Opinion time

[marguerite_krux]

Random things in the news

 

1. Holy crap. I don’t know how far I’d go for a loved one but I hope I never have to find out, because I’m afraid I might turn out to be a wimp and leave them to their fate. 

I certainly couldn’t do what this guy in the Northern Territory did. A crocodile had clamped onto his wife, and rather than run away as fast as he could, the guy leapt onto the croc’s back and bashed at it as hard he could [ouch, scraped skin, much?]. Fortunately, this desperate attempt had a happy ending- he was able to get the croc to let go of his wife and the couple escaped with no permanent damage done. How amazing is that?! You read stories about wife-bashers and murderers all the time, then an inspirational story like this comes up. Just…wow.

 

2. Poor Kevin Rudd. Everyone’s paying him out for selling out and submitting to Bush [it’s funny when I see him mentioned in the news- with all the commotion over Clinton and Obama, I forget he’s still around]. 

Apparently his ‘friendly salute’ symbolically renders Australia the 51^st state of America. I admit, I have no love for Kevin Rudd, I certainly didn’t vote for him, but people should cut him a break. The picture in the paper? Sure didn’t look like he was saluting. I mean, people groan at John Sheppard’s attempt at a salute in SGA and post mean things about Joe Flanigan’s portrayal of a soldier, but this is ridiculous. If Kevin Rudd honestly meant to salute Bush in acknowledgment of his superiority, he’d’ve done a more credible job of paying homage to the man, rather than insult him with that appalling attempt. I’m way more inclined to believe his statement that it was a friendly gesture between allies. In all honesty, that’s the way I wave at people. I feel embarrassed about jerking my hand around and being all obvious, so I just stick my hand up to get attention and that’s it. Which is pretty much what Rudd’s hand gesture looked like to me. I can’t believe this is what gets people all riled up about- I’d be more offended if he’d flipped the middle finger at someone, rather than this.

 

3. This was in the papers a few weeks back and it’s been preying on my mind ever since. I’m the type of person that feels guilty about everything, whether or not it’s my fault, whether or not it’s something worthy of feeling guilt over or not.* My parents raised me to be conscientious, unhealthily so. Which means I don’t understand it when people won’t admit responsibility for their own actions.

 

The girl was 14 when she started having sex. She visited a health center where she received the morning-after pill three times, although the article doesn’t clarify whether on three separate occasions, she was given the pill, or if she was given three pills on the one occasion. Nevertheless, she had sex, and she got the pill. So far, so mature, to my mind anyway. That’s regarding the precautions, not kids having sex at that age, because that just creeps me out, but anyway. Then I find out that this was unprotected sex, which makes me take a dimmer view of her maturity, but at least she had the sense to get the pill because kids having kids is to be avoided if at all possible. Now at 15, she becomes pregnant. I have to wonder if she learnt about condoms at all, or if she was solely relying on the health system to bail her out, but in any case, it was too late this time. Now, I’m sensitive to people’s opinions, and I respect them, and if you’re anti-abortion you may hate me for this, but I completely agree with the clinic’s advice to her including abortion as an option. They don’t know the girl, what her position is on abortion, what her home situation is, whether her parents might punish her or worse. So they make sure that they advise her of *all* her alternatives, which is the responsible thing to do, because abortion is legal and telling people about it is informing them of their rights under the law and how is that a crime? Except it comes back to bite them on the ass.

 

The mother finds out and instead of re-examining her relationship with her daughter, instead of investigating why it was that the girl couldn’t come to her for support and help in such a serious situation, instead of telling the girl off for not confessing to her in the first place, she decides to rant at the medical system. She says that the girl was from a ‘normal, stable environment’ and that she should’ve been informed. Well, excuse me, but the clinic workers aren’t going to know that, they’re not going to have the resources to go around investigating the home situation of every kid that comes in for help, their main agenda is to provide support for the people that come to them for assistance and to put their needs first, not to consider the bruised feelings of embarrassed parents who obviously hadn’t bonded well enough with their kid to be kept in the loop.

 

But I can understand, to some degree, how the mother feels. Her daughter had this monumental secret and didn’t tell her. her daughter had to drop out of school to have a baby. There is enormous stigma attached to this, and no doubt she was feeling guilt and shame and the weight of people’s disapproval- imagined or not- of her parenting skills. She probably felt like she’d failed as a mother. This isn’t what I say she had to have been feeling, or should be feeling [hell, I don’t see why everyone’s so outraged over Keisha Castle-Hughes and Jamie-Lynne Spears’ respective pregnancies], but that if this was the emotional gamut she was going through, then I totally get why she had to focus her anger and frustration on a third party, an outside target, someone safe. And that was the health clinic, for not telling her, even though informing her of the girl’s condition was hardly going to change the reality of it.

 

That’s as far as my sympathy goes, because she really pushes it with this statement. She says that she’s outraged she wasn’t involved, ‘…we weren’t given that option and they just kept giving her this pill…’ and that access to abortion and the morning-after pill meant girls didn’t face the reality of pregnancy.

 

Well, firstly, a big fat DUH to that because of course the point of those two things is to make sure the girl doesn’t stay pregnant and how can they face the reality of a state they’re not in?

 

And secondly, she’s making them responsible for her kid having unprotected sex. That was a stupid decision that her daughter made, and the *only* sensible thing she did was ensure she didn’t get pregnant afterward, though she was a dumb-ass a year later and didn’t avoid it. Anyway, assuming the clinic called her up and said, ‘hey, your daughter’s having unprotected sex’, what would she really have done? Would she then have accepted the blame for her pregnant daughter, or better, directed any blame at the girl herself, instead of well-meaning strangers who make their living helping others?

 

Thirdly, what mother wants her kid to face the reality of pregnancy at 15? I mean, if I understand correctly, a mother that truly loves her child would want to protect them from the harsher aspects of life and want the best they can possibly have and smooth sailing through their teenage and adult years, right? It’s never going to happen, but that’s the dream, isn’t it? I don’t believe there are a whole lot of mothers out there praying for their little girl to fall pregnant and be a high-school drop out and lose their chance of a decent career and to make a good living in the future. [And I’m not saying that’s her only possible life path, but that’s the worst case scenario that can’t be ignored] So the mom’s a hypocrite for acting like girls should face the realities of pregnancy. Okay, okay, so she’s religious and her faith tells her abortion’s bad and that her daughter should have the kid [now I’m feeling sorry for the girl because she never wanted this child and now her mom’s made her have it], but what right does she have to get mad at the clinic? Would she have preferred her daughter be pregnant at 14? And worse, she wants the health system reformed so that health workers are obliged to tell parents what their kids have been doing. So just because her daughter sucks at keeping secrets and she found out about the pregnancy, suddenly all the other kids that seek help from Australian clinics have to lose their privacy? Kids whose families might disown them and throw them out of the house, or at the very least, emotionally abuse them for screwing up like this? Who is going to be courageous enough to go to a clinic for help if they know their parents will find out about it? It’s because they don’t want their parents to know that they’re going on their own in the first place. And that’s when you get kids who are trapped in a bad situation and don’t know how to resolve it and can’t get help from anyone and then they take drastic action and terrible things start happening.

 

So now I’ve exhausted my rant against the mother, and I shift my focus to the girl, the one I pitied in the paragraph above. My well of pity’s dried up. This immature child, who didn’t have the will to tell her boyfriend to practice safe sex, who used the clinic when it suited her, who was willing to consider abortion when her pregnancy was secret, had the nerve to turn on the health workers. She blames them for her pregnancy, for not telling her mom what she’d been doing. “If she had known, I wouldn’t have gotten pregnant.” I love this. I frakking love this. She is so unbelievably blind and stupid and self-serving and delusional, I have to admire the sheer will that goes into sustaining the illusion that her decision to have unprotected sex numerous times since the age of 14 and predictably resulted in her conceiving a child was *entirely* the fault of health care workers who made every reasonable effort to prevent this situation from happening.

 

It is also impressive that she ascribes her mother the powers to prevent her pregnancy just from the knowledge that her daughter was sexually active. I love that this girl, who willfully hid her sexual activities and pregnancy from her mother, envisages her mother as a shield from those things. If it was that simple, why didn’t she tell her? ‘Mom, I’m having unsafe sex. Make me virtuous and pure and innocent, prevent my body from conceiving.’ I imagine if the health workers had told her they intended to ring up her mom, she would’ve protested and cried and wailed about it. Because she wanted it to be kept a secret. She was totally into their privacy regulations then. But just because her mom found out, she’s turned the situation around and reproaching them for it, presumably to get herself on her mom’s good side. Blame the system and she gets out of jail free. The depth of her hypocrisy astounds me.

 

And listen to this. “Parents should know because, while I love my daughter, I am only 16 and I wish I had waited longer to have kids.” Okay. So that again backs up her seeming belief that her mother, armed with the knowledge that she was having unprotected sex, could’ve prevented her from getting pregnant. The only way I can see that happening is if the woman grounded her daughter and only let her out of the house to go to school, with strict instructions to come straight back after last period, no exceptions, or else. Yeah, I totally believe this kid would support that kind of regime, I can see her yearning for strict regulation of her movements and wishing on stars at night for her mother to curtail her freedom so she wouldn’t be able to sneak off with boys and do naughty things with them.

 

Basically, she’s blaming everyone else for decisions she made on her own. She was grown up enough to choose to have sex- but not enough to deal with the consequences, not enough to keep from hurling accusations at the clinic that tried to help her, and not enough to accept responsibility for the things she did. I’m only surprised that she didn’t blame her boyfriend for his sperm being so potent, if he’d been less of a stud, she’d never have had to become a mother at 16.

 

I’m just feeling bad for the kid, having to be raised under these circumstances, knowing that she had never been wanted, knowing that her mother would’ve had an abortion if only her grandmother hadn’t stopped her.

*For instance, mother didn’t buy the Thursday paper when I specifically asked her for it, so I read it at university on Friday- then I come home to find that she went to the newsagency to buy me the previous day’s paper because it was important to me and I felt bad for reading it already. I didn’t tell her that because I didn’t want to ruin her gesture, but I’ve been brooding about it ever since. That’s how perverse my mind is. *kicks brain*