Real choice

In 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, I felt the demotion to legally “less-than” status as an insult in my bones. No matter that I was too old to get pregnant. The highest court in the land had decreed I had fewer rights than a man.

My 1970s coming-of-age was when women secured a series of rights beyond reproductive choice, like having their own bank accounts and credit cards, buying their own homes, getting the education they needed to work at jobs they wanted.

Watching so many male politicians and jurists take that hard-won autonomy away from women and girls today makes me physically ill.

When I read Roxane Gay’s 2014 collection Bad Feminist, I was taken with the title of the essay called “The Alienable Rights of Women” before I fully registered its genius.

“Often, when I read the news,” she wrote, “I have to make sure I am not, in fact, reading The Onion. We continue to have national and state debates about abortion, birth control and reproductive freedom and men, mostly, are directing that debate. That is the stuff of satire.”

This week, a W.A. Lawrence article made my internal radiator edge into the red zone. Called “Women’s Legal Rights Are Being Dismantled In Real Time,” it’s published on her great Substack publication Glass Empires. Lawrence catalogues the terrifying ways Republicans are turning back the clock on women even more than they already have.

“Trump’s executive orders are accelerating the deliberate erasure of a century of women’s legal rights,” she writes, “stripping healthcare, voting access, education, and workplace protection while steering women back toward enforced legal dependence, not as consequence but as design, the open execution of a Republican project that has targeted women’s autonomy for generations and is now moving at full speed.”

Like termites, the administration is hollowing out the infrastructure that upholds the laws.

“Women’s rights were not granted by culture or courtesy,” she writes. “They were forced into existence through hard law and enforceable mandates…..Every gain depended on enforcement power and compliance systems, not social permission.”

(Read her whole article here https://wendy664.substack.com/p/womens-legal-rights-are-being-dismantled?r=1fpul&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay&triedRedirect=true).

Add the egregious “SAVE Act” — which Republican senators hope to pass by May —  to the pile of bad news and it can feel insurmountable. Claiming it’s another “election security” measure, sponsors have created a system whereby any woman whose Drivers License doesn’t match the name on her birth certificate would have to produce an updated paper trail of marriage licenses and divorce decrees that document every change or be turned away at the polls.

It almost sounds like satire. Only it’s not fiction.

Bodily autonomy and reproductive rights — which Republican political strategists decided to use as wedge issues in the 1970s; before then, birth control and the range of OB/gyn procedures women got from their doctors were considered personal healthcare — mean so much to me because they’re a cornerstone of my story. I’ve spent much of my post-retirement life making sense of, writing about and repairing the powerlessness I felt as someone who became pregnant three times as a teen without ever marrying the guy I planned to raise a family with, or feeling any control over the outcomes.

Before we ever went all the way — two whole years after we started dating at 14 — Joe had given me a tiny pre-engagement ring and promised to marry me early if our being careful efforts ever failed.

Instead, I had two abortions I didn’t want in 1973, because he claimed doing so would ensure our future. The third time I became pregnant, in 1975, I didn’t tell him or anyone. I dropped out of college and hit the road so no one could tell me what to do or prevent me from becoming a mother. But carrying my baby to term wasn’t enough; at the end of my pregnancy, I was persuaded that surrendering my son for adoption was better for him.

In 1973, the year Roe became law, my parents drove me to a hospital an hour away so my mother’s OB/gyn could take kind care of me. Her doctor tried his best to make sure I had the final word, pulling me into his office and asking my parents to wait before letting us go through admissions.

“It must be your choice,” he said. “No one else’s.”

I didn’t know how to tell him I didn’t know what he meant, that I had no experience having a say in my life, except over things that didn’t matter.

“It’s been decided,” I eventually said, looking down at my hands.

He sighed, gave me a pill to help me sleep and said he’d see me in the morning.

I wish I could say those pregnancies taught me about the importance of agency in a mature sex life, or helped me understand how much my deferential approach to relationships harmed me, but I didn’t fully learn either lesson until I was in my 50s.