"No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." ~Margaret Sanger
This article is eight years old (one of my Twitter-peeps led me to it), but in many ways it's more relevant than ever. The steady erosion of Roe v. Wade at the state level makes it a nightmare for many women to access a legal medical procedure, and the possibility that it may be overturned altogether is not out of the question.
Not that abortion's legality or lack thereof will stop a woman who has determined in her own mind and heart that she cannot, and will not, have a baby.
The arguments would be endless, but they would be irrelevant to the facts: From the moment I started looking for an abortion, not once did I even consider going through with the pregnancy. Not for one second. It simply was not going to happen. Nothing, and I mean nothing, was going to stop me, and it could have cost me my life. And this is what I had in common with millions and millions of women throughout time and history. When a woman does not want to be pregnant, the drive to become unpregnant can turn into a force equal to the nature that wants her to stay pregnant. And then she will look for an abortion, whether it's legal or illegal, clean or filthy, safe or riddled with danger. This is simply a fact, whatever our opinion of it. And whether we like it or not, humans, married and unmarried, will continue to have sex -- wisely, foolishly, violently, nicely, hostilely, pleasantly, dangerously, responsibly, carelessly, sordidly, exaltedly -- and there will be pregnancies: wanted, unwanted, partly wanted, partly unwanted.
A society that does not accept the facts is a childish society, and a society that makes abortion illegal....is a cruel and backward society that makes being female a crime.
I watched the Republican debate in South Carolina tonight. Close to the end, there was approximately a ten-minute back-and-forth about abortion, with the four rich white guys on the stage (who will never have to worry about an unplanned pregnancy) basically trying to out-pro-life each other. What struck me, though, that throughout all of this freewheeling more-forced-birther-than-thou, not once was the word "woman" ever mentioned.
Not once was the carrier of said holy fetus, a real person with hopes, dreams, wants, needs, and actual human rights despite possessing a uterus, ever brought up.
If that doesn't say something about the deplorable state of the modern-day Republican Party, I don't know what does.
No comments:
Post a Comment