Editor’s note: This column was originally scheduled to be published Oct. 19.
With a U.S. Supreme Court seat opened up due to the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, much of the discussion surrounding her replacement includes legalized abortion.
Known as Roe v. Wade, it refers to the 1973 court ruling that made it unconstitutional for states to ban abortions because of a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body. Of course, this issue is much more complicated, but that’s my take in an oversimplified nutshell.
This is still a hot topic with hard core supporters on both sides of the argument. However, rest assured that I have no desire to jump into the fray, but instead would like to recount a story from my youth. It involves two sisters, some petunias and a cockroach. Oh, and me. My role was mostly as bystander, but somehow I got caught in the middle.
This happened at a time when an aunt and cousins lived down the street from my parents, an easy walk in either direction. We were often at each other’s house, so on this day, Auntie came by to see what we were doing. Finding us out in the yard, she leaned over the lanai railing, puffing on a cigarette and gazing at her sister’s petunia patch.
In Hilo, Mom’s house was surrounded with orchids, plumeria, heliconia — splashy tropical flora that seem to grow willy-nilly. But she was uninterested in everblooming anthurium and ho-hum hibiscus, enthralled instead with common mainland flowers such as petunias. For us islanders, the term exotic often applies to whatever’s not growing free and easy in our back yard.
My mother had just returned from a long trip, and while she was gone, her petunias went wild, blooming, fading, dropping seeds, then sprouting for another go-round. By the time she got back to Hilo, the patch was full of keiki, all jammed packed in a tiny bed.
“Let’s thin it out,” Mom told me. “Pull the puny ones so the healthy have room to grow.” But as I knelt down to weed them out, Auntie muttered, “Pulling those poor keiki — that’s like abortion, you know.”
“Whatchu talkin’ about?” My mother countered. “They’re plants.”
She turned back to me. “Pull ‘em”
“Plants, animals, people, same thing, all living,” Auntie solemnly intoned. “Life is life.” She looked down at me. “Don’t pull ‘em.”
I froze, fingers in mid-air, caught between two sisters with opposing world views. Thinning out the petunia patch was abortion? Maybe my fingers couldn’t move but my head was spinning.
As I was contemplating moral and ethical implications of abortion in general and plant abortion in particular, I suddenly heard my auntie yell.
“Cockaroach! Cock-a-roach!” She pointed to a fat brown specimen, scurrying on the walkway. Hearing the commotion, it paused, antennae waving wildly.
“Get da slippah … da slippah!” Auntie bent to pick up her zori in one hand and with cigarette in the other, hopped bare foot down the steps of the lanai. Then SLAP SLOP WHOP! With singular determination, she went after the only creature that will survive the nuclear holocaust.
Naturally she missed and it escaped by dashing into the petunia patch.
The loud slipper whacks snapped me out of my stupor. “Hey, wait a minute! What about life and living things?”
Auntie dropped her slippah and slid her foot back in. “Oh, what, you talking about the petunias? Yeah, but the cockaroach is different.”
And this is why, nearly 50 years after Roe v. Wade, the issue is still being contested.
I thank these two sisters for lessons learned, whatever they are.
Rochelle delaCruz was born in Hilo, graduated from Hilo High School, then left to go to college. After teaching for 30 years in Seattle, Wash., she retired and returned home to Hawaii. She welcomes your comments at rainysideview@gmail.com. Her column appears every other Monday.
