Let me begin by saying, none of your business. We need to remember this. Our right to a medical procedure is nobody's business. And yet because we are constantly under attack for the freedom to decide to have an abortion, we have found it necessary to tell private, personal stories and to attempt to provide a justification for those decisions that are palatable to religious radicals in this country that are no better than the Taliban.
Here's another point: we allowed the insurance industry to increase premiums on those who smoke. At some point, we will allow them to increase premiums on the obese. With DNA testing, it will become possible to increase premiums for those who are high-risk for genetic factors. Forcing women to pay a rider for abortion coverage is really another component of the country's intolerance and willingness to let industry profit from it. Which does not excuse or minimize this new attack; I am merely saying we should step back and look at the atmosphere that allows it to happen.
Under the heading of, "I Can't Believe They Can Do This," Michigan Right to Life gathered sufficient numbers of signatures on a petition to require women to pay for an insurance rider on any insurance policy, even those held privately, if they want abortion services to be covered. So, once again, the voice of the fanatic holds sway over individual rights. Of course, this did require that the Michigan legislature do the group's bidding.
Most of us are not fighting for reproductive freedoms because we are not wrong. We are engaging in the freedom that we take for granted in a democracy. We have fought hard for equality, and assume it is our due. But just as if we were a country under attack, our attacker has no justification, only the desire to control us. They have not ever needed to prove that they are right, only that they are more powerful. And that they have, because they are louder and they don't give up. Ever.
And this has been going on for a very long time.
So we need to fight back, and as ferociously as they fight, and as though we are a country at war defending our liberty.
And there are others that should be joining the fight, for a variety of reasons.
Men should be interested in defending the right to reproductive privacy and equality, because after abortion comes birth control, already under attack. A woman who does not have reproductive freedom makes the entire family structure more vulnerable, emotionally and economically.
Employers should want to assure that women are in control of their reproductive health, for the stability of the workplace.
The insurance industry certainly must know that it makes sense financially to cover birth control and abortion.
And finally, as a community we should all recognize that those who are seeking to prevent women from determining their reproductive paths are by no means pro-life. In fact, they oppose funding better health care and nutrition for pregnant women and children. The women most affected will be the poor, but it will also be the middle class who in 2014 will be struggling to provide the best for their families. The additional costs for preventive care, and even more the burden of being forced to carry a pregnancy, can be enough to push that woman or that family over the brink into undue emotional stress, and financial hardship. It can end the possibility of college, even high school, and put an end to a promising career and hope for the future.
And here's something else. A woman who is able to make her own reproductive decisions is more likely later to have wanted, healthy and happy children.
God did not create a world in which a woman has an abortion and is then banned from having children. That's the case whether the abortion is the result of a rape, a medical complication, or an error in judgment. Those who seek to punish women for their sexuality would have us believe that abortions reduce the numbers of children. In fact, being able to wait until a woman feels ready to have a child is something that many of us might consider a blessing. That God may have given us the option of ending a pregnancy because this is not about punishment but about growth. And there are a lot of women who have had that opportunity, and wonderful, wanted children were the result.
I am one of them. Not that it's anybody's business.
So instead of wondering why the anti-abortion, anti-life, anti-freedom people are attacking us, I think we need to see the attacks as irrational acts committed by tyrants, and do what we need to do to control our bodies and our lives.
As I've talked among women about the insanity that is called Congress and its anti-abortion, anti-birth control antics, the question has come up, "Why do they hate us?"
I hadn't been able to find an answer; in fact, it seemed that "hate" was too strong a word. It just didn't fit. And I think the reason "hate" doesn't fit is because it is tempered considerably with denial.
My days of studying Freud are long gone, and there is a lot of derision for the man, but I believe he was brilliant in conceiving the battles within our minds. So let me get a little faux-Freudian with this.
The most powerful object in an infant's life of course is its mother. For a girl child, I think there tends to be more overt intimacy, and later, more overt battles for independence. For a boy, I believe issues of dependency are far more insidious.
So, unlike with girls, a boy's anger is nearly certain to get convoluted. Until, as an adult, you have rage that cannot be named. That denial of rage becomes a need to protect that gets twisted all around to the most destructive forms of control imaginable. I'm not talking about the obvious overt rage that comes in the form of rape and spousal abuse. What I'm talking about is something I'm thinking of as "legislative rape."
It's amazing, but maybe not really, that as women become more powerful in business and politics, the push to confine us has become so much greater. And indirect. Of course a woman is entitled to the same job as a man, but she doesn't need a law saying she's entitled to the same pay. And if she wants to work, then she needs to be a man and take responsibility for caring for her children -- she certainly has no right to expect the State to take care of her children for her.
And then there is the ever more abrasive and abusive anti-abortion movement. I'm not talking about the whackos out there with there placards trying to intimidate women when they are at their most vulnerable. I'm talking about the whackos elected into the 112th Congress on a "jobs, jobs, jobs" platform, who introduced 44 bills on abortion. I'm talking about our own South Carolina legislators, who proudly -- and yearly -- introduced "personhood" bills and continue to try to put a monument to "unborn children" out on the State House grounds, which would have it in good company with the Confederate flag.
While these legislators look out for the interest of the "preborn" against us stupid and selfish women, they are also cutting funding to welfare, food stamps, education and health care. And let us not forget that while they are stamping out abortion, they are also working hard to ban birth control.
That, my friends, is where the rage is evident. This is not a case of wanting to help a woman through a hard time in bringing a baby into the world. This is a pure and simple case of punishment. Punishment for leading a man into sin. God punishes the woman by getting her pregnant, and folks like SC Senator Lee Bright are going to make damned sure she pays the price. For the rest of her life.
There is just not enough of calling things by their rightful name. Men in power acting like they are protecting babies when they are in fact punishing women (and of course the eventual children). Calling their motivation Christianity rather than "loathing." And let's once and for all rebrand that "personhood" bill and call it by it's true name: enforced pregnancy.
I got my back up a bit with "this younger generation" yesterday. It was during Up With Chris Hayes, and the panel discussion was about women's issues, and the current fight for women's reproductive rights. Gloria Steinem, my hero, was there, and Marlo Thomas, representing my generation, and after a brief interview, they were joined by a couple of youngsters, the ever-self-referential Melissa Harris-Perry, and Serita Gupta.
This discussion was extremely important because in fact we continue to fight the battles over Roe v. Wade, even to the point of fighting for the right to birth control.
What caused me to growl at the panelists was when Gupta referred to herself as a member of the "sandwich generation," and then explained that these are the women who are now responsible for the care of their elderly parents and their young children.
Excu-use me, but when I was too young to recall, my own mother was taking care of her elderly parents, my grandmother a wheelchair bound stroke victim, and a three-year-old me and one-year-old younger sister.
Gloria, in response to that sandwich business, reminded us all that back in her day, women were home, and not considered to be "working." The care was free, because the women in the household were the unpaid invisible workers.
And I do realize that just as these younger women need to be aware of the battles that came before them, we had warriors fighting before us. Women were risking their lives so that we could vote and Hollywood was portraying the independent working woman.
And here we are, in the 21st century, our daughters taking up the charge to fight for the human rights that are their due.
