Happy birthday, America. You know I love you, love you so much I think my heart might burst right out of my chest sometimes. I can love you, America, and not like you today.
It’s been more than a week since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, and I’m still pacing the floors of my cabin. Furiously scrubbing the shower pan. Aggressively raking pine needles in the yard. Chopping wood.
On the day of the decision, I got a call from someone who knows my story, knows why this one is personal.
“How are you doing?” they asked me soft and low, testing the waters.
“I’m not sure,” I said into the phone. “I don’t know what to do or say right now. I’m spinning.”
I had just spent the afternoon rage-cleaning my closet.
After hearing the Supreme Court’s decision, I had stormed into my bedroom and yanked clothes off their hangars. Threw them into a pile on the bed. Scooped up armfuls of dresses and shirts, and hauled them out to my car. Stomped in and out of the cabin with each load. Slammed the hatch on those mother-fucking clothes. Then I crawled on my hands and knees in the tiny closet, cursing under my breath, as I sucked up dust and spiderwebs from the dark corners with a handheld vacuum.
I was trying to control what I could control.
Which didn’t feel like much.
But that’s what many women do when our voices are ignored, and control is taken away from us, time and again. We find ways to safely channel our anger. We instinctively do something productive, try to create order out of chaos. We tidy up our houses and gardens … aggressively.
Women have been conditioned since birth to hide our unladylike rage and aggression. Swallow it deep. Be a good wife, good girlfriend, good daughter who is pleasing and keeps a nice house. Just don’t be a loud feminist bitch who has something uncomfortable to say about her own body. Anything but that.
A good girl must never scream or curse. A good girl should not be angry or destructive. A good girl should never want or need an abortion.
But the problem is, they do. We do. I did.
“No more rallies, no more marching, no more knitting those stupid hats. It doesn’t work,” my friend griped over the phone. “I think women need to get violent. Need to go on strike. Men only understand violence, or if something hits them in the wallet. Men don’t play fair, and women have been too nice for too long.”
“But it’s not just old white dudes,” I grumbled. “There are conservative women who feel a righteous victory today. And don’t even get me started about Clarence Thomas.”
I’m convinced the reversal of Roe was a decision made by people who have never had to hide in a bathroom and pee on a pregnancy test, see the positive result, clutch their stomach in terror, and feel the world drop out from under them.
The fact that dead people have more rights about the use of their body organs than living women have over the use of their uteruses is appalling to me. It reinforces what women have been taught since girlhood – that we are second-class citizens in this country.
“So, what do we do now?” I asked into the phone.
“I don’t know.”
I never fully appreciated how much control I had over my body back in the 1990s when I made the choice to have an abortion. I can’t imagine other women (and nonbinary people and trans men) not having the same options I had, the same ability to choose, the same basic civil rights.
Today, the outlook is especially bleak for low-income women who represent the vast majority of abortion patients, and who can’t afford to cross state lines for the procedure.
A recent social media post stated, “If every time men had sex, they risked death, physical disability, social shunning, a life altering interruption of their education and career, and the sudden life-long responsibility for another being, I think they’d expect a choice in the matter.”
But again, it’s not just old white dudes making these decisions. And I think that’s what hurts the most and feels like the biggest betrayal – when minorities and other women take away my body autonomy, which is an essential human liberty. If women don’t have freedom over their own bodies, if we don’t own our bodies, then what else do we have? And what other freedoms will they take away next?
We live in a country that espouses liberty and justice for all, just not for women.
When I became pregnant in my early twenties, I was a starving college student already juggling three jobs to pay for tuition, rent and food, and my unreliable car had broken down. I was barely keeping it together and was not ready to be a mother. If I had kept the baby, I would have dropped out of school. There’s no doubt about that. I most likely would have lost my jobs during and after pregnancy. I would have been a single mom without a degree trying to raise a child in a broken system that is rigged against women and children in poverty.
Again, the message is loud and clear: women don’t count for much. Unwanted fetuses count more, but only until they are born, and then it’s somebody else’s problem.
I don’t live with shame or regret about my decision. And if I had to do it all over again, I’d make the same choice.
The hardest decision a woman can make … IS NOT YOURS. It is hers, and hers alone.
Today, the Fourth of July is a day of reflection rather than a day of celebration for me. I’m struggling with the lack of independence for women on Independence Day.
This post is the first time I’ve written about my abortion publicly, but it won’t be the last. I’m adding my abortion story to my memoir. It’s an important part of my life, and I know just the right chapter.
It’s time to clean out the dark corners of my closet. Clear out the dust and cobwebs. Let in some light.