The office park where I spend my days is across the street from the Feminist Women’s Health Clinic, or as the protestors standing in our parking lot call it, “Abortionland.”
They’re usually there on Wednesdays and Fridays, so if you’re planning on getting a pap smear or somethin’ over there, you might want to schedule around those days.
The loudest is a woman caring a sign which reads, “I REGRET MY ABORTION.” I call her “Irma” for short. I have learned so much about Irma’s personal narrative on walks to and from my car.
Let me assure you: She really, really regrets her abortion. She thinks about it every day of her life. The child she did not have would be 37 by now. Mathematically, that means she has been screaming about her regret since Gerald Ford was in the Oval Office.
I call them the Fantastic Four. No, not Marvel’s famous superhero family. These are four embryos, a product of my in vitro fertilization, that are currently housed in a freezer.
I actually produced five eggs as a result of the procedure but my medical professionals only deemed four viable. Under a bill currently in the works by two Georgia state lawmakers, the act of my clinic discarding that unusable embryo could be considered murder, and my surviving molecular children would be guaranteed the same constitutional protection that I enjoy.
The “personhood” referendum, as it is often called, proposes a state constitutional amendment stating that life begins at fertilization. Thus, legal protection would begin at fertilization as well. Simply, a fertilized egg would be defined as an adult person.