It appears that Gov. Jeb Bush has finally done the right thing and did not continue the court battle to stop a 13 year old girl from getting an abortion.

Now, even if you do not believe abortion to be a good thing in the grander scheme of life, think for a moment about the consequences to the life of a child born to a 13 year old ward of the state who may or may not know the father of the child.

I often think about things like this because my parents were born in a time when abortion was not possible for those who did not have the means nor social position necessary to skirt the prevailing law.

Both my mother and father were the results of liaisons that were not the province of loving domestic relations. The consequences of their births have taken their toll over three generations of my family--my parents life-long confusion and abuse, mine and my sister's peculiar upbringing, and the stultified lives of my niece and nephew.

There are few things more traumatic than hearing one's father say "I don't know why my mother didn't love me," or "my father must have raped my mother, maybe that's why she didn't want me." What else could explain a baby being dropped at delivery and his arm broken? What else could explain a mother leaving her child in the care of her father and rarely, if ever, seeing her first born son?

Just as traumatic is to hear one's mother say "I look like my father, but I don't look anything like my mother or my sisters," or "I don't know why my mother hated me so much. Maybe it's because I look like somebody she didn't like."

Or imagine what it might be to look at a picture of one of your aunts and her daughters, and see more of a resemblance between her daughters and your own mother than between your mother and her "sisters"....and to realize that you, too, look more like that particular aunt than you do anyone else in the family.

So, consider this....there are times and circumstances when a mother cannot love a child. When the child is conceived in incest, or rape, or from a one-time encounter with a nameless individual, how can a woman then love her child?

Sure, we can give a whole bunch of lip-service to the idea of "family love" and that "community love" can help a woman deal with this sort of trauma...but let's get a grip on this. How can a family take on a child conceived as the result of an act of incest and not be affected by it? How can we change the state of mind of a mother who, when she looks at the face of her child, is reminded of an horrific and traumatic event or of a person she may not have known? Can she ever bond with that child? How is it possible for her to maintain a healthy state of mind?

Sure, she can learn to adapt. In public she can put on the happy face and let everyone believe that she loves her child. She can let other family members raise that child, too. But what about when she is alone with that child? Can she really trust other family members to nurture and not abuse that child? What about when she takes on other lovers or a husband who is not the father and might not be all that fond of a child whose sire is not traceable or is traceable to someone capable of criminal activity? And if she is so psychologically damaged by the birth of her own child, how can she possibly choose a suitable loving mate?

Few people in the anti-abortion contingent ever think of what happens to the lives of children conceived in traumatic circumstances. Few consider the lives of the subsequent generations. As one of the subsequent generations, I know the effects of secrets and lies and of parents denied maternal (and paternal) love.

The other day, my father said to me "I don't believe in love between a man and a woman. The only love I've ever seen is a mother's for her child." And he'd only seen that with his own wife for her first-born.

Yet think further about those statements. The statements deny that there is such a thing as a father's love for a child. It is, though a natural conclusion from the first part: if there is no love between a man and a woman, how can a man love a child? Men, then, are perhaps incapable of love.

Or is it just that my father sees himself as incapable of love?

How, then, can I expect that my life, or my sister's, or my nephew's and niece's could turn out just peachy?

And they haven't.

My sister is sickly and angry, abusive towards both her children and now toward her elderly father. Yet no one outside of the family can see this because she is a master at isolation and of putting on the happy face for the public. But the face has cracks, and when mom, the glue in all this, goes, there is a chance that all will fall apart.

The pieces might end up falling on me. I'm the de-facto keeper of the secrets, the one who knows all now, who heard and continues to hear those sad, little unanswerable questions from her parents about their parents, who's put two and two together and has confirmed the veiled truth from others who speak in cryptic glyphs of long-dead "mistakes".

Strangely, I am glad that my niece, because of her mental disabilities, may never have children, as much as I am glad that my nephew is gay and, too, will never have children. I am glad that I chose years ago never to have children. The secrets, lies, abuses, bad genes, etc. can now wither on the vine (as my father is wont to say).

Yet think of how all this could have been avoided if, in another time and another place, two young women would have been granted the permission to terminate their pregnancies.

Perhaps it might be nice to send Jeb some flowers and give him a good old boy pat on the back. He finally got a bit o'sense.