[[ How can you justify the very real possibility of leaving your children motherless over a high risk pregnancy? Where's the value on their life now that they're out? On yours? Maybe you should ask your four year old who he'd rather have die... Mommy or the baby he hasn't met yet. You make me fucking sick. I hope you realize that if you die, you have decided your son doesn't deserve a mother, you have chosen the unborn over the living breathing boy in front of you.]]

What kind of Mother can hold one child in her arms, then the other in her body; both inside her heart, then consciously choose to take one of their lives for the sake of her own?

About 6 months into my pregnancy I remember my son asking me during dinner, “Mommy, if a woman who is pregnant with a baby dies can they still save the baby?

A man or woman who leaves his/her family and risks his/her life for his country is a hero, but a woman who would die for her child revolts you. Unfortunately you share some of the same values as our current society; that an innocent human life can be measured or weighed against another’s. That because I am a woman and have the ability to bear life, that I should also have the ability to take that life away.

I’ll have you know that each of my four children (¾ of them were unplanned by me, but planned by God, pregnancies) were all high risk. Each and every one of them I suffered D.V.Ts and P.E.s, all extensive, excruciating, and fatal. Perhaps if we were fighting for real woman’s health, I would have been able to get on the required shots (about $4,000-7,000 a month-Lovenox) and medication that my insurance fought against me for, that would have prevented all of these clots, rather than only being able to take them after I developed life threatening clots.

For some reason our current society believes woman’s health is the power to take the life of a human being, and contracepting her natural and normal working fertility. We are only “powerful” women in this society when we disrespect our healthy bodies with medication, from the time we first get our periods. We are told as young girls that in order to be in a relationship we must reject ourselves and our bodies natural functions, that we must loath our fertility, and view our very wombs as plagues. I already have the gift to give life, why do I need the power to take life away?

We are told that instead of educating a women’s body about her natural fertility and infertility periods through the use of N.F.P, which is 99% effective for every woman (regular and irregular periods), we should take this pill, this shot, this patch and place objects in our bodies and then label this “Woman’s Health Care.” I refuse to believe that by contracepting my body to become barren like a man will gain me some sort of power and respect. I am a woman and I expect to be expected by society as a whole, as I was born.

I apologize to all the young girls being shoved into their fist exams at 14 to be placed on a seemingly mandatory medication.

I apologize to all the young girls being led to believe that their bodies’ natural functions are a disease, a pre existing condition.

You deserve to be educated and informed about your body, and its beauty.

I am also deeply sorry if you believe that one of my four children are less precious to me because I had yet to see their face. I’m sorry if you are revolted that I cannot choose one child or the other, or choose my own life over my child’s. I know it’s hard to believe that there is love beyond what our eyes can see, in a consumerist world in which places values on humans based on what they produce, rather than simply because they are human beings.

And I will have you know, that the when I sat down to tell my children that I was pregnant with their sibling, my 8 year old son broke down in tears, “Mommy, I am just so happy. I have been praying for you to have another baby.”

The first time I felt my baby kick was standing in Mass singing a hymn, my 7 year old son pressed against by belly as he held his unborn sibling. When he felt the movement against his cheek, he glanced up on me to confirm that what he had felt was his sibling, seemingly responding to his loving embrace. And I will have you know, my four year old daughter teared up with delight to find out her unborn sibling was in fact a little girl, and she would finally have the little sister she too had been praying for.

Mostly, I am sorry for those that believe that in the event I would have died for one of my children that they would be without a Mother. Death does not remove me from their lives and their hearts. The day they place my body into the ground, will not be the day that every kiss I ever gave them washes off, that every story I ever read will be forgotten, that every laugh we ever shared will fade away into a frown. Nothing will stop me from living in their lives, and my children, completely aware of the risks I took to bring them into this world, never second guessed their happiness about their new sibling. Not during the 3 times I was admitted into the hospital, not during the twice a day injections into my stomach, not during the 4 hour bi-weekly office visits they patiently sat through, waiting to hear their siblings heart beat and a blurry black and white profile of their siblings face on the ultra sound.

My children have been raised to understand and value love and life, as I suffered lovingly through each and every one of their pregnancies with the possibility of death.

I don’t want the power to take another human’s life, and if you truly understood the value of life, you wouldn’t want that either. And although my children are all completely aware of the risks, I find it extremely disturbing to ask one of my children to choose between a sibling and his/her mother. Is this a choice, truly?

How can we as humans, born to love as the fish are born to swim and the birds are born to fly, desire the power to choose take another human beings life? Can we not see how infinitely precious we are?