I’m going to say one last thing on the topic of a woman’s right to make her own decision. There’s more to this. Our local Jackie Speier stood up in the House last year, angry, and described what she personally had had to go through: she had lost a baby and had had to go through “that procedure,” a D&C.
I know that she and her husband had long struggled with fertility issues, that that baby was dearly wanted. She did have I think two kids afterwards–and then her husband was killed in a car accident while they were little.
What I did not know until that speech hit the paper was that the men trying to push all the personhood and anti-Planned Parenthood bills were also trying to make it so that new doctors would not be taught how to do D&Cs because those are used in abortions, and were even wanting to criminalize the procedure itself.
I want to scream every time I think about that, Do you know what that means?!
When I miscarried my first pregnancy at almost four months and the fetus was dead, the doctor who did the D&C told me that I had to have that done in order to protect me from scarring, from having leftover tissue that could cause infections, that if it were not done I might never be able to have children. I had that D&C; I went on to have two daughters and two sons.
Do we outlaw all guns everywhere because some are used to kill living people? Did a bullet ever help a body heal?
———
Okay, enough of that. So. I took my baby dress project to Purlescence tonight, the one I’m working on to match little Eden Alison’s hat. Except, I was stumped. All these years of knitting and I just haven’t done baby clothes–the first sweater I made Parker when he was a few months old fit his three-year-old cousin.
So I asked Pamela, who knits for her little grandchildren all the time, and Danette, who has a toddler. The bottom hem seemed to be coming out too big. We talked fit and the whys and hows of it. (I know I linked to that chart the other day but I needed knitters around me to tell me in person.)
That did it. I sat down and got going, and I am really pleased now with how it’s coming out. Like I so wanted to be all along.