![]() I’m not thinking about young girls who will grow up without the protections of Roe. I’m not thinking about the students or the young married women who have lost the choices they had yesterday about their futures and their families. I’m thinking about my mother. My mother, who entered college in 1939 without the assurances I had in 1977. My mother, who so desperately wanted children that she took prescribed poison to protect her pregnancies. My mother, who made sure I understood the choices women had before legal abortion. I can see the two of us sitting in our den in the lower level of our Lawrenceburg home, dim sunlight coming through the dirty glass of the sliding doors that opened to the broad yard. I was sitting on the stone hearth of the fireplace. She was across from me on the sofa. She told me what frantic women had done before. She was matter-of-fact. I was horrified. Incensed. And here we are again, fifty years later. I wonder how my mother would react to today’s news. Would she be as irate as I am about the cruelty of this decision? Would she be more sanguine, having seen more of life, and politics, than I have? Or would she simply be numb? Losing this one “right” may seem small potatoes compared to the looming threat of losing our democracy. How many women and families are really affected? In recent years, fewer than a million women in the U.S. made that choice—fewer than the number of Americans who have died of Covid. And we’ve mostly brushed aside that trauma. I suppose we’ll forget about this, too, in a few short weeks as we make the most of the waning days of summer. But I urge you to be vigilant as the tectonic plates shift ominously beneath us. Exercise the rights you still have. Send a clear message to our self-serving elected representatives. We are the majority. We gave them their power. That is what we can take away.
4 Comments
Barbara R Fallis
6/25/2022 01:44:04 am
One woman protester held a sign "IF ONLY MY UTERUS WAS AN AR-15".
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Joe Anthony
6/25/2022 11:16:49 am
Clarence Thomas indicated in his opinion that other "rights" are in danger: including same sex relations and marriage and even contraception. It will affect more than the million women you mentioned. We can't depend on the court to protect us. Before Brown vs. the board of education, there was Plessy vs. Ferguson which sanctioned segregation, there was Kentucky's infamous Day Law which mandated it. In other words the court has been reactionary, racist, corporate for most of its history. Our safety and our freedom has to rely on our resolve.That means a determination to defy the unjust law, just as some did with the fugitive slave law and the Jim Crow laws that followed. If a woman chooses abortion, we need to all do what we can to help. Otherwise, we're just blowing steam.
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Sallie Showalter
6/25/2022 12:31:07 pm
You're right, Joe. This is just the beginning of the erosion of rights they have in store for us.
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Joan Cullen
6/25/2022 04:33:17 pm
I guess that the founders really meant what they said "that all men are are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness".
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