Three years ago, I wrote a blog post titled Abortion: A Sensitive Topic. The post began like this:
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who passed away a few days ago, was best known for her forceful stance on women’s rights, particularly abortion rights, and equal treatment of women under the law. Her name is usually linked with the landmark 1973 case Roe v Wade that made abortion legal in the United States …
Now that she has passed away, there is a lot of concern about the future of Roe v Wade and abortion rights. Far be it from me to attempt any legal or political discourse. I am not a lawyer nor a politician, but as a woman and a writer of women’s fiction, I understand the reasoning behind the passage of Roe v Wade.
As we now know Roe v Wade has been overturned by the US Supreme Court and women’s abortion rights have been returned to the states. Since then, the national conversation has focused on abortion and with the US presidential elections just eight days away, abortion has become not just a sensitive topic but a hot one.
Fifty years after Roe v Wade became the law of the land, women have lost their reproductive freedom and are even losing their lives because they can’t receive proper care when it is needed. The situation is very complicated and I’m not prepared to go into details here. Just listen to your television any day and you will hear more on this topic.
However, as a mother, grandmother, fiction writer and as a Christian, the topic of abortion concerns me a great deal.
In my debut novel Coming Out of Egypt, set in the 1980s, the protagonist Marva and her sister June Garcia were both sexually abused by their father. Marva became pregnant and her father instructed her mother to perform an abortion on her. In a scene following her birthday party, Marva recounts to June what happened:
“I had to have an abortion because of Daddy. He made Mama do it to me. The pain was so bad he gave me a shot of gin to dull the pain. And it helped. That was my first drink. After that, I dropped out of school. I knew the teachers were talking about me. It was horrible. I don’t want the same thing happening to you. I don’t want anything to stop you from finishing your education and making something of yourself.”
June yawned. “I want to finish my education.”
Marva’s eyelids felt heavy. She lay down and pulled the covers over her. “Good. So be careful. Don’t let Keith, or any boy, talk you into doing … you know what.”
Silence. “Sister …”
“Mm hmm?”
“I’m glad you told me what you just told me.”
Here’s another scene in which Marva’s former teacher discloses to a detective what she knows about the abortion:
“As I was saying, one day the younger sister June came to me and said that Marva was in the bathroom, bleeding. I told another teacher and we both went and found her groaning and writhing on the floor, her clothes all soaked with blood. We got her cleaned up and gave her an aspirin. I asked her what caused her to bleed so much. She began to cry, but wouldn’t say anything. Mr. Sampson, the vice principal, and I took her home in his car.”
David’s face was expressionless, and Cicely continued, “They lived near the river, and we had to take a little, narrow track off the main road to get to the house. As we turned onto the track, Marva told us to stop the car and she would walk from there. Mr. Sampson refused and drove right up to the house. We didn’t see Garcia.”
“What about her mother?”
Cicely kept her voice low. “She was a frail-looking little lady who seemed as scared as her daughters. She didn’t speak much English. We told her who we were and why we’d brought Marva home. We offered to take her to a doctor, but the mother started to cry and wring her hands and say something in Spanish. She begged us not to tell anybody. She kept shaking her head and saying, ‘No, no, no.’ That convinced us that Marva might have had an abortion and her father was probably responsible.”
“Did you inform the police?”
Cicely nodded. “Our principal advised us to file a report in case anything happened to the girl, but he warned us that nothing would come out of it. Marva never came back to school and I left Egypt Village shortly after.”
David stared into the distance then fixed her once more with his penetrating gaze.
“What did the police say?”
“They said we had no evidence that the girl did have an abortion or that her father was sexually abusing her. And even if we did, the country has no laws against incest.”
To learn more about Marva and June, go to this link where you will see the other books in the Egypt series, all just 99c. for a limited time only. If you are in Kindle Unlimited, you can read the last two books In the Wilderness and In the Promised Land for free.
Angela is a blogger and author of Christian women’s fiction and Christian romance. Her latest release is Making Music Together.
