Posted on 10/13/2009 8:38:13 AM PDT by kingattax
In 'Impossible Motherhood,' Irene Vilar, now a mother of two, writes of what led her to have 15 pregnancies ended.
Reporting from Denver - Irene Vilar's house, a charming old place on a leafy block outside Denver, is a monument to her mothering. Half the downstairs has been transformed into a preschool, with picture books, educational toys and art supplies in organized disarray.
Outside, her little girls, 3-year-old Lolita and 5-year-old Loretta, are decorating the walkway with brown-eyed susans plucked from the garden. It is a scene of almost magical domesticity.
Inside, their mother, a striking 40-year-old literary agent with big, brown eyes, long, straight hair and a Spanish-inflected lilt that gives away her Puerto Rican roots, is describing how, from the age of 16 to 33, she could neither stop herself from conceiving, nor from terminating her pregnancies. Fifteen of them.
She explores her history in a brutally frank new memoir, "Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict."
Even before it was published last week, Vilar's story unleashed a wave of emotion in the anti-abortion community. Reactions have included pity and -- at least in one blogger's case -- a call to put her behind bars.
On the abortion rights side, reaction has been muted.
"The majority of pro-choicers -- and I don't blame them -- are somewhat confused," said Vilar. Vilar believes that access to legal abortion saved her life because she would have found a way to end her pregnancies no matter what.
"Abortion exists everywhere, legal or not," she said. Latin America, she noted, has a relatively high abortion rate and stringent anti-abortion laws. Most abortions in the region are considered "unsafe" by health authorities, who estimate that up to 5,000 women in the region die each year from abortions.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
The woman is insane. If anyone needed their kids taken away she does.
That woman is a true monster of epic proportions!
A freak trying to make a buck....swell....
I still don’t buy her story. There’s no way her cervix could hold up during two fullterm pregnancies after artificially forcing it open once a year for 15 years. No way. She’s a freak looking for attention, but I don’t believe her on the abortion count.
Still more proof that genocide euthanasia and sterilization are "progressive" ideas. During this period FDR was in power and would soon be incarcerating Japanese, Germans and Italians in prison camps, and everyone's favorite progressive was just warming up in Germany.
Is it any wonder the "progressive" Bamster is surrounding himself with lunitics.
was going to say the same thing....wouldn’t she have caused alot of damage, scarring, etc. by having an abortion that many times?
She certainly came from a screwed-up background, and fell into a majorly screwed-up relationship. But as far as needing her kids taken away from her, I’d say that depends on her current state of mental health rather than her previous one.
When you take kids away from their parents unnecessarily, you screw up the kids. It’s another case of a government cure often being worse than the disease.
And there ARE people who get their lives straightened out or at least partly straightened out, after having been totally messed up. I don’t know whether that’s the case here. But I’d be careful about taking people’s kids away from them. That’s a government-intervention road you don’t want to go too far down.
From a physical standpoint, there’s nothing unlikely about it. According to various studies, back in the Soviet era, the *average* Russian woman had had somewhere between 9 and 11 abortions — and that was via the notoriously primitive Soviet medical system. The government was too busy building tanks and spacecraft to divert any manurfacturing capacity to things that would make people’s lives better, like contraceptives, so abortion was the only forom of “contraception” available. Few women wanted to bring babies into that horrible oppressive society, so they had abortion after abortion after abortion (and they ultimately succeeded in bringing down the Soviet government by starving it of new bodies with which to staff the military-industrial complex).
Besides, it’s rare for the cervix to sustain damage in an abortion — it’s a lot less traumatic to the cervix than natural childbirth (assuming the abortion isn’t being done near full-term). The main risk during abortion is injury or perforation of the uterus, which can lead to severe bleeding or infection — but if that happens, it doesn’t usually cause infertility (unless the woman dies from the bleeding or infection).
However, I agree with you that this story is probably BS invented to sell books. She’s a literary agent, and knows what sells. This would have all happened in an era when abortion was already legal, and (except for illegal aliens and some minors under the control of pimps) being performed by reasonably competent medical professionals in clinics which routinely pushed IUDs, Norplant, the pill, and other contraceptive options to their abortion patients. No way did she turn down the offers of passive contraceptives 15 times.
Concur, MB. She’s BSing for the dinero. All the crude, disgusting quips I’ve heard about the durability of women’s lower anatomy nonwithstanding, this fat old farmer’s son knows there no way she coulda been wrenched open and reamed a dozen times without major degradation to the original function.
This woman is not straightened out. She is defending what she did.
From reading the full article, it would seem that you are correct:
Vilar, whose pregnancies were punctuated by several suicide attempts, is aware of the horrific reaction her story may inspire. (Worried about the safety of her family, she asked that her neighborhood not be identified.)
(SNIP)
Vilar's maternal grandmother is the famous Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón, who left Vilar's mother as an infant with relatives and moved to New York. In 1954, Lebrón and three other nationalists shot up the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five congressmen. Convicted of attempting to overthrow the U.S. government, Lebrón spent 25 years in prison, and was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. She is now 89 and in ill health.
(SNIP)
While Lebrón was incarcerated, her daughter -- Vilar's mother, Gladys Méndez -- leaped from a moving car and died two days later. Vilar's father was driving, and Vilar, then a child of 8, had tried to hold her mother back.
Okay. Let’s assume that’s the case. Having had 15 previous abortions and defending having done so is still not legal justification for having her present children taken away from her by the government. You need more than that to justify taking children away from their mother.
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