Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries: A Woman's Right to Choose Has Nothing To Do With Your God

In Texas, "A" is a Scarlet Letter They Hang Around the Necks of Women Seeking Abortion

There are two occasions when a woman tends to go sexually overboard: on vacation, and just out of a committed relationship.

In the former, far from the cares and constrictions of home, she transforms into a different creature, which then invites the possibility of sexual partners. In the latter, she’s a woman fresh off a diet. Nothing looks so tempting as that which you have denied yourself for a long long time.

In my case, it was both. I was on vacation—from myself. And I was having a great time being newly single. There was a smoking hot guy at the gym, and because I was attracted to him, for the shallowest of reasons, I said yes. It wasn’t a love story; it was garden-variety attraction. That happens sometimes. Unlike men, women don’t have a refractory period, the recovery phase after orgasm. They can go all night. Women like sex, experience attraction, and are not always, or even usually, the innocent victims of men’s predatory interest.

Why do I feel it necessary to say these things? There is a persistent belief in the XY chromosomal community that women have to be coerced into “giving it up.” We are the gatekeepers of our own vaginas, and if that gate refuses to swing wide, it must be because we’re frigid, a lesbian, sex-hating, man-hating, or uptight. I can safely promise you that if a man is attractive enough, we’ll open the gate. Hey, buddy, sorry if that isn’t you. But the problem we face as a society is this one: when a man rejects a woman, that woman hates herself; when a woman rejects a man, that man hates all women.

I got pregnant that night, a fact that only became apparent to me eight weeks after our one and only encounter. It scarcely seemed possible. We’d used protection, which failed, and I was a single mother in her late thirties (“geriatric” by reproductive standards) with two teenage children. I refuse to sugarcoat, or excuse, my reasons for sleeping with the guy. I wasn’t raped. I wasn’t coerced. I wanted, and I took.

Had I lived in Texas as of this writing, I would have already been beyond hope of obtaining a safe, legal abortion.

Nauseated and miserable, I went to Planned Parenthood and got a prescription for mifepristone and misoprostol, which induced a miscarriage. My one-nighter refused to pay his share, insisting that I take my kids out of school and move up north with him so I could incubate “his” child. At this point, I hated the guy, so that was never going to happen. Nor did I have any desire to have more children. I assumed all financial responsibility for the abortion, which was $700 I didn’t have, and I assumed full responsibility for what I’d done.

Moral of the story: don’t sleep with cretins, and make sure you use two forms of birth control.

From The Daily Don

It’s harder for me to admit I’d done something that stupid than it is to admit I’ve had an abortion. It was not my first. Were abortion not an option, I’d have six kids right now, instead of two. I would have been a teenage parent, my life over before it started. Were abortion not an option, I would have been forced to have children before I was financially, emotionally, or psychologically ready to be a mother. Most importantly—and this is the part I want you to hear—I’d likely be dead by now, because banning abortion doesn’t stop abortion; it merely forces desperate women to take desperate measures, sometimes with a coat hanger, that can often cost them their lives.

No contraceptive method prevents pregnancy 100% of the time.

According to prochoice.org, “Each year, almost half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended. 1.3 million are ended by abortion. Half of all women getting abortions report that contraception had been used the month they became pregnant. Some couples used the method improperly; some had forgotten or neglected to use it on the particular occasion they conceived; and some had used a contraceptive that failed.”

In the state of Texas, it is now illegal for a woman to obtain an abortion after six weeks. Anyone who aids and abets her in obtaining an abortion after six weeks can be reported to the authorities and may have a $10,000 injunction levied against them.

That said, let me take a moment then to acquaint you with what an embryo looks like at six weeks.

A six-week embryo (which is the size of a grain of rice) doesn’t look very human, does it? That’s because it isn’t. It’s embryonic, which means “in a rudimentary stage with the potential for development.” There’s the possibility of an embryo becoming a human baby, but by any scientific parameter, it’s still a clump of mutating cells.

Contrary to popular belief, a six-week embryo does not have a heartbeat. Rather, an ultrasound can detect a little flutter in the area where a heart might someday exist. The embryonic brain? Only the neural tubes are formed at this stage, which will later develop into a central nervous system and a brain.

This isn’t a frog; it’s hardly even a tadpole. It’s an idea.

If you’re holding a baby in one hand and a petri dish containing an embryo in the other, and you have to drop one, which is it going to be?

I think we already know the answer to that question.

So, why then is it impossible for a woman in Texas to obtain a safe, legal abortion after six weeks? How is it in year 2021, almost fifty years to the day of the ratification of Roe versus Wade, pregnant women are, by law, being denied their most fundamental human rights by the same political party that believes life-saving masks qualify as “government overreach?” If life is so sacred to pro-death-penalty-loving Republicans, are they willing to enact legislation that provides financial support for families, funds school lunches, subsidizes pre-K, enforces a living wage, and delivers family healthcare?

No?

Then it’s not life they’re trying to protect; it’s control over women’s reproductive freedom. The battle for abortion rights is largely the imposition of a religious minority upon people of differing or no religious beliefs. It’s an abrogation of the 14th Amendment that prohibits all levels of government from advancing or inhibiting religion.

But I believe it goes a little deeper than that. At its heart, the Texas anti-choice movement is meant to punish women for actually having sex. These are the same people that refuse to allow health insurers to cover birth control. And in the case of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has been confined to a wheelchair since age twenty-six, it’s meant to punish women for refusing to have sex with him. Think I’m joking? Read this Texas Monthly article about Abbott’s notoriously thin-skinned and vindictive nature. Tell me I’m wrong.

Everything in life is about sex, except sex; sex is about power. And when you can’t have sex, what’s the next best thing?

Power to force an eleven-year-old incest victim to carry her rapist’s baby to term.

Power to doom a mother who's working two jobs to bring another child into poverty after her spouse walks out on her.

Power to condemn a woman into staying with her abuser because she’s unemployed, pregnant, and unlikely to get a job while she is pregnant.

For so many of these old male lawmakers, it’s water, water everywhere, and never a place to drink. All these beautiful women, not one of whom would spare them a second glance, even if they weren’t physically and psychologically repulsive. It’s Incels with the power to legislate; it’s revenge of the scorned—and perhaps more to the point, revenge of those no longer capable of sustaining an erection who must then punish the “harlots” for granting sexual access to other men.

Power, control, and misogyny. What a trifecta of evil.

From The Daily Don

Fortunately, some unlikely heroes are riding to the rescue. The Massachussetts-based Satanic Temple is mounting a robust pushback against Texas’s draconian abortion laws. Under the aegis of religious freedom (a precedent Christian religious encroachment itself has ironically paved the way for), the Satanic Temple recently noted on its website, “[We] stand ready to assist any member that shares its deeply held religious convictions regarding the right to reproductive freedom. Accordingly, we encourage any member who resides in Texas and wishes to undergo the Satanic Abortion Ritual within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy to contact The Satanic Temple so we may help them fight this law directly.”

That’s admirably ballsy.

The Satanic Temple successfully sued the Little Rock State Capitol in an effort to erect their own monument on public grounds.

There are others. The Texas Equal Access Fund, correctly believing that funding an abortion is “a radical act of kindness,” provides financial aid (and encourages donations) here. The Lilith Fund also helps people pay for an abortion when they can’t afford it. And in further proof that in a garden of weeds, sometimes roses will grow, Fund Texas Choice is helping Texas women travel across state lines to acquire a safe, legal abortion. If you have even a dollar to give, please donate freely.

What we need, of course, is a firewall of federal protection for women’s rights, and that will not be possible without your help. PLEASE VOTE in the upcoming elections. The time to double-check that your right to vote hasn’t been “mistakenly” revoked is now. Vote in every single election, especially midterms and local elections involving your schoolboard. If that’s all you can do to help right now, it’s a lot.

Human rights are women’s rights. No woman is free who is prohibited from controlling her own body. And I may suffer significant blowback for posting this article. I don’t care. Let someone take me to court for “aiding and abetting” pregnant women seeking abortions. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I let fear sideline me in this fight.

Do you have a reproductive health service you donate to? If so, please submit all contact information in the comment section below.

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