I am sure that the whole world know that the US is going back in time to the horrible days when women had no say in their reproductive health nor any good choices. I am sure that women the world over are wondering how this misogynistic archaic Puritan political crap can be happening here in 2013.
I partly blame the fact that young people in the USA don't know any history. I am certain that in most public schools teachers would be pillared if they taught the struggle in recent history that went into Roe v. Wade. It was huge. It was about time. It saved countless women from horrible illegal abortions or painfully unwanted pregnancies. Look it up if you are young. Try to get the picture.
Firstly, the thing that pisses me off at the onset of the new war on reproductive rights is that it is being waged by the very same people who are against free, readily available birth control. It is the same people who have eliminated reproductive health from many school health classes across the country. Go figure. Barefoot in the winter and pregnant in the summer used to be the old joke about how to keep a wife. Nauseating. These are also often the same people who are against food stamps and help for single mothers. The whole cycle seems to have come full circle.
Those righteous Christian patriarchs were losing control over their independent women, so they assured them that not only would they go to hell if they had an abortion, but kept them ignorant and dependent enough that they now collude with the men to take away their rights and those of other women.
We should get pissed off. We should get royally pissed off. We should overthrow anyone in politics and religion who thinks we are too stupid to make painful reasonable decisions about our own bodies. Especially dumb ignorant or evil men who think we can't get pregnant from a rape. We must be the laughing stock of planet earth. Even an illiterate peasant in an isolated tribe in wherever knows more about the human body than our elected officials.
About the morality of abortion, My read on it is this: we each have our right to our own values. We must have the right to decide what we can live with. I know of no one who has had an abortion who hasn't suffered with the decision or suffered after. It is never the easy way out of anything. It should be the safe way out of otherwise untenable situations.
I speak as a woman who never had an abortion. My three pregnancies came when I made the decision to have a child and stopped using birth control. There was one time, however when I slipped and figured it could be possible. A woman friend performed a menstrual extraction which a lot of women used to use to regulate their periods. I will never know.
The only sensible path I can see is to keep our laws and offer more and more education and more and more birth control and let intelligent women lead their own lives. This is so basic, I can't believe I am writing this. I wrote an article in 1970 something in the same vein. Young women and men need to listen to the older people's stories. Almost anyone you talk to will tell you some horror story about a friend who died or almost died or became sterile after having an illegal abortion. Listen to your elders and take action now.
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