Third Culture Kid(s)

South Park makes me cringe sometimes. This week’s episode, for example, was kind of a waste of 30 minutes. But I keep watching because, every so often, they have a really good one. Granted, my idea of “really good” generally involves a scary Cartman or a very pathetic Butters (preferably both at once), but not always.

A few weeks ago they did an episode involving Stan’s father and the N-word, in which Stan keeps trying to apologize to Token by explaining that he understands his feelings, which is always rejected by Token. At the end of the episode, Stan comes running up to Token and says something to the effect of “I finally get it! I don’t get it!” and they make their peace.
I wish a few Supreme Court justices would “finally get it” as well. Before I was pregnant with MM, I thought I had a pretty good handle on what pregnancy involved. I was very much in the “pro-choice-but-I’d-never-ever-have-an-abortion” camp, and I had all these gauzy Hallmark ideas of what happens when you’re pregnant. Oh, sure, sometimes bad things happen, but they wouldn’t happen to me.

Then I got pregnant. I now know a few things I didn’t know before.

1. Bad things happen more than you’d think, and they happen to anyone, regardless of race, ideology, weight, or moral righteousness.
2. Bad things can happen at any point in a pregnancy, right up to and including birth.
3. A lot of the ‘humorous’ stuff associated with pregnancy - all that ha-ha morning sickness, bloated body parts, joint pain, etc. - is more than just “uncomfortable.” My morning sickness was moderate, at worst, and I still felt like I was never going to be well again for several months. I had bad sciatica, I wound up in the hospital twice before we finally went for it because of high blood pressure, and I spent the entire pregnancy terrified.
4. And I discovered that I had actually had absolutely no freaking idea what pregnancy was like. None. I’m a woman, and I couldn’t begin to imagine what it was really like. Of course there were good moments - that whole moving-baby thing is pretty incredible - but I simply couldn’t have ever imagined what it was like before I was actually pregnant.

And now we have these men, backed by other men, supported by legions of men* telling us that they not only have completely figured out the whole pregnancy thing, but they’re also the best qualified people to decide when and how decisions about pregnancy should be made. They have absolutely, unequivocally no way whatsoever of even beginning to imagine what pregnancy is like - what it’s like to worry for both yourself and your fetus/baby/sprog - and yet they’re going to legislate how pregnancy should and shouldn’t be done.

It’s sickening and it really makes me just want to up and leave the country. What kind of messed-up place do we live in, where (ex?) senators can do commercials for Viagra, but they can also tell me that I’m utterly incompetent at making my own medical decisions, and too stupid to understand my options when they’re explained to me?

*I know there are many, many women in the anti-abortion camp.  But the majority of legislators and lobbyists involved are men.