There are many things I´ll miss about Guatemala. Like today. I must be having a good hair day. As I was walking down the street, I passed a couple men talking to each other, and one of them stops and says, "Qué mujer, ¿no?" In other words, "What a woman!" Hahaha I love it.

Then ten minutes later, some little guy says in English, "Hi! You are very pretty."

We should say things like that out loud every time we think them. Can you imagine? "Hi! Nice job. You look great."

I also enjoy having lots of free time to read scandalous things about Sarah Palin. All of the bad press on her is beginning to renew my faith in the general American public.

I have noticed about myself that my outrage has a certain trajectory. As things go from good to acceptable to bad, I get uncomfortable and then mad and then outraged. But once they get bad enough, my sense of humor kicks in and I float into a Zen-like but involuntary detachment. The rape kit thing was that kicker for me.

The way rape enters into the public domain always interests me. Talking to survivors, it seems to me that there is a huge disconnect between the extremely personal experience of rape and public discourse about it, which makes life for survivors an uphill battle in a way that cannot be underestimated. I don´t think our society as a whole understands that battle. Rape kits are just one example. The things themselves are ghastly and painful. Why would the chief of police and the governor think victims should pay for them? Where does that come from? It serves, like so many things, as a re-victimization.

What I hate even more is that fact that many who are pro-life, such as John McCain, support allowing abortion for cases of rape and incest, or when pregnancy threatens a woman´s life. I get to experience first-hand how that plays out, because those are the laws in Guatemala and most of Mexico.

As it turns out, proving rape and/or incest is so difficult, time-consuming and dangerous as to prove the law useless. Virtually no legal abortions occur after rape. This is one of those dangerous things that looks like good intention, but ends up harming those it wishes to protect. What does still occur at sobering rates are scary and grotesque incidents of women trying to get abortions anyway. They are victims of the law. If you want to protect rape victims, let them get abortions without having to defend themselves.

And how do we define pregnancy as dangerous to a woman´s life? ALL pregnancies are potentially dangerous to a woman´s life. All pregnancies increase a woman´s chances of diabetes, hypertension, anemia, calcium deficiency, birth complications, postpartum depression and psychosis, poverty and domestic violence just to name a few. If we force her to carry her baby to term, we are forcing her to walk into a quagmire of risk.

Then of course follows the trickier question. What is rape? What is incest? We instinctively think of one end of the spectrum, I think: child molestation, women in emergency rooms. Luckily these are instances in which it is still considered humane to allow abortions. But rape is a spectrum, and is constantly being re-defined in law books. We get into dangerous territory of trying to regulate sex and health.

We need a more nuanced discussion of these issues. I´ll go ahead and say it--we need Obama.