CHAPTER 1

You Can’t Unfriend Family

When I was a kid a giant poster of New York City hung in my room. It was a poster of the Brooklyn Bridge at night, the city lit up like the Fourth of July behind it and in the bottom right corner a dimly lit riverfront street I didn’t know. The poster took up half the width of my bedroom wall at my home in southern Missouri. To me it represented everything my rural community south of St. Louis did not: excitement, adventure, opportunity, sophistication. Everything I knew about New York came from The Baby-Sitters Club: Stacey’s Mistake (No. 18). I wanted to picnic in Central Park. I wanted to see the museums and eat lox and bagels. But when I visited Manhattan for the first time, my childhood dream was shattered, because no matter how large my poster was, it couldn’t convey the size of the city. I felt like the buildings were long fingers clasping over me, and I couldn’t see the wide-open sky. It was pointless to drive a car anywhere, and the first time I tried to relax in Central Park two homeless people fought in front of me and everywhere smelled like urine and pretzels. The childhood Dana took down that Brooklyn Bridge poster from her mind’s bedroom wall.

I never realized my attachment to that wide-open Flyover sky until I had to do without it. As much as I wanted to love and fall in love with NYC, I couldn’t. My very first visit to the city left me overwhelmed. I was in town to appear on Wendy Williams’s television show. The staff was wonderful and gracious; they put me up at the W in midtown, and some band booked on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night show played me to sleep in Times Square. There were so many people and so many things and advertisements and cars and noise that I went to Sbarro, got a slice of pizza, and holed up in my room for the rest of the day watching the city parade past, many stories up, through the glass. I got more adventurous with every visit, although my views of the city were mainly limited to what I could see through the tinted windows of a studio-hired car en route to this or that network. I’ve been to NYC more times than I can count at this point, but every time I go I take a big breath as the bridge dumps me out of Queens and into Manhattan. I also can’t sleep without a white-noise machine that plays crickets and frogs.

My childhood was fraught with upheaval, a tempestuous childhood of domestic violence that resulted in a struggling single-parent household in Flyover. My mother worked in the city because the jobs were in the city, not in the rolling hills and green pastures of the rural farmland where she and the rest of my family originated and still live. I was angry at her for having us live so far from everyone we knew. I hated my elementary school and the kids who didn’t like me: I was small for my age, reed thin, and unremarkable in every way. From my mother’s feminist, leftist perspective, in rural America you were either a wife, a waitress, or a bank teller at the small branch in town—or you got lucky and scored a job as a makeup artist for the local mortician, as my mother’s best friend did after high school. The city offered more opportunities for employment (for her) and education (for me). Every weekend we’d make the two-and-a-half hour journey back to “the country,” as we simply called it, the nouveau city mice visiting the country mice. Every weekend my spirit was restored in a tiny one-room church, playing in the creek with my cousins, catching fireflies at dusk, and sleeping at the foot of my grandparents’ woodstove as the sound of crickets lulled me to sleep; in the winter it was the sound of complete silence from the woods buried in snow. Nothing was ever so wonderful as being in the Ozarks. My cousins were cared for after school by my aunts, older cousins, and Grandmother. They grew up spending every day, not just weekends and summers, playing in the creek, picking corn, naming Grandpa’s goats, chasing Grandma’s pheasants when she wasn’t looking. Their caregivers consisted of familiar places, familiar locations.

Everyone in the family knew where each grandkid was at any given point in the day. My cousins had one another at school during the day. If you messed with one, you messed with all. They attended one another’s basketball and volleyball games; they cheered wildly whenever a cousin made a basket or scored a point. They rooted for one another at the town’s annual beauty pageant and gathered at Grandma and Grandpa’s beforehand to dress that year’s appointed female cousin in the best gown and makeup the Ozarks had to offer. They attended church together and sat next to one another, filling up half the pews in the sanctuary. If you didn’t have a father figure in your life there was Grandpa, a bevy of uncles, and older cousins there to fill the role. Everyone always had a partner at recess, company at dinner, a shoulder on which to cry, a hand to hold, a ride from school. They were separated from me by hours of asphalt and rolling hills.

In the city, no one knew who I was or to whom I belonged. An endless string of teenage girls babysat me after school. I felt no particular attachment to any of them. One time one of them forgot to make me lunch and instead made out with her boyfriend on my mom’s bed. I turned up the television so Heathcliff would drown out their noises and then ran outside and down the steps to the sidewalk in front of our house, where I sat on the bottom step and embraced my knees. There was no one to whom I could run. I had no tribe. The neighbors on our left were a poor family whose daughter smoked pot and whose bedroom consisted of a mattress and rainbow curtains; her parents fought at night and I could hear her mother’s every scream. The neighbors to our right were a family who seemed to find themselves in our hovelly hood due to hard times, and they kept to themselves. My mother did the best she could for me. I hid the transgressions of babysitters so that she wouldn’t worry while she slaved away at one of the three jobs she worked so we could avoid taking government handouts.

No one knew me at school. I didn’t fit in with the preps, the burnouts, the jocks; I didn’t even fit in with the weirdos, which made me the weirdest weirdo of all. I ate lunch alone and pretended that people at my school who remotely looked like me were family members. I sat on the bus alone and no one noticed me. Literally. One day I forgot to get off at my stop and was too small for the driver to see. My mom and the school found me a couple of hours later, crying in my seat in the dark bus shed. It’s amazing how you can feel lonelier in a city than in the country. In the city you’re isolated by all of the nameless faces and the noise of their conversations. Everyone around you does what you do, so no one stands apart.

During recess I swung. It was a solo activity. I would swing higher and higher until I could look down the hill at the long drive that led up to my elementary school. I’d imagine my mom’s green Oldsmobile coming up that windy drive to collect me early from school and take me away back down south to our family. Every Friday that’s what she did: She picked me up after school and we’d escape. We’d eat sandwiches, or if I was lucky, I’d eat a McDonald’s Happy Meal in the car. There wasn’t time to stop and eat anywhere; Mom wanted to be on the road and get to the country as badly as I did. I’d hand her fries while she drove. We’d chase the last stretch of sunbeams across the plains until the white lines on the highway were all I could see. I’d drift off to sleep and wouldn’t wake up until I could hear the crunch of Grandma and Grandpa’s gravel drive under the well-worn tires of our thirdhand car.

Waking up on Saturday morning at Grandma and Grandpa’s was magical. Sometimes I would be so tired that I’d sleep through the rooster’s crow, but Grandma’s bacon and eggs would wake me up every time. I’d get out of bed and make my way down the hall to their sun-drenched living room. I’d hug Grandpa first because he was always in his recliner, watching wrestling and drinking coffee.

“Are they treating you nice up there?” he’d always ask. I’d always answer yes, even if it wasn’t true. I think he knew when it wasn’t, but Grandpa never pried. He was selectively half deaf from firing .50 caliber guns on the USS Alabama during World War II. He would pretend not to hear you when he didn’t want to but always amazed us with what he would hear and inquire about later. After Grandpa, I’d find Grandma in the kitchen and hang on her waist while she fried eggs. My grandmother was a micromanaging matriarch with a terrible temper, but no one fiercely loved and protected their brood like this woman did. She would kiss my head and tell me that she’d made sure to fill the cookie jar before we arrived. Mom would sit at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette while Grandma cooked. Mom would brief Grandma on everything during those Saturday mornings when I slept in: her divorce, her work, my school, how we were doing. After breakfast we dressed, and then by noon the entire family would descend on my grandparents’ house. It was a Saturday tradition. The adults would visit and we kids would tear loose throughout the hills and valleys around Grandma and Grandpa’s property.

Where I lived was very different from the country, where the Quik Mart owner, canoe rental proprietor, gas station attendant, town preacher, and everyone else recognized me without even hearing my family name, all because I had the family looks: dark hair, large dark eyes, olive skin, and a slender build.

“I know you. You’re Gale’s daughter,” one would say. “You look just like all of ’em.”

“Well, I’ll be,” said another. “You’re the spittin’ image of ’em all.” They’d watch me and my cousins with amusement as we’d walk into the store barefoot, fresh from the creek, and pick up Sixlets and cream sodas before unfurling damp, wadded-up dollars on the counter to pay for them. There’s a certain credit you carry when everyone knows your family. In the city your family name means nothing to anyone. Down here, down in these dark crevices of the Missouri hills, it means inclusion, belonging, familiarity, legacy. Family isn’t perfect. You can’t unfriend family; you can’t unfollow them. They are yours. They are mine. And I know in my soul that if ever I found myself in a situation, my family would be there, just as I would be for them. My cousin once heard about threats I’d received and messaged me that he would “come to the city and sit on your porch with my shotgun.” I cried for an hour straight. My Flyover family. They were bred for the woods, for the prairies, bred to live off nature, to fight, and to love. They live in one of the most beautiful parts of the United States, a place people don’t see unless they look down from their plane windows at thirty thousand feet.

Aside from faith, name, looks, and mannerisms, I shared something else with my family: their politics. The stereotype is that country bumpkins are just one big Republican voting bloc. They’ve never met my family. I’ve said before that Bill Clinton was the second man after my father to screw me over, and it started me down a path of political self-discovery. My faith and my politics are intertwined because, you see, one led me to the other. It was my biggest vulnerability that drove me to God and to a deeper understanding of self-sustainability and responsibility.

I came from a broken home. I am a statistic in that regard. I had a horrible relationship with my father that followed me into my adulthood and nearly killed me spiritually. The entire first half of my life was tainted by its effect on me. I allowed it to control me. I hated men, I hated marriage, I never wanted children, and I believed that the only good place for a woman to be was on her own. I was rude to men, I was cruel to boys I dated, I was angry at the world, and I felt that the entire universe owed me a giant apology. I was uncomfortable in the homes of friends who had intact families. It didn’t help that I had friends whose parents viewed me as damaged goods because I had a single mom at home. They went to big churches and prayed to God, but I didn’t see any fruits of their faith in their hushed tones and condescending looks whenever my mother would collect me from their house in her old car. I resented them, I resented their faith, and I resented their wealth. I resented that they always had family in the stands cheering them on at track meets while it was rare for someone to be there for me. I raged at God in prayer.

Why did I get the shaft, God?! I would mentally scream. Why did you do this to me? I thought you were omnipotent! He just took it. He took all of it. Over the period of a few years He began to soften my heart (a child’s heart!) to the point where I could open a Bible and read it. And I did. The first Bible I read was the giant Bible my grandma and grandpa kept on their coffee table. Some people keep art books or magazines on their coffee tables, but at my grandparents’ house they kept a giant Bible. It was in a wooden box specially made for them by a cousin in shop class. Every now and then I saw Grandpa reading through it. (We later learned, after Grandpa got sick, that he hated banks and kept a sizable amount of money in his Bible. His reasoning was that “no heathen is going to take it.”) I picked it up one weekend and spent an entire night reading the Gospels. That’s how my journey began. I went to Sunday school and church with my grandma, aunts, and assorted cousins. It was a tiny little Baptist church in the hills with three rooms: one for worship and two classrooms for adults and kids in the basement. My family aren’t what I’d call “holy rollers,” but Grandpa would crack you with some Scripture when needed. It was from this that I asked my mom to start taking me to church. Mom picked up another job on certain weekends, so whenever she couldn’t drive south she’d take me to church near our house. From there I attended church camp and was saved. The absence of a father figure in my life had created an abyss in my heart so deep that I almost couldn’t function. Without even realizing what I was doing, I began seeking out a way to fill it and through this pain found my faith. I may not have had an earthly father, but I have a Father in heaven. I was saved at a country Baptist church camp when I was eleven. I am still growing in my faith to this day. It has not been without bumps along the way, particularly during my teenage years, but it has been my relationship with Christ alone that has brought me to where I am now.

It all began in my grandparents’ living room with their coffee table Bible.

 • • • 

My family and other families in Flyover Nation have an odd tradition. For someone who dies in Flyover, popularity is measured in three ways: the number of flowers delivered to the funeral home for the wake/visitation, the length of the funeral procession, and the number of trinkets that cover a grave site in the years after someone dies.

An aunt of mine is family-famous for once encouraging family members to drive separate cars so it looked as though there were more people turning out for another family member’s burial. When attending other visitations, it is not remarkable to see people taking inventory of who sent flowers and the sizes of the bouquets. If so-and-so sends Dorothy Smith’s wake a big bouquet and sends someone else’s only a peace lily—and so-and-so knows both in equal measure—there will be a cold war. Everyone knows that the peace lily is the lazy funeral flower. For instance, you do not send a peace lily to a close friend’s or family member’s visitation. It’s the middle finger, the I don’t care of funeral botanicals. If you don’t send a family member visitation flowers for their loss, you might as well go and burn their house down and shoot their dog, such is the offense. The unwritten rule is that a person is on the hook for visitation flowers by twenty-one years of age. My mother once called eleventy frillion times in one week to make sure that I had ordered visitation flowers for Great-Great Aunt So-and-so (whom I could remember only for always having coral lipstick on her dentures), and what time would they arrive? My uncles had their own tradition, much to the funeral home owner’s chagrin, of tucking a bottle of Busch beer between the body and the casket lining. In the town where my family originates, there is one undertaker and one funeral home. I always facetiously imagined him rubbing his hands together and counting his money as he watched the families in town gray and wither.

This flower business may sound wasteful, but where I’m from you want to live a good and generous life and you want everyone to know you were loved and respected for it. By “everyone” we mean everyone whose life you personally touched. Of no importance is how big the paper ran your obituary or whether anyone famous attended your funeral. Even though we believe our dearly departed have moved on to a better place, funerals are always heavy, somber, and emotional events. In certain parts of Flyover they serve double duty as family reunions, revivals, and theatrical performances, particularly in my family. It used to embarrass me, but in hindsight I view it as an extraordinary, unique quality of my family (but not to the point where I can’t wait for the next death to witness it again). I hesitated for a bit to introduce my husband to my family. I had just turned twenty-one and we were engaged. My family was overjoyed simply because they had thought that either I was a lesbian or no man would take on the challenge of marrying me. When they got wind of Chris, my grandma said her prayers had been answered and one of my particularly frisky and liquoriffic aunts immediately asked when I was going to bring him down to meet all the kin. Unfortunately, before all of this was to happen my great-uncle, who lived in St. Louis, died. It was the rare relative who lived in the city, so the entire family was making the trek from down south to up north. I told Chris that I would see him later that weekend, as my family would be arriving soon and I needed to attend the visitation and funeral.

“Well, I am going too,” he said.

“Oh, no, you’re not,” I replied.

“Oh, yes, I am,” he countered. “You’re my fiancée. I want to be there for you and your family.” His poor, sweet little heart had no idea what it was asking. After some back-and-forth I conceded and resolved myself to being single after he met my family—at a visitation—for the first time. I coached him before the Friday-evening visitation.

“First,” I instructed sharply, “do not make eye contact with any wailing people. If someone falls, step over them.”

“If someone falls . . . ?”

“Step over them.”

He was incredulous.

The day arrived and my family piled into the small sanctuary at the funeral home in the city. Most of them had crammed themselves into as few cars as possible, as all my aunts were terrified of driving anywhere beyond the reaches of southern Missouri. Then my grandmother arrived. Most of the women in the family have always taken their lead from Grandma. If Oscars were awarded for performances not given on screen, the woman would be the most awarded thespian in all of the craft. Sometimes it was genuine emotion, but mostly she just liked the attention. I heard her sobbing before she even entered the room. She walked past, hanging on the arm of a second cousin, and made her way up to my great-uncle’s casket.

Then the wailing began.

Grandma threw herself on the casket and screamed, “Why, God, why?”

“Because he was old and unwell?” I offered under my breath. An uncle elbowed me. Chris was stunned.

Other family members joined the Wailing. That was the signal to me, my cousins, and most of the men in the room to exit. Chris was on my arm and we made our way to the exit, which, unfortunately, was by the casket and the Wailing.

Chris was so close.

Just as we were at the home stretch, Grandma cast a cursory glance around the room before crumpling to the floor. I stepped around her. Chris did not. He was suckered. In the safety of the foyer our group of escapees took inventory of our numbers.

“Oh no . . .” I said softly.

“What is it?” asked a cousin.

“Chris. He stopped . . . he stopped to pick her up.”

“Newbie,” said an uncle as the rest murmured in agreement. About fifteen minutes later Grandma was escorted through the door clutching Chris’s arm. She shot me a baleful look as she passed while Chris looked concerned but horrified.

“Well, she got him,” said another cousin. I thought for sure he’d ask for the ring back in the parking lot.

“I won’t judge you until you come to one of my family reunions,” he said before hugging me.

 • • • 

In my family’s town there is a process for death. Oftentimes family will elect to have home hospice, as in the case of my grandmother, and have the family member pass at home. Home births, why not home deaths? The family preacher comes to visit, often bringing a handkerchief with which to wipe his brow after a furious prayer session. Family gathers, food is delivered, and everyone pretends that they’re not just staring and watching for the death mask.

What I experienced at visitations and funerals growing up couldn’t have been more different from the restrained sophistication of such events that I attended on the coasts. I read an article recently where the author lamented the loss of the funeral. In place of mourning, families were instead opting for “celebrations of life.” We once attended a friend’s funeral on the West Coast, where we saw this phenomenon. People celebrated in lieu of mourning. It struck me as odd. I felt out of place holding a champagne glass and laughing next to a posterized 11×17 of the departed. Everyone was dressed fabulously and it felt like Fashion Week. I added up seventeen thousand dollars’ worth of Louboutins on the feet of the women chatting while waiting at the bar. It felt like it would be a fashion faux pas if anyone were to cry. Another such event on the East Coast felt similar. It was billed as a “celebration of life” of the departed. The funeral service pared down any religiousliciousness and opted for one anemic prayer. There was no graveside service; instead the cavalcade of black BMWs, Mercedes, and Volvos made its way to an Italian restaurant that was rented out for the life celebration. The widow was on uppers so as not to fall apart in front of guests. Isn’t that when you should fall apart? While friends and family are there to uplift you? I didn’t understand—and frankly was beyond embarrassed by—my own family’s funeral theatrics until I experienced some of the emotion-choking formats of life celebrations. No one wants to be happy and all the smiles are fake.

My family may fall to the floor and bawl like toddlers denied a toy at Walmart, but they get it all out of their system.

When I die, I don’t want a celebration. I want people to be sad because something sad happened. I don’t want to have a such a tenuous connection to people in my life that they’ll attend my funeral only if it looks like it’s going to be fun. I don’t want the loss of life to be a party because it’s not. I want people to attend because they feel a moral obligation to pay respects to my loved ones and to share fellowship with one another, to honor the moral bond that linked us in life. From my experiences in Flyover Nation, a funeral isn’t just some posthumously hosted celebration; it’s a way for people to honor the purpose of life and the effect that this life in particular had on others. A funeral in Flyover is a also religious observance that recognizes God’s design, culminating in the end of life. There is a certain joy, to be sure, the joy we feel is knowing that we will see our loved one again because of our relationship with God through Christ Jesus. Chad Bird, in the Federalist, summarizes these “end of life celebrations”:

The danger is simply this: that we downplay death and, in so doing, fail to fully appreciate life Stripped of its euphemistic language, the get-together billed as a “celebration” or even a “party” is, in truth, a gathering of mourners around a corpse. And that dead body not only preaches that death has claimed this particular life, but it betokens our own inevitable demise. To the extent that we bury our head in the sand when confronted with the reality of death, to that same extent we miss out on an opportunity to learn more about, and to appreciate more deeply, the life that is ours. It should come as no surprise that a culture which has euphemized the beginning of life has also euphemized its end.1

Birth can be predicted; death, in most cases, cannot. In our world the body is a containment unit for the soul. The body is a vessel through which we experience the joys and horrors of this imperfect world, like a virtual-reality experience. When we use up our shell, we discard it in plots that perforate the earth or we burn to dust. Either way, I’ve never felt celebratory looking at an empty body in a casket. The first funeral I ever attended was that of a junior high school classmate who drowned in a lake one fall. I huddled with my friends by the casket and stared at his smooth, artificially peach skin. He looked as though he could wake up at any moment. Since then I’ve witnessed the burial of grandparents, aunts, and uncles. I’ve watched as the older generation of my family has rotated into heaven, thereby placing my generation—myself and cousins, we “grandkids”—a step up in both hierarchy and distance from death.

Perhaps one of the oddest traditions my family observes, and I’m not even certain this is unique to my family or other families in Flyover (a friend from Kansas admitted that her family did the same thing), is that of the graveyard vigil. I have nothing else to call it, but that’s exactly what it is. My family members regularly visited our departed at the family cemetery atop a hill overlooking an Ozark valley. The view is breathtaking, and I often wondered why the property was wasted on people who would never see it.

“So the living visiting their relatives can enjoy it,” snapped Mom once during one such “vigil” visit. She was frustrated at having to move around all the gewgaws that littered my grandparents’ tombstones to the point where the names were no longer visible. My uncle was in his farm overalls and had brought with him a giant trash bag into which he swept all the trinkets with several motions of his arm. It was my last visit to the family cemetery there in the Ozarks, and we went with my aunt and uncle, my mother’s brother and sister. You could see which graves were my grandparents’ upon arrival, as they were the only ones with their own flagpole, wind chimes, and assortment of fiber-optic angels. I had no idea who thought that wind chimes made sense in a graveyard, but there they were, ringing with the breeze above the granite markers. The fiber-optic angels were even weirder. Apparently Grandma liked them, or someone in the family had decided she did. I personally thought they were bizarre because all of their faces were so cheaply painted so that they looked like The Dark Crystal characters. During her dying days, my aunts and uncles set up her deathbed in the living room of their tiny country home, and at the foot of her bed one of my aunts arranged a small army of fiber-optic angels to comfort her. Grandma was on morphine so she was high as a kite, and I can’t imagine what it looked like in her mind every time she opened her eyes and saw a mob of distorted faces with creepy, disproportionate arms, skinny fingers, and ever-changing rainbow-colored wings reaching out to her from the foot of her bed.

“I promise to never get you a fiber-optic angel,” I told my mother as she helped my uncle bag up the trinkets so she could lay flowers on the graves.

Hospice helped care for Grandma and when her time was close, the family called Brother Jim, the family preacher, to the house to pray over her. She refused to die while people were in the room. As macabre as it sounds, I found this humorous, as it was a testament to the woman’s sheer strength of will and vanity. Her entire body would shut down, but if Grandma Boots wasn’t ready to die yet, well, there would be no dyin’, and Grandma wasn’t going to die in front of people. Grandma didn’t like wearing her pajamas in front of people or having her short, Elvis’d Nice’n Easy Black No. 1 hair messy if someone called. She also didn’t drive, as she preferred to be driven.

So it made sense that Grandma tried to die one night when Mom stayed over and fell asleep in the recliner next to her bed. According to Mom, she opened her eyes right as the “death mask” flashed across Grandma’s face, and when Mom yelled out in fright, Grandma stopped. After that I think Mom tried to stay up to stare all night at her, but a couple of days later the family realized that they needed to give Grandma some quiet time to see what happened. Otherwise who knew how long the woman would hang on in spite of the laws of nature? One afternoon they did just that, giving Grandma her space. Grandma finally sensed that she had the privacy she wanted and deserved and chose that moment to answer the call and return home to Jesus.

 • • • 

Where my family is from “euthanasia” means putting a cow or horse out of its misery after it fatally injures itself. Applied to a person it is defined as murder. They would never think of robbing God of a scene from His master plan. As difficult as our exits may sometimes be, they serve a purpose. Things are seen quite differently on the coasts.

California’s state legislature legalized physician-assisted suicide in a bill signed by Governor Jerry Brown. It made California the fifth state, along with Washington, Oregon, Montana, and Vermont, to allow physician-assisted suicide. Other states have proposed such legislation but no others have yet passed it. The movement got its face with the death of Brittany Maynard, who had terminal brain cancer and moved from California to Oregon to end her life. She was a beautiful young woman who was devoted to education and traveled the world. She killed herself on November 1, 2014. She wrote in an article for CNN:

I’ve had the medication for weeks. I am not suicidal. If I were, I would have consumed that medication long ago. I do not want to die. But I am dying. And I want to die on my own terms. I would not tell anyone else that he or she should choose death with dignity. My question is: Who has the right to tell me that I don’t deserve this choice? That I deserve to suffer for weeks or months in tremendous amounts of physical and emotional pain? Why should anyone have the right to make that choice for me?2

I can completely understand that choice if you think your life is your own. That’s not what most in Flyover believe, or most Christians, for that matter. Our lives are not our own. That choice is made already. God is not ambiguous in the Bible when He condemns the taking of innocent life.

Maynard’s story was aided by groups like Death with Dignity, also the common phrase used when describing legalized suicide. The phrase itself is insulting, as though those who’ve died by any other means did so without dignity—or those who choose to allow God to determine how their lives end are somehow undignified in their choice.

Death on demand is now a lifestyle in Holland and other parts of the Netherlands. It has become such an issue that eighty well-known and respected Brits—including Hugh Grant, Eric Idle, Patrick Stewart, and an assortment of lords and ladies—wrote letters to the Telegraph demanding an examination of the issue before Parliament, writing:

Most people in Britain support law change on assisted dying, and no one believes that someone should face a prison sentence of 14 years for compassionately assisting a loved one to die. We are closer than ever to allowing dying people to have safeguarded choice in how they approach their deaths. Whoever forms the next government must allow time for Parliament to reach consensus on a safeguarded law.3

In Flyover the only legitimate death assistance anyone requires is for the jailer to pull the lever and execute a criminal whose punishment was justifiably worthy of capital punishment. Physician-assisted suicide is a glossy term for euthanasia or, more plainly, a very late-term abortion. It’s the ending of a life due to inconvenience. Circumstances, not God, determine viability, and our culture is marching ever toward vesting an immoral, godless government with the power to determine both circumstance and viability. There is no such thing as a slippery-slope fallacy when discussing the abuse of regulatory powers by the government. It’s simply an observation of statistics. Soon people will argue that physician-assisted suicide promotes inequality, as those of lesser means may lack the ability to pay for an assist. Don’t roll your eyes: We subsidize infanticide as birth control in clinics that are allowed to skirt the medical standards other actual health-care clinics are required to meet. Euthanasia is the devolution of medicine. It’s a lazy escape for medical professionals who confuse surrender with compassion. Holland legalized euthanasia years ago and is described as “out of control” by doctors. From the Daily Mail:

The number of mentally-ill patients killed by euthanasia in Holland has trebled in the space of a year, new figures have revealed. In 2013, a total of 42 people with “severe psychiatric problems” were killed by lethal injection compared with 14 in 2012 and 13 in 2011. The latest official figures also revealed a 15 per cent surge in the number of euthanasia deaths from 4,188 cases in 2012 to 4,829 cases last year.

[ . . . ]

The rise is also likely to confirm the fears of Dutch regulator Theo Boer who told the Daily Mail that he expected to see euthanasia cases smash the 6,000 barrier in 2014.

Overall, deaths by euthanasia, which officially account for three per cent of all deaths in the Netherlands, have increased by 151 per cent in just seven years.

[ . . . ]

The figures, however, do not include cases of so-called terminal sedation, where patients are given a cocktail of sedatives and narcotics before food and fluids are withdrawn.

Studies suggest that if such deaths were added to the figure then euthanasia would account for one in eight—about 12.3 per cent—of all deaths in the Netherlands.

Dr Peter Saunders of the Christian Medical Fellowship said the Dutch experiment proved that doctor-assisted death was impossible to effectively regulate.

“Euthanasia in the Netherlands is way out of control,” he said.

In 2013 Holland “euthanized” 650 babies, as reported by the Daily Mail:4

But the euthanasia business does not just concern the elderly. It is now acceptable for a doctor to end the life of a baby, with the parents’ consent, if it is in pain or facing a life of hopeless suffering. The Royal Dutch Medical Association estimates that 650 newborns are killed every year because they fall into this category.5

It is also a safety precaution for the innocent: Life falls under God’s domain, not man’s.

There isn’t a lack of dignity in pain or in having family care for you as you die. We don’t dictate the terms of our birth and have little more control over our death.

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You can see this selfishness coming through in the debate over abortion, as well. The coastal approach has always been that a pregnancy is nobody else’s business, especially excluding consideration of the life in the womb.

Do abortion advocates know how babies are made? I ask because they always act so surprised if intercourse results in pregnancy. One doesn’t “accidentally” become pregnant. It’s not as though you can walk down the sidewalk, trip, and—ta-da!—you’re pregnant. You don’t fall down and in the process of falling lose your clothes and land in bed with a member of the opposite sex. Even with most birth control methods on the market today, there is no such thing as “pregnancy proof.” The choice comes before conception. Every time you have sex, unless you’re elderly, have had a hysterectomy, or are infertile due to another issue, you risk creating new life. This is how science works. The amazing thing about science is that, coupled with capitalism, it’s allowed for numerous women’s choices before conception. You can purchase birth control for a few bucks a month at your local Target, Costco, etc. I realize that Sandra Fluke requested thousands of dollars a year in free birth control—which for that price must be some Louis Vuitton birth control talon rolled in fourteen-karat-gold flakes by bald eagles—but for us plebes you can get it for a fraction of that cost. Republicans even introduced legislation to make birth control available over the counter, but for some reason the Official Party for Women’s Health and Victimization® opposes it and has blocked it from the floor for quite some time. Planned UnParenthood also opposes it, as it would cut into their revenue. We can’t give women the ability to walk into a pharmacy and buy inexpensive, over-the-counter birth control on their own! Why, that would bite into Cecile Richards’s Lamborghini money! Videos released in 2015 by the watchdog journalism site Center for Medical Progress caught numerous top docs and staffers with Planned Parenthood discussing how they sell infant body parts for profit. Using cagey language, they mentioned how they keep affiliates happy by watching “their bottom line,” which suggests that the money received does more than pay for shipping and processing costs, as originally defended by Cecile Richards. The videos shocked those who live in a pretend world where infants are removed from the womb using magic instead of scissors, forceps, and vacuums. Richards later released a statement saying that Planned Parenthood would no longer charge companies like Stem Express for aborted infant body parts, destroying their earlier denial that such sales even took place. Over the 2015 Thanksgiving weekend a nut named Robert Lewis Dear engaged in a shoot-out with cops that reportedly began outside but involved a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility when Dear holed up inside. Planned Parenthood wasted no time in fund-raising off the attacks, pushing the narrative that Dear “targeted” the clinic (eyewitness accounts had placed the start of the incident at a nearby Chase Bank) and demanding that Republicans denounce Dear even though he wasn’t a Republican or involved with any pro-life group. Murder is wrong, be it what Dear did or what abortionists inside Planned Parenthood clinics do every day, but you solve it with the justice system, not reckless, murderous vigilantism.

According to its own figures available on its Web site, Planned Parenthood makes the vast majority of its bank off abortions, yet it pushes the narrative that it offers women’s health services, as though that evens out its practices. In reality, health services offered by Planned Parenthood have decreased over the years as its focus has sharpened on abortion. Meanwhile, community health centers far outnumber (three to one) Planned Parenthood facilities in every single state and offer exponentially more services for women. In addition, they meet the same standards required by states for medical clinics, a requirement Planned Parenthood unsuccessfully fought in Texas. Wendy Davis tried making her name off this fight, which occurred when lawmakers in Texas introduced legislation requiring Planned Parenthood facilities to meet greater standards of care for women. The law was proposed in the wake of infamous serial killer abortionist Kermit Gosnell, whose award-winning work (yes, really) at his Philadelphia clinic was called into question when his facility was raided in 2010 by the DEA on suspicion of illegal prescription drug practices. Agents discovered a house of horrors: a filthy facility, untrained workers performing procedures, babies shoved into shoe boxes and stored in freezers. The raid resulted in eight murder charges (among others) and a life sentence for Gosnell. Jurors heard of botched procedures that resulted in death, patients restrained and their infants aborted after they changed their minds, and other horrors. I read the grand jury report and cried. Sadly, this isn’t an exception in this industry; it seems like the rule.

When the Planned Parenthood bill was introduced in the Texas legislature, Davis and infanticide advocates fought to stop it, massing in Austin and protesting wildly, including screaming “Hail Satan” on video and throwing used tampons, jars of urine, and feces.6 The bill simply increased standards of care for women patronizing Planned Parenthood’s Texas facilities and required, among other commonsense measures, that abortionists have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Proving that it’s “all about women’s care,” Planned Parenthood opposed increasing its standards of care and threatened instead to shut down its clinics and blame Texas lawmakers, falsely stating that Texas was going to close clinics when, in fact, it was Planned Parenthood’s infantile decision. The so-called champion of women’s health wasn’t an equal champion of its intellect.

Planned Parenthood fights against women’s choice by falsely presenting to them a limited number of choices. It lied about providing mammograms—not just referrals, which don’t constitute a service, but actual mammograms—and refuses to acknowledge that there exist better and more clinics that offer more services and better standards of care and serve more people than Planned Parenthood. But doing so wouldn’t be great for its “bottom line.”

Sometimes, when a media outlet sends a reporter out to visit the heartland to see what we’re up to, they’ll stumble upon the supposed irony that many of the states with the highest numbers of unplanned pregnancies are pro-life and in the South or Midwest. That’s a backward way of thinking about it. The truth of the matter is that in states where we spend more time interacting with real people dealing with these issues, we tend to come out pro-life. It’s much easier to support abortion rights when you don’t have to actually think about someone you know killing their unborn child.

When I was pregnant with my firstborn, I was friends with a woman who was also expecting. She was one month ahead of me. I stopped speaking to her after she told me she was going to abort her child because she and her husband already had a toddler and couldn’t afford a second child. Her husband didn’t work, yet the solution to their situation wasn’t for him to get a job; it was for them to murder their baby. I tried talking her out of it but it was hopeless. Her heart was hardened and her mind made up. Abortions are rare in my family’s town. It’s more shameful to abort an unplanned pregnancy than to become pregnant unplanned. People in Flyover believe in redemption and grace, because we’ve all needed it. Single motherhood and teenage motherhood aren’t encouraged, but when they happen, it is done, and people focus on raising a baby rather than on blame. When a cousin of mine fell pregnant out of wedlock with no hope of the baby’s father taking part, the family rallied, hosting a baby shower, purchasing all of the clothes for the first year, diapers, even gift cards to be used at the grocery store. One thing about Flyover: No one raises a baby here totally alone.