Category Archives: Life

The Peterson Verdict: Truth Reclaimed

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

December 20, 2004

Twelve people, ordinary citizens, accepted the ultimate challenge of a civilized society.  They sat through five months of grueling testimony in the Scott Peterson trial in order to defend truth.

There is something immediate and real about sitting in the jury box, examining bits of concrete, clothing, and recorded phone conversations, searching for truth.  When the prosecution passed the peasant maternity blouse thought to have been worn by Laci shortly before her murder, one juror burst into tears.  Literally touching the truth can be painful.

The Peterson verdict makes me think back to another trial I witnessed firsthand in 2001, where Dr. John Biskind was accused of letting his patient die.  Like Laci, his patient LouAnne was pregnant.

In order to prove their case against Dr. Biskind, prosecutors needed to prove the age of LouAnne’s baby.  Twelve jurors focused on a description of the proper use of ultrasound to measure the widest part of the baby’s temple, slightly above the eyes.  The expert witness assured them further measurements of the baby’s waist and femur could be used to confirm an estimated age.

The jury listened intently.  The truth seemed to be that LouAnne’s baby had been 25 to 26 weeks old, at the age of viability, when, under ordinary circumstances the baby could have survived outside the mother’s womb.  But these were not ordinary circumstances.

Scott Peterson and Dr. Biskind were both convicted by juries.  Both prosecutors won their cases.  Two trials, two mothers, two babies, and four deaths.   But oh, the difference in truth.

You see, as tragic as his death was, at least Connor had a name.  He is remembered in the hearts of people who wanted him, and he is honored by a nation who grieved when his little body was found on the shore of San Francisco Bay.  Laci’s baby was a victim.  And Scott will pay the price for his murder.

LouAnne’s baby was measured and counted and aged.  But he…or she…was never named.  Prosecutors in the Biskind trial were under a strict order from the judge not to make the trial about the baby.  Just figure out how old “it” was…and then move on.

Later in the trial, when prosecutors described the death of “it”, they explained how the broken leg bone of the baby could have ripped a hole in LouAnne’s uterus as the doctor pulled it out.  And the metal tool that broke the leg bone…and crushed the skull of “it”…that sharp metal tool might have cut into LouAnne and caused the uterine wound that made her bleed to death.

The Peterson trial was about two people, Laci and Connor, who each died a brutal death.

The Biskind trial was about one person, LouAnne…and “It”.  LouAnne died a painful and undeserved death, and Dr. Biskind was convicted of this crime.  “It” never died, because “It” was supposed to die.

When “It” was measured at the trial…her little head, her tummy, her legs and arms…she was a fully-formed picture on an ultrasound with a beating heart.  But when time came to describe her death in the trial, she became a fetus…a linguistic charade that snuffed out her humanity, a life summed up by a medical examiner in three words of dispassionate science…a “Product of Conception”…or more simply said…“It.”

Is this the truth that we require of juries?  Is the truth a matter of declaring what you want, even if the evidence proves otherwise?  If you name him Conner, then he was killed.  If she was only an “It,” then she never was…and she never died.

This week, just as Americans work to make peace with the conclusion of the Peterson trial, the brutal truth we work so hard to avoid has been savagely resurrected on the front page of national newspapers.

Another mother, Bobby Jo Stinnett, was murdered.  Her fetus?  Her product of conception?  Her “It”?  It lived.

Bobby Jo died.   But because someone wanted her fetus enough to kill her for it, to take it by force from the womb, a grateful father has been reunited with his baby…Victoria Jo Stinnett.

In Kansas, another jury will eventually convene in another trial, with another long trail of evidence leading to the conviction of a murderer.  And as the jury weighs the evidence of this unspeakable crime, our nation will once again be faced with a serious truth that refuses to die.

The definition of life is not fluid…changeable from one trial to the next…based on whether we wanted to receive the life…or not.  Life, like truth, exists of its own volition…separate from our juries and verdicts…life is.  And truth is.

No amount of evidence and testimony will ever be enough to reach truth if we close our eyes and hearts.  The greatest challenge for a jury in a civilized society is not to determine truth, but to open its eyes to the truth in plain sight…and accept it.

 

See Archives for past editorials.

June 25, 2004:  Unplanned Joy

December 10, 2004:  The Best Part of Snuggling

 

The Best Part of Snuggling

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

December 10, 2004

It is black outside.  Soft pits and pats against the window…rain…and I pull the blanket closer, sinking back into the arm of the recliner.  A hot cup of tea rests at my elbow.  It is my favorite time of the day.

In the darkness, I think back to other special mornings, twenty years ago.  Wrapped in my green plush robe, rocking back and forth, it was many a quiet dark morning when I would slowly sense the presence of another person.  My son, a toddler of three, had padded into the living room, up next to my chair, with his small eyes fixed on me.

Wordlessly, in agreement that the peace of the morning was large enough for both of us, I would open my robe.  Knowing what to do, he climbed onto my lap, and I pulled the robe around us, a snuggling of two.  In many a dark early morning, so many years ago, we kept the peace together.

Snuggling…it’s hard to know the best part.  Is it the dark, the quiet, the soft touch of a hand on the shoulder?  Is it protection, comfort, acknowledgement, relationship?  Safety?  Is it the promised assurance between human beings that what happens to you will happen to me because I share your heartbeat?

I was jarred to attention last week.  I was asked to consider the first time I ever snuggled, my earliest snuggle of life, and the question brought me up short.

Was it inside the warm white blanket wrapped around me as I was laid into the arms of my mother in the hospital?  Or was it later…close against her as she nursed me, her firstborn?  Maybe my father was the first to snuggle me, peering intently, measuring the smallest eyes and lips of a baby…his…held in the crook of his arm.

Maybe…but the magic of science has opened the window on snuggling, and I think it must surely have been weeks, even months before my birth, when I knew I was safe, a knowing of safety available to all living beings even before they can explain it in words.

Surely, weeks before birth, wrapped into a bundle of baby, between my bursts of pushing and kicking against the walls of the womb…surely there were quiet moments shared with my mother where we snuggled and dreamt.  Already at this stage I had fine hair, teeth, and eyelash fringes around eyelids that opened and closed…and opened again…for infant eyes that looked around.  When she spoke, I knew my mother’s voice…outside…serenading me as I waited my time.

Certainly, even weeks earlier, when the womb was large enough for me to swim and stretch and turn somersaults, I took time to rest and sleep and snuggle.  Inside my mother’s quiet belly, worn out from my infant gymnastics, curling my toes, I would have stuck my thumb into my mouth and felt the safety of darkness…protected and safe.

One thing is certain.  I know I snuggled long before I made my first appearance under bright hospital lights.  No matter what some want to claim I was back then…a blob, a mass of cells, an embryo, a fetus…a product of conception…I was, without a doubt, a flourishing child of my parents, thriving and growing.

Today, cloaked in a battle of terminology, creating labels devoid of humanity, there are those who wish us to forget that we once snuggled in the womb.  They will not have their way with me.

I claim my existence, refusing to be dehumanized at any stage of development.  Supported by the miraculous development of four-dimensional ultrasound, doctors and parents can follow the development of babies like me.  At eight weeks, I was fully formed, a human of one inch in length, every organ present, with a strong beating heart.

At nine weeks, my fingerprints were already engraved, and my fingers were ready to grasp an object placed in my palm.

At ten weeks, my body was sensitive to touch. I squinted and swallowed. I puckered my brow and frowned.

And then I smiled…at eleven weeks.  And if I could smile, it is certain that I smiled because I felt safe, snuggled inside, nurtured and protected…my life ahead to be enjoyed and cherished.

So many years later, watching the dawn break on the mountains outside the window, I follow the beads of rain that trickle down the glass.  Another beautiful day outside, crisp and damp.  The garden will sparkle when the sun breaks through the clouds.  I take a sip of tea and pull the blanket up under my chin.

My son is grown now, and I must snuggle alone.  It’s enough, but it’s not the best there is.

If there really is a best thing to snuggling, this would have to be it…revived by thoughts of long ago…a bundle wrapped together, two of us sharing the morning…the best thing of all surely being the promised assurance between human beings that what happens to you will happen to me…because I share your heartbeat.

 *************************************

DEDICATION 

This column is dedicated to the many committed educators who are not afraid to teach our children about their earliest days of life inside the womb.  May these faithful teachers be encouraged in their work.

 

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 June 25, 2004:  Unplanned Joy

Old as the Hills

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

November 12, 2004

It was an old house…ancient even…abused and crumbling.  Windows twisted out on bent hinges, leaving ample space to climb through and into the back bedroom where the black paint of recent renters covered the peeling red and green layers of past owners.  Wood floors creaked, plaster walls cracked open, and loose rusty pipes rumbled below as my husband and I walked through, exploring our first home.

Thirty years later, this sorry-excuse-for-a-house has risen from the ashes, a bright little castle in the small historic area of Phoenix.  It is a gem.  A treasure.  Restored and repaired, it will bring more money per square foot than any modern state-of-the-art darling “home for sale.”

My husband and I often sit on our front porch in the evenings and look down the street.  We live in a neighborhood of resurrected Lazaruses, as my parents call them, homes that have seen the tides of time carry them through periods of respect, rejection…and respect again.

Ours is the perfect neighborhood for an antique car rally.  Indeed, once a year we carry our lawn chairs down the street and sit along Central Avenue.  It’s a neighborhood block party under shimmering street lamps, a friendly celebration of old cars turned new, remodeled …and recharged.

New…grown old…and restored to new again.  It is a process respected for cars and homes.  Surprisingly, restoration is a process that works on us as people, even as we labor to scrub and polish steel and wood.

Restoration.  As we refinish and polish, we reconnect with things eternal…family, simplicity, honor, integrity.  We learn that honor is not conferred from the outside by a modern designer feted as the “latest and greatest.”  Honor is a glow from the inside, private and quiet and still…a light eternal, burning even when we turn our backs and seek the glitter and glamour of fashion and celebrity.

Restoration.  It is a concept that works for ideas just as well as it works for houses and cars.  Virginity…chastity, abstinence, purity…all old words turned new again, like a fresh coat of paint on an antique car.  New words…but it’s still the same old thing.  Love.

No matter how much we want to equate sex with love and confuse the issues, the clarity of truth is a pure light that never waivers.  Love…imbued with patience, fueled with trust…love waits its turn.  Love in its purest form is passion held in check for the benefit of the one true object of my affection.  And sex can wait.

Abstinence is not just an old idea gone bad…outdated and ready for the rubbish pile.  Abstinence works.  It restores health.  It restores hearts.  It restores souls.

In the British Medical Journal an article on abstinence strips away the false glitter of the sexual revolution.  The article says a reduction in the number of sexual partners is the tried and true key to halting spread of HIV.  Here it is, a modern gussied-up term… partner reduction…by any other name…the new and modern is the same old same old…abstinence…the old made new again.

By any other name, abstinence is the sexual revolution of the future…abstinence until marriage…a chastity and purity as old as the hills.  It is the perfection of “partner reduction;” it is the one and only…the person who cares enough to give a heart and a promise eventually perfected with the sexual passion of love committed for a lifetime.

An old sign hangs above the door in our old home restored to new.  My mother bought it at a garage sale, a gilded frame around a German phrase I have since learned in English: Faithful to the End.  Painted in blue, it is the promise of fidelity.  Loyalty.  Eternal virtues of the ultimate friendship, the best of devotion, sanctified in marriage…until death do us part.

Abstinence…abstinence until marriage…ideas being reduced to insignificance by people who think these are worn-out words as old as the hills.

Abstinence…abstinence until marriage…ideas of the future being ushered in as medically necessary to curb life-threatening diseases that promise to take control of out-of-control lives ruled by lust.

Abstinence…the tried-and-true method of reducing one’s sexual partners.  Modern science gives new reasons to respect the values of old.  Abstinence until marriage is the modern tool for preventing STDs and pregnancy…a new coat of paint on eternal truths that continue to glow.

Abstinence until marriage…an idea as old as the hills made new again…love resurrected, life-giving, and eternal.  Faithful to the end…the eternal glow of creation…resurrected…restored…abstinence until marriage, a gift as old as the hills to be renewed forevermore.

July 23, 2004:    My Friend Betty

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Breaking the Silence

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

October 8, 2004

“I can’t take it.  This is too much to handle.”  As Kelly talked with the distraught woman on the phone, rescue workers were racing across the city to reach her before she could pull the trigger of the gun in her hand.  She had just had an abortion.

Kelly has seen it all in her twenty years of work counseling women who are considering abortion.  Her voice is gentle as she describes the women she has met…women who choose to come back to Kelly when they are hurting.

Why do women choose to talk with Kelly about their abortion pain?  She is an openly pro-life person.

When we break the silence about abortion, there is a lot to learn, not only about what abortion is, but about what it is has done to millions of women.  And these are the women who talk with Kelly, the women Gloria Feldt fails to acknowledge, both in her leadership of Planned Parenthood and in her editorials defending the new Planned Parenthood t-shirt campaign promoting America’s abortion-on-demand policies.

If Ms. Feldt is truly sincere about breaking the silence on abortion, she has a lot of explaining to do.  Women who have had an abortion and who wish to break the silence would welcome her support.

Silent No More is a national campaign giving voice to women who regret their abortions.  They wish to break the silence about abortion.  It hurts.  They hold press conferences and testify at legislative hearings.  Yet, they are treated with disdain by members of Planned Parenthood and the media.

There are others who have worked to break the silence about abortion.  In her book REAL Choices Frederica Mathewes-Green sought out the involvement of abortion providers to talk with women who had had abortions.  “I got either cold shoulders or cold feet. Usually there was no response at all.”

Mathewes-Green penned the famous quote embraced by both pro-life and pro-choice advocates.  “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice-cream cone or a Porsche.  She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg.”

Her research confirms testimony from Silent No More women.  They “uniformly talked about pressures in relationships; the abortion was done, each told us, either to please someone or to protect someone.”

If Ms. Feldt is truly sincere about breaking the silence on abortion, I invite her to join me in a call to the nation’s universities.  Stop promoting abortion and start teaching about abortion.

Where are the college courses that open the window on partial birth abortion procedures, forced abortion in China, and sex selection that is aborting a generation of girl babies in India and China?  Where are the college panels that include Silent No More women sharing the long-term aftermath of their abortions?

Will Ms. Feldt herald courageous suffragists like Alice Paul and Susan B. Anthony who denounced abortion?  Does she agree with feminist Naomi Wolfe that pictures of aborted fetuses should be brought to the table?  As Ms. Wolfe points out, how can feminists truly support “a choice” they refuse to look at in real life?

If Ms. Feldt truly wants to “throw off that mantle of secrecy”, I suggest she redesign her own Planned Parenthood website.  In a search under “fetal development” the top 2 of 31 listings shout:  “Why do guys have nipples?” and “Donating Fetal Tissue.”  Where are the pictures of real fetal development…the living, thriving babies in utero?

And if Planned Parenthood is willing to talk about “donating fetal tissue,” what do they say about selling fetal tissue?  What should we know about the doctor who worked out of a Kansas abortion clinic and and was filmed on “20/20” negotiating separate prices for pieces of babies: feet, eyes, brains and spinal cords?

If it takes a t-shirt to break the silence, I hope Planned Parenthood sells millions of them.  And when the talking starts, I encourage Ms. Feldt to join hands with the women of Silent No More to tell both sides of abortion.  I hope she implores the press to open its eyes and ears to all the truth.

All the truth?  If Ms. Feldt will join in a campaign for all the truth about abortion, I will buy a t-shirt.  It’s a small price to pay to break the silence.

Unplanned Pregnancy?

June 25, 2004:    Unplanned Joy

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End of Life as a Fairly Normal Person

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

September 24, 2004

I’ve always been a fairly normal person.

Growing up, I helped my mother make biscuits, played flute in the band, did enough homework to get good grades, and envied girls who made out a lot with boys between classes.

Things didn’t change when I entered Arizona State University (ASU) in 1969, over thirty years ago.  Even though I bought wire-rimmed glasses, let my hair go straight, and quit going to church, I remained a fairly normal person.  I still did my homework and never found it worthwhile to cut classes.  I changed majors twice, hooked up with a boyfriend, and hung in there to the end, to graduate.

So, it’s no surprise that I have lived a fairly normal life for over thirty years.  Like most women I know, I balanced a marriage and raising two children with full-time work as a teacher, a real estate saleswoman, and an accountant.

Little did I know that everything would change when I went back to Arizona State University in 2000.

It seemed a good way to spend the Christmas break with my daughter.  Together, we drove to ASU, walked to and from classes, and spent two weeks buried in notes and tests.

She learned the basics of psychology.  And me?  I learned the basics of feminism in women’s studies.  My daughter warned me.  “Don’t come whining to me,” she scolded.  “You’re choosing to do this yourself, so I don’t want to hear you complaining.”

I was expecting a few surprises to pop up here and there.  After all, my own kids were in college, and life has changed in thirty years.

Indeed, there were little surprises in every class, but nothing I couldn’t handle.  I learned the distressing news that I was married to a patriarch and was also raising a patriarch, my son.  So sad.  I had always considered them the best of the new breed of man.  Until women’s studies, I didn’t know patriarchism was an unavoidable genetic trait.

I learned that women still focused on their body types.  Boy, was I glad to go to college and gain this insight!  Now I finally understood the significance of having cheerleaders on Monday Night Football shaking their cleavage at the camera.  I just never could figure that one out.

And I learned that even after thirty years of feminism, it seemed still worthwhile to discuss who should open the door for whom.  Thankfully, the male student sitting in front of me was just as mystified as I.  “What’s the problem,” he asked.  “Who got there first?”  For the rest of that class period I kept imagining somewhere in America a little old hippie lady and her hippie dude stuck in an elevator like Charlie on the MTA, unable to get out because they didn’t know who should go first.

These were the little surprises.  But they were absolutely nothing when compared to the big surprise, the mind-blowing news that I was no longer a fairly normal person.

Imagine my surprise the day my professor told the class my marriage license was nothing more than a contractual exchange of sex for money.  That little piece of paper was my formal promise to give sex and my husband’s promise to pay me for it?  Licensed prostitution?  I was a prostitute?

It was probably a good thing the bell rang just before I was able to close my mouth and open my eyes.  In the entire semester’s study of marriage in a class dedicated to issues of feminism, we spent five minutes reducing marriage to a contract for prostitution.  And that was the end of our consideration of marriage in Women Studies 300.

Watching the professor erase the board and stack her books, the immediate shock wore off.  I mulled things over.  Too bad I didn’t know about this prostitution deal back in 1970.  Sure would have paid better than teaching!

Following students out of class, going down the stairs to meet my daughter, I couldn’t wait to enlighten her.  “Guess what I learned today?” I teased.  She raised her eyebrows to warn me.  “I married your dad for money.  He married me for sex.”  I laughed.

Like always, she knew the perfect way to sum up two weeks of feminism.  “Well, it serves you right.”

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