April 10, 2024
Another in a series of observations of life as I know it.
All you Trump fans are gonna be really pissed off when your condom breaks and your sister can't get an abortion.
-Oliver Markus Malloy
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I am glad that I am no longer young. That says a great deal about today’s landscape. Please let me explain.
In 1972, I was 20 years old and navigating feminism head on. Everything that I knew before then was predicated on a world fashioned in man’s image. For instance, my mother managed a household and held a full time job. She cooked, grocery shopped, mowed the lawn and kept the family cars running. She had an income. But, she couldn’t get a credit card of her own without my dad as a co-signor. When she wanted to buy a car of her own, she couldn’t get financing. So she pulled cash out of her modest savings and slapped those greenbacks down in front of the salesman. She went alone because she knew the dealership would try to foil a purchase made by check and she understood the value of cold, hard cash. She got the car but not a credit card. That came years later. In college I had friends who got pregnant. Condoms break, or guys fail to use them. Contraceptives aren’t foolproof. Their only option was to go to New York or Europe for a legal abortion. Which was a step forward from women who were faced with back alley abortions in the 1960s, some botched and lethal. I also know about trying to get something better than a secretarial job with a BA from a highly selective liberal arts college. My options were grad school or marriage. And yes, I have experienced what the #MeToo movement exposed in the professional lives of my female peers. Don’t tell HR if you want to keep your job. Or women friends in the military, with the rank of an officer raped at mandatory happy hours at the base bar. Don’t ask or tell.
Oh yes, I am fully aware of the situation today. At least while Roe v Wade survived, legal, safe abortion was available. The law of the land. Now? Not so much. If SCOTUS kills access to prescription drug abortion, it’s game over. Those who can afford a trip to London or Paris can get care there. Those who cannot will stay home and produce a raft of unwanted children. Their dreams shattered yet again. I never thought we’d return to the bad old days. We’d come so far, relatively speaking. And yet today, women have been reduced to nothing more than an anatomy. A uterus not of one’s own.
Yes, I am delighted that I am old.
No one should have rights to a woman’s uterus and decisions concerning it except that woman. Period. End of discussion. I do not care what some man decided in 1864. It’s irrelevant today!
😢