superceded the women who bore them and the right of these women to decide their own fate.

Tonight, I happened across a bit of history, that I knew had to be there, but because I felt the issue was so safe in my "blue" liberal city, I never bothered to look, and I had seen no evidence of it myself. The women who saw this picture a long time ago never told me about it. I have seen the anti-choicers pictures of aborted fetuses. But in spite of being socially aware and pro-choice, I have never seen pictured the body of a woman who was denied a legal abortion, and who, for reasons only she could know, felt it was safer to risk a self-induced abortion outside of a doctor's help. Tragically, she was abandoned and left to bleed to death. Both hers and the life of her 6 and 1/2 month old fetus were lost. The story is told by her sister, on the website at the link below. Let's not forget Gerri. This is what going back and giving up our rights to the control of others really means.