Making Choices

Women are a big topic of this election. Working women, who work in the home raising a family, work in an office, or run a business from their home. Women making choices: work choices; marriage choices; health choices; choices about children; election choices.

Choice is a hot button word. It shouldn’t be, but it’s been made that way by the abortion debate. Legalized abortion in the USA was the result of Roe v. Wade, a court case that went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1973; the debate still rages 39 years later.

I saw Marco Rubio on the Today show yesterday being interviewed by Matt Lauer. Mr. Rubio seems to be under the impression that all women are mandated to have abortions because of Roe v. Wade; he argued that it’s not just men who don’t think abortion should be legal, even some women don’t think abortion should be legal.

Of course it should be legal. No woman makes the decision to have an abortion lightly, but every woman has the right to make her own health decisions, and to have safe and legal health options available to her. That doesn’t mean that every woman will have an abortion.

Pro-choice means that access to safe and legal abortion is available, otherwise there is no choice.

If you feel strongly against abortion, then your choice is not to have one. Abortion won’t go away if it’s illegal – it’s been around as long as women have gotten pregnant, and it always will be.

As soon as a man can get pregnant, then he can make decisions affecting his pregnancy. Not decisions for every pregnancy, just for his.

It is no man’s business. In 2003, President George W. Bush signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, surrounded by 9 male members of Congress smiling and congratulating him. Where were the women? Why should old men decide any woman’s health options?

In 1972, when I was 13, a girl in my class was raped by her 13-year-old boyfriend. She got pregnant. Abortion wasn’t legal, and she wasn’t from a family with the resources to send her to Europe for a “vacation” where she could have a legal abortion. She carried the baby to term, and the child was raised as her sibling. The vivacious girl transformed into a shattered woman before the end of her freshman year in high school.

I always thought that was unfair. Unfair to her, having to live with the reminder of her rape every minute of every day. Unfair to her child, raised under false pretenses about who her parents were, and possibly not the most wanted child. How did that dynamic affect them, and the rest of the family? In 1972, at 13, what were her options? She had no choice.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan want to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of health care to women who cannot afford private providers. What other options do they have planned for those women?

Their argument is based on the abortions that are performed at Planned Parenthood clinics, which amount to 3% of the services Planned Parenthood provides. They are talking about cutting funding for legal services because they don’t like one of the services offered.

Every child should be a wanted child. Every woman should make the health care choices that are best for her, without any man telling her what she can or can’t do.

Some choices are easier to make than others.

 

 

Pick Your (Weather) Poison

Every area has its natural hazard, whether it’s hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, blizzards, or earthquakes.

I write this with Hurricane Isaac having shed much rain and wind on Vero Beach on its way to New Orleans, seven years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. Considering that the path Isaac took was through the Gulf of Mexico, the amount of rain dumped on the Atlantic coast of Florida caused more flooding than Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne in 2004, and Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

New Orleans braced for Hurricane Isaac, confident that the levees would protect the city sheltered in their embrace. They didn’t order mandatory evacuations, but suggested that anyone outside of the levee system who felt uncomfortable staying should leave.

Today people who stayed were interviewed, and more than one expressed regret that they hadn’t left town. The levees held, but some were breached by overflowing waters. Ironically, areas flooded because the water was held captive within the levees.

I’ve lived in Florida for over 20 years. I lived in Fort Lauderdale when Hurricane Andrew hit; and I lived in Vero Beach when Hurricanes Frances, Jeanne and Wilma hit. The damage is incredible, and the aftermath is not pretty. Loss of power, downed trees and tree limbs and palm fronds, flooded streets, lack of services – no thank you, I’ll get out of town.

There is too much emphasis placed on the strength of the storm. “It’s only a Category 1, no need to worry,” is a common sentiment. To get a feeling for what a Category 1 storm feels like, drive your car 70 mph with the windows down during a driving rain storm. Then decide whether it’s nothing.

The trouble with Isaac, as it was with Jeanne in 2004, is that if even a Category 1 storm moves slowly it dumps huge amounts of rain on an area. The biggest problems aren’t necessarily from wind strength; flooding can cause more problems than wind damage.

Water saturates the ground, weakening the support system for tree roots, and making it easier for the wind to lift the trees out of the ground. Living on the Treasure Coast, I saw the damage to the citrus crop from Frances and Jeanne. The water sat and damaged the roots; the wind abraded the fruit and scarred it, which made it okay for canneries and cattle but less so for eating out of hand – pretty fruit makes it to market, ugly fruit goes for juice.

Hurricane reporting is so much better than it was 10 years ago, but people need to make their decision on worst case scenario. Rely on your desire, or lack thereof, to stay housebound for days on end without power if the storm is bad. If you choose to stay, be prepared; there is no obligation to find you and provide food and shelter – the city/county/state will be busy cleaning up and restoring power and other services.

Enjoy the benign embrace of Mother Nature, and be prepared for her wrath. Ignore her at your peril.

 

National Novel Writing Month Continues

There is something to be said for writing fast and furiously instead of stopping to think about what I want to say. During November, I don’t have time to linger over what I write; I just write.

Good stuff. Bad stuff. Stuff that right now I can’t tell if it’s good or bad. And not including what I write for work, or pep talks I write to send out to my region for NaNo (for more information, visit http://www.nanowrimo.org).

I realized today that I think of my stories as female. If Mother Nature is female, why can’t my stories be? I wrote a pep talk last week for my region, and talked about the wall you hit at a certain point in this process (excerpted here – I’m sure you’ll catch the female reference):

Are you feeling stuck? Have you hit the wall, and just feel so over your story and/or characters? Has their bright shiny new world tarnished? Is a better story weaving its siren song into your creative mind, and you just know that if you start this one, you’ll finish with ease as the words just pour out?

Don’t give in to the flirty new story shaking its pretty characters and sinful plot at you. You will grow weary of them at some point, and they too will become tiresome; you will think fondly (dare I say wistfully?) of the story you want to callously disregard now.

Throw in a circus or a gun or a posse of clowns (or a posse of clowns waving guns at a circus) – they don’t have to stay, and probably won’t - but they do act as a stimulant to the imagination. You want to break through a log jam if you’re stuck. Just dealing with them and having to make a sentence about them will get the fingers moving and that will lead to good stuff. Even if, or especially if, they are not part of your story. The point is to get unstuck, not to write the great American novel. That comes later.

I write mysteries, so I am prone to throwing in a gun, or a bad guy, or another dead body (cause of death to be determined). The hard part is continuing to the end, but I persevere. I want to finish, I want to have a crappy first draft to revise; I want to be published.

I have been writing a lot more than usual these past few weeks, and not just because of NaNo. I had two articles for a local weekly newspaper to write, in addition to work and outside writing projects. One of the writing projects was proofreading a novella, another was formatting a novella and two short stories for an e-book, and another project is editing the first draft of a manuscript for grammar and punctuation.

The upshot? I really love writing. I like taking a blank page, and decorating it with the words that convey a situation, an emotion, a story. I have learned a lot about my own writing, and that I know more about story structure than I thought I did.

The hardest part of learning to write is knowing if/when you are making progress. I read what I write now and it is better than what I wrote last year. I am better at conveying what is in my mind, and how to get it on the page.

My editor at the newspaper helped me, by asking a couple of questions and by highlighting what she wanted me to cut – if I agreed with her. In an article by Reed Farrel Coleman, Reed says that what he writes are just words, not darlings or babies. If they need to be cut, so be it (I’m paraphrasing here, but you get the gist) – the point is not to be so attached to them that you take offense when someone suggests perhaps you could do better. That’s what revision is for: to make it better.

I received an email from the subject of my first article – he liked it, and said it looked great! He probably would have liked the way it was submitted to my editor, but I think her input made it stronger. The end result was all that mattered.

The end result of NaNo is having 50,000 words to work with, words I didn’t have on November 1. The point is to make it through to the end of the story, and let the agony come later.

I can’t wait to make it better.