Indiana, 1955

 When my mother was in high school, in small town in Indiana in the 1950s, one of her friends was impregnated by another of her friends. 

(There were only ten or twelve people in her high school, so everyone was friends with everyone. This is how my mother told it, though you must remember my mother made friends everywhere she went.)

In 1955, of course, both birth control and abortion were illegal. A sixteen year old pregnant girl had few options. I've heard that the usual method was to send the child away for a year, after which she returned, without the child, and resumed her life. That's not what happened in this case.

In this case, the sixteen year old was not banished by her family. She stayed home (I suspect this was much more common than people now believe) and stayed pregnant.

The high school, however, expelled her. She was a bad influence, do you see, the evil, evil slut.

My mother never suffered injustice. She got all of her girlfriends (more than half of the high school) and stormed the principal's office. "You know who the father is," she said, and named him -- everyone did know, of course. I'll call him Fred here. "You're not expelling Fred. Why expel her?"

The principal could not expel Fred, who was one of the few college-bound students the high school had. (Everyone else was too poor to even think of higher education.) My mother staged a sit-in, though she didn't call it that. This was some years before sit-ins became common. She and her girlfriends refused to leave the principal's office until the expulsion was rescinded.

Which it was. The pregnant child married Fred, who ended up joining the military instead of going to college, since he had a family to support. Their marriage lasted decades, though it was never (I am reading between the lines here) all that happy, and ended, finally, in divorce.

That's the world the GOP wants for us and for our children. Our bodies, the criminal court has now made clear, do not belong to us. We are not citizens. We are property, and the state can use us as it pleases, quite against our will.