(Last week, I submitted a letter to the editor.  After I deleted over one hundred and fifty words to get it under the required four-hundred-word count, they published it in our local paper.  Here is the edited version.)

Twenty years ago, I went into premature labor 7 ½ weeks early.  Independence sent me by helicopter to Wichita, gambling that I had enough time and would not give birth enroute. 

I was amazed when someone told me that babies of this age, up to full term, were aborted in the same city…Wichita.   

I read on CNN about women who had last-trimester abortions.  Their stories were heartrending. One woman told how her pregnancy had totally ruined her life.  My heart went out to her.  She felt like the only choice she had was to have an injection to stop her baby’s heartbeat ten weeks before her due date.

It makes me think of hearing Kamala Harris say, “How dare them tell a woman what to do with her body!”

I don’t want to tell anyone what to do with their body.  Whether they decide to have a weight-reduction surgery, or a kidney removed and donated, like my niece.  I don’t think I have the right to make my friend force her children to have the measles vaccination.  I’ve respected that.

But the ignored question is whether this is the woman’s body…or a baby.  I don’t hear that addressed at all.

In the hospital, it was real to me.  I held my baby skin to skin, touched, and fed him.  There were no doubts…he was a baby.

I learned I was unable to carry a baby full term.  I went on to have another thirty-two-week baby and twins at twenty-nine weeks, one week younger than the CNN lady’s “fetus.”  I still remember the day that my twins were born eleven weeks early.  My son was born screaming and fighting for life.  How can I forget that?  Can I say that he was my body?

Over fifty years ago, another mother delivering in Wichita also had an extremely difficult decision.  Her unborn baby was not her husband’s, and it seemed her family was being torn apart.  Maybe she didn’t think she had a lot of choices either, but I’m so glad that she chose life and allowed this child to be adopted.

I feel blest to have him as my husband and best friend!

I have no anger and wish our world did not have hate.  I also wish I would not be labeled “anti.”  To be honest, I’m just prolife.