I'm still trying to recover from yesterday. Astrological cold spot, mr. delagar and I call that sort of day. Every time I picked my head up, something else slammed into it.
O'Connor retiring was, in the long run, the worst of it. (Broken cars being not actual problems. As Anne Lamott says, any problem that can be fixed with money is not a problem.)
O'Connor retiring , on the other hand, is going to -- or may, if I want to remain optimistic, and I'm trying -- may be going to reshape the nation.
Here's Amanda over at Pandagon, noting some folk already trying to frame the possibility of over-turning Roe v Wade as a "a minority" problem.
Because, you know, dealing with unwanted pregnancies is something only a minority of Americans have to do. (A million and a half of us per year.) Or worry about.
http://www.pandagon.net/archives/2005/07/dear_democratic.html#comments
How many Americans are women again? How many live with women? Have sex with women? Have sex with women who, at some point in their reproductive lives, might need to make that choice, for whatever reason?
And before any of you out there say, not me, never me, I suggest you go here
http://ourhomeschool.blog-city.com/index.cfm?m=2&y=2005
and read the posts.
And believe me, what happened there is the least of it. That's the sort of thing that comes up all the time when people have kids. Sometimes we're lucky and everything goes fine. Other times, we need medical intervention. Other times, we want it. It's our business.
Anyone who wants to go back to a country which did not have that option should do some serious reading in what life was like in those days -- not the glossy life of the rich, either, who always did have birth control and abortion available. (Problems can indeed be fixed with money.) Try looking at life among the working class. Try looking at life among the poor. Have a look at life in the third world today.
The world has changed in a lot of ways since 1950 and, despite what they would have you believe over there on Townhall.com, almost all of those changes are for the better -- at least if you aren't a middle-class or upperclass white male control freak.
Anyone who still thinks the right to be able to choose abortion, to have abortion available as a choice, is something only a tiny minority of us are concerned about, needs to also think about this:
If abortion is overturned, the battle will not stop there. It has already moved on from there. Already, the "pro-life" movement has its activists refusing to give women birth control pills in pharmacies, and passing laws that keep university women from getting emergency birth control from university health care centers. Already, that is, they are redefining birth control as abortion.
They aren't pro-life. They are pro-control.
This isn't a minority issue. We better not let it be treated like one.
1 hour ago
1 comment:
There is one part of this equation that is being completely left out. That is the grandmothers. I know from experience what happens when an unplanned child is born and the mother is not going to do what she is supposed to do. The grandmother ends up raising him or her. Not that I would ever want it any other way, well, I would like to have a daughter who is responsible and would raise her children but unfortunately that isn't the case, so I am taking care of the baby, oh she does come in every night for a minute or two or during the morning for a minute or two until she passes out.
Now, when the birthcontrol and abortion laws are changed and women start having babies, people who don't want to have babies, guess who is going to raise these babies? YOu got it, and if the grandparents don't they end up in foster care where there care is maintance at best and they grow up to have so many things stacked up against them. I don't know, sounds like this is going to affect not only the reproductive lives of the younger women, but it will be affecting the retirement of the older women, not that I am opposed to my grandchildren because I love them and they will always have a home with me, but I hope my daughter doesn't ever quit taking her birth control pills again. And if a pharmicists should all of a sudden deny her those pills and she should become pregnant, well, I would be in graduate school with a toddler and an infant. Yep, that is what the new laws are going to do to women my age.
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