Just Because the Supreme Court Says No Roe v Wade — Your Life is NOT Ruined
Take your own action to protect yourself, women — stop living by what politicians say
--
I’m thinking about all the “suffragettes” who spent years — decades — of their lives campaigning for the right to vote. It took over 100 years.
I remember having dinner at my dad’s house and my stepmom screaming about the right to an abortion. She was shrieking, red-faced, hysterical. I was only about 13 at the time, and I barely knew what sex was despite being followed around by pervy out-of-work actors and filmmakers.
I’ve written about my rape crisis group, which included a friend who’d been raped by her father and grandfather and given birth to two twin girls. Which incestuous rape produced these little girls? She didn’t know and didn’t want to find out: she’d had no choice to give birth to them because she only discovered she was pregnant with them on the day her mother took her to the hospital with severe stomach pains, suspecting appendicitis.
It turned out to be “labor and delivery.”
The abortion “debate” in the U.S. is dominated by two groups: right-wing conservatives who champion the baby’s right to life and who vilify all women who might have an abortion for any reason, at any time. This group has no interest in what happens to the baby after it is born.
The other “side” of the abortion debate are the abortion advocates who are somewhere back in 1975 with my stepmother, shrieking about the ERA (never passed) and a woman’s right to have an abortion. They might even be like peak-upper-middle-class faildaughter Lena Dunham, who declared, “I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had” in 2016.
I remember going to the college health center back in 1983 … what did I want?
What I did not want was to be pregnant. At the time, I believed an unwanted pregnancy would ruin my life.
What I wanted was birth control.
What did I get?
A 30-minute breast exam from Dr. Creepy Feely and … yes, I did exit with birth control pills, things I took for the better part of the next 4 decades. What did these hormones…
