I’ve been reporting and writing about the abortion issue since 1970 when New York State passed its law legalizing the procedure. That was three years before the landmark Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade legalized abortion throughout the country. I am angry that it is still an issue. Women die from illegal abortions, not the men who impregnated them. Women’s lives mentally, physically and financially are the ones at risk if they are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.
And yet here we are again still having to fight to control our body’s reproductive rights after mostly male legislators feel entitled to control us. I May of 2019 I put words together at another time when woman’s reproductive rights were being red-flagged by the right wing with a wave of anti-abortion laws. Young women and contemporaries asked me to speak out. I did and will continue to do so.
If abortion is against your moral or religious beliefs, no one is telling you to have the medical procedure. But it needs to be kept safe and legal for those who want it. Choice.
But Texas doesn’t see it that way nor do the other states that are lining up in a attempt to reverse the progress of the past fifty years.
Texas has created a law complete with a vigilante system to round up anyone who tries to help a woman in need of ending a pregnancy, even as the tragic result of rape or incest. But they included no funding to feed, clothe and educate the children who came into this world under the draconian Texas law. Good old boy Republican Governor Greg Abbott proudly signed the bill that bans abortions after six weeks when many women might not even know they are pregnant.
Governor Abbott is a man who is paralyzed below the waist and has been in a wheelchair since an accident at age 26. He and his wife adopted their only child. That was their choice and right. But the governor says that his anti-abortion stance has been driven by the adoption of his daughter. Now he has taken his personal beliefs and forced them on the women in his state, mostly for political gain.
There must be something empowering to men when they take the power to determine whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term away from women. It’s a very disturbing kind of power.
As I wrote in 2019:
Where is it written that laws should only govern the reproductive rights of women? Nowhere. Should a man’s penis and reproductive ability be allowed to exist without laws dealing with the impact it can have? Perhaps not.
There are approximately 500,000 vasectomies performed on men each year. It’s a procedure that makes it near impossible for a man to impregnate a woman. Men have a choice when they decide to have this procedure, and no one is threatening to take that choice away…
The Supreme Court will be hearing another anti-abortion case in the coming months, this one a Mississippi challenge. Donald Trump’s three critical conservative appointees, Neil Gorsuch, Bret Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are expected to join forces to continue to weaken Roe v. Wade or perhaps abolish it completely.
When will people wake up and realize that legal overreach into a woman’s body is a very dangerous thing? Just think. If you had a fifteen year old daughter who was tragically the victim of rape or incest, would you really want her even more scarred for life because she was forced to carry the resulting pregnancy to term?_____________________________________________________________________________The entire piece written in 2019, “If Men Got Pregnant Abortion Wouldn’t Be An Issue: Same Old Story” appears in my book along with other writings over the past 5 years shedding perspective on our times., POLITICAL & OTHERWISE https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08L8D56HH