~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The way I remember the Roe vs. Wade decision of 1973 that legalized a woman’s right to choose is that it had a lot to do with equality of access to abortion in ALL states, not just a state here and there. When it came to their own wombs, that hopscotch kind of healthcare for women was unequal and thus unfair: a woman with money could fly from Iowa to New Jersey to get an abortion; a poor woman in Des Moines could go to a back alley.
In May, Texas wrote a law that says anyone getting an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy is in trouble with the law . . . not her specifically but whoever performed the procedure, the clerk in the clinic, the driver who took her to the doctor – her mother, her sister, her neighbor. . . the city bus driver? The law allows anyone to bring charges against these people who might have helped her get to the doctor, and if they win, be rewarded with a minimum $10,000 decision. Some people are calling this vigilante law enforcement, deputizing anyone to turn in folks with a different opinion from them. To me, it reeks of Gestapo encouragement of neighbors telling on neighbors in Nazi Germany.
The U.S. Supreme Court late one night a couple of weeks ago, by a 5-4 vote, refused to block this Texas law that amounts to a ban on abortions. Gutless? I’d say so. It’s difficult to know at six weeks that you’re pregnant. Besides that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution says, “No State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” And Roe won in Roe v. Wade, so it is a law that is on the books.
The entire 48 years since Roe went into effect and allowed women to make their own decision about their own bodies has seen people across the country shout and yell about murder and try to make laws to prohibit abortion. It is their right to shout and yell. It is the Court’s job to uphold a law that allows an individual to know her own moral obligation to herself without interference from a bunch of appointed people with power, or a shouting minority, all who seem to think her womb is their business.
That the right to choose ever devolved into this litmus test for righteousness still puzzles me. Why so many men are interested in the “murder” of a fetus mystifies me when, in one way or another, they do most of the killing of people already born into this world.
I had a friend in the early 1970s, at least 20 years older than I, a writer with a great deal more experience under her belt and an attitude because of it. Mary Plotkin was thoughtful and amusing, quick with the wit; she wanted to go into a writer partnership with me as “Clopton and Plotkin.”
The tongue-twister echo going on with that possible business card still makes me regret we didn’t do it.
When lawmakers around the country started introducing bills against a woman’s right to choose what to do with her eggs because it was murder, my Plotkin friend decided there should be laws disallowing men to spill their seed on the ground. “Killing possible babies right and left,” she said, asking why men thought they should be the bosses of anything, let alone us.
No answer – and a thousand answers – to that one.
In the state of Nevada in the 1980s, when their majority male legislature announced that they planned to introduce a bill that would force a woman to get permission from her “significant other” before she could get an abortion, a female legislator wrote another bill: if a man wanted to get a vasectomy, he’d have to get the permission of his significant other. As soon as the vasectomy bill hit the legislative floor, the male representatives who wrote the first bill stepped on it like it was a scorpion off the desert. Neither bill was heard from again.
The majority of the people in the country when polled about abortion want the lawmakers to get out of the bedrooms of the citizenry and let women make up their own minds. Pew Research Center polls that six out of 10 people say that abortion should be legal in most cases.
Texas lawmakers and the members of the U.S. Supreme Court have more important things to do than bug a majority of the population – not just the 60 percent who are okay with abortion but that other majority – the women themselves; there are more women than men, you know. U.S. Census tells us that women are 50.8 percent of the population. And I know women who are against abortion. I’m all for them, if they’re talking about themselves and their own bodies.
Author F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “So, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
It’s time to row on, folks – with the current.
