complicated political and ethical issues were laid out like plump, warm biscuits and rich gravy, an all-you-can-eat buffet of confidence and clarity, and I was starved for both.
Yet by the time I returned from Rome, and Gore and Bush were debating the death penalty, things had changed. I learned that a close friend of mine had had an abortion and had been supported through the process by her boyfriend. I loved and respected this woman, and given the story in her own words, her decision indeed seemed like the best choice. Suddenly, the fervor that surrounded Bush’ s candidacy felt uncomfortable. My friend’ s decision had me questioning the certainty that edged all conversations concerning abortion and the so-called sanctity of life.
Additionally, the fact that the sanctity of life argument encompassed contraception, a medication that I used, pulled the argument out of the abstract and into reality. A friend confided in me that she stored her birth control pills in a Tylenol bottle so her roommate would not know that she was using a contraceptive. I could not decide what stunned me more: the fact that she had to lie to her roommate about the nature of her relationship or that she had absolutely no idea how these pills worked, and if she continued to administer them to herself from a Tylenol bottle, she would most certainly become pregnant. She did not understand that the active hormonal pills came first to suppress ovulation and that the last row was actually a placebo to allow the body to menstruate without losing the habit of taking a daily pill. And she wasn’ t the only one.
As it became clearer that my female classmates possessed very little knowledge about the fundamentals of the body and how it works sexually, one question continually gnawed at me: how did these well-read, well-educated people not know this shit? In high school health class, amongst poorly scripted videos depicting, say, a handsome teen with a scholarship to Stanford reduced to working in an ice cream shop to support his illegitimately-conceived child, I had learned the basic mechanism that allowed the pill to work. Until coming to Bushgoverned Texas, the state with the 4 th highest rate of teen pregnancy in the country, I thought every 18-year-old had at least slipped a condom onto a banana.
No one seemed to want to talk about these issues in an open and investigatory manner, and I found no answers in my Sunday visits to the chapel. I couldn’ t talk about my friend or her experience without serious opposition, nor discuss my own advancing relationship with my boyfriend without facing bias and judgment. I respected that it was a seriously Catholic university, but what
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