When I was in high school there was a girl in my English class who “got in trouble” and was sent away to visit her aunt in some far off state.  We were scandalized.  Did she have an abortion? Who took the baby? How could she let this happen, we whispered, as if we never put our own pure and righteous selves at risk for a hasty trip out of town.

But that was in the days when we were more hypocritical than compassionate, and I’m not just talking about gossipy teenage girls.  That’s why it’s hard to believe that all these decades  later we could be regressing and in the future be telling stories about how it used to be when there were safe places girls and women could go for help in making very tough choices.

Like this one.

Elizabeth was single, in her 30s, working as a writer and a teacher with a city apartment.  As she says, “I had a very nice life.” She was conscientious about birth control and when she discovered she was pregnant she was horrified. She said she liked the man a lot. He was attractive and intelligent.  But she doubted he would want to marry her. Besides, she didn’t consider herself ready to have a baby.

She went to the Planned Parenthood clinic in her town intending to get an abortion. And there she met a counselor who changed her mind. “She was very warm and very kind. She had children. She’d had an abortion herself. She asked me questions like, where was I in my life? How did I feel about this pregnancy? How would I manage as a single parent.”

Elizabeth left Planned Parenthood that day conflicted about her original decision.  “I needed to go home and think about it. This time I felt differently,” she said.

She said this time because Elizabeth had two previous abortions. Her diaphragm had failed her those times, too.One abortion was done at a Planned Parenthood clinic when there had been no question that it was “neither the right time nor the right man.”

The other was at a hospital in Eastern Europe where Elizabeth was teaching and it was a terrifying experience. “I remember screaming and being held down. There was no anesthetic.” The hospital conditions were so grim the staff washed the surgical instruments in the same hot water used to boil the noodles for lunch.

Now with another abortion pending Elizabeth went back for a second  meeting with the Planned Parenthood counselor. Plus she started seeing a psychoanalyst. Neither of them told her to have a baby or not have a baby.

What they did, Elizabeth said, was “help me see someone I didn’t know I was. That I could have and love a child.”

That baby is now her bright wonderful grown-up son and Elizabeth is a grateful defender of Planned Parenthood.

“I owe that woman. I wouldn’t have gone ahead if some indifferent person had been there.  She  listened to me. She saw me as a worthwhile young woman at a fork in the road. She helped me decide I didn’t want to miss this chance and that what I needed in the end was to have a child.”

Planned Parenthood has come up with a big pink sign that it plants next to Republican campaign placards. It says, “Women are Watching.”

There’s been plenty for women to keep an eye on.  The Republican chant to take this country back apparently includes taking back some basic reproductive rights for women.

We’ve heard it before from the Republican front. They don’t trust a woman to choose what’s best for herself and her family when it comes to baby-making. They seem to think that that family planning should be practiced only by God.

If you are a woman and you are watching you might wonder what century does this backward brotherhood come from? What country are we living in? If you are a woman living in a so-called backward country that looks to America as a model of freedom, you might be asking, what’s going on, sisters?

Of course the abortion debate is standard Republican rhetoric. One candidate brings it up and they all follow like a chorus of neighborhood dogs barking at the garbage truck. And enjoying it as much.

Oh good, here comes abortion, let’s all get crazy.

But this time around they added in this unbelievably dumb idea that birth control is a bad thing. Rick Santorum was clearly the alpha dog on this one, declaring that contraception is “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Wait a minute, Rick. Think back to your sex ed years, although maybe you had parental permission to skip class. Doing things in a sexual realm without contraception is a license to cause unwanted pregnancies and invite terrible diseases including AIDS.

Santorum says it should be okay for states to make birth control illegal. And how would he do this? With diaphragm detectives, pill police, a raid on the rubber aisle at Rite-Aid?

It’s tempting to turn it into a bad joke except that being the  champion of non recreational sex plays well with the Christian Conservative extremist vote. And yes, I know that bloc includes women.  But for women who believe in keeping the government out of the bedroom and ob-gyn clinics, this patriarchal playlist is disturbing.

After the New Hampshire primary Cecile Richards, head of Planned Parenthood, told Rachel Maddow the Republican primary is “absolutely a race to the bottom for women, where they are trying to outdo themselves on who would be the worst president for women.”

The Republicans have long tried to paint Planned Parenthood as abortion central, ignoring that its services include safe sex counseling, cancer screenings and preparation for pregnancy.  They would eliminate Title X, the federal program that gives low income women access to family planning programs. They would prohibit American health agencies operating in foreign countries from even mentioning abortion. Rick Perry is crowing over Texas forcing doctors to show a sonogram to any pregnant woman before she gets an abortion.

Maybe when the pack of GOP hopefuls thins down to a couple of real candidates they’ll have to talk about issues more crucial than who’s toughest on women bodies.

Like what jobs the job creators are ready to offer. What to do for people without health insurance. How to protect the country from more ruin by banks and big business. What’s better than Social Security and Medicare.  How to give all children, including poor kids, an equal chance.

On this,  women will definitely be watching. With the same eye on Democrats and President Obama, too.

In the film Illegal Belgian police board a plane handcuffed to an undocumented immigrant they are escorting out of the country. The weeping woman cries out that she is being forced to leave her child and the other passengers immediately side with her. They berate the immigration officers who are ordered off the plane by the pilot with the woman. She gets beat up for her outburst and returned to a deportation center.

Stories of people struggling to make it in another country are a favorite plot line. Coincidentally it was in three of the last novels I read. The Northern African families in southern France in Bruno, Chief of Police. Polish war refugees in England in 22 Britannia Road.  The young Irish woman in New York in the book Brooklyn.

Adjusting to a foreign land, learning the language and the culture, missing your homeland and feeling often unwelcome and suspect in the new country make good stories.

And we relate, since except for Native Americans, most of us wouldn’t be here had an ancestor not come first as an immigrant. Maybe in a proper legal manner, maybe not.

But then there are today’s undocumented immigrants.  Lured here by the promise of work and a safer, better life for their family, like many of our own great-great-greats, they exist quietly, hoping to stay under society’s radar.

They are the voiceless ones in the middle of a loud, often angry debate over immigration. Republican campaigners argue over who would build the highest fence. Border vigilantes go on a hunt. The Supreme Court will get into it next year when it reviews a tough Arizona law targeting illegal immigrants. And the rest of us get all twisted up over what is the best way to deal with what we call “the immigration issue.”

Behind the issue are real people, of course, like Elida and Sam Mejia who escaped political violence in Guatemala in 1992 and came to California with their infant son Gilbert. They bought a home in Novato and had two daughters, Helen and Dulce. The father worked as a carpenter, the mother as a hotel housekeeper.

All was well until immigration officers, ostensibly looking for someone else, stormed the house and demanded their papers. And two years ago the family had to divide itself.

Their story is told in a short documentary, Sin Pais (Without Country) made by Theo Rigby and making the rounds of independent film festivals and social justice organizations. It will be broadcast nationally on PBS next summer.

I saw it at a Jewish synagogue in Santa Rosa where people don’t have to go back many generations to know about fleeing their homeland. College professor Madeleine Rose introduced the film and said that her father, a Holocaust survivor, came to this country from Luxembourg, also illegally. He knew, she said, that “a border can mean life or death.”

Elida and Sam Mejia were deported and forced to split up their children. They took their little girl, who’s an American citizen, with them back to Guatemala. The two teenagers, Helen, an American citizen, and Gilbert, who is undocumented, stayed in Marin County.

The parents and younger daughter are temporarily visiting California on a humanitarian parole and after the documentary joined the filmmaker on stage. Elida Mejia did most of the talking, at one point wiping her eyes and saying, “This is no life.”

The audience was crying too. Rigby, the young filmmaker, said he has found sympathetic audiences “even in places known for being immigrant unfriendly, such as Arizona or Texas.”

Immigration reform is not an easy issue but people like the Mejia family should not be demonized. They came here and got jobs, learned English, bought a house, paid taxes, educated their kids, bought refrigerators and cars. Give them the right papers and they’d be regular Americans.