REMEMBER HER FACE
What do you see in her gaze?
Apprehension. Fear. Vigilance.
A woman watching the sky. Watchful for
planes, great streams of fire,
gathering storm clouds of war.
This is how it feels to be a woman in 2022. We are alone and betrayed by our cultures and societies. What once was legal -- the right to decide on healthcare and pregnancy -- is now kicked down to the states where abortion may be gleefully outlawed. Women and medical personnel can be considered criminals for claiming basic healthcare, well-being and respectful decisions about our own bodies.
It's political. It's damning. It's a way to take away women's power. In this country where we have No universal healthcare, No universal childcare, No guaranteed right of maternal leave after delivery, limiting abortion is basically cruel and stupid -- and deliberately designed to hamstring the freedoms and personal progress of women as equal citizens. Equal in the "eyes of the law".
What's next? Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is on a vendetta to make contraception illegal. Same-sex marriage illegal. And who knows what else.
I was a young adult woman before Roe vs. Wade was accepted as law. Women's choices and sexual behaviors were met with shame, scorn and contempt. Young women could be disowned by their families. Some kept their pregnancies secret and gave up their child to adoption. Some married, successfully or not. Some sought out illegal abortions. Some were treated by a "family friendly" physician in a private hospital, a practice I would expect will continue on for those men with power and money.
And the men -- what about the men who are the other half of this equation. What will you do now? What did you do then, before? Did you use contraception? Did you disappear? Say: "Not mine".
What is lost in our culture is simple care. Every decision taken by a woman to carry a pregnancy is complex, laden with emotion and carries consequences -- welcomed or not --for life.
It is not up to Congress or the deliberately skewed Supreme Court to take away liberties already granted. We, the majority of people in this country who support choice, must stand up to those self-righteous bullies and remove them from office and power now, not in ten or twenty years.
Sometime, someone you know may need a choice. Where will you stand?
~
Note: The statue used in this entry is in the Zahm Courtyard at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. The artist is English sculptor Thomas Bayliss Huxtable-Jones. It was a gift of the Class of 1943 in memory of their classmates who died in World War II.
