We're Not Gonna Take It

Waking Up to the Biggest Issue of the 2024 Election

(Please note that I started this piece more than two weeks ago before being struck down with my first case of Covid-19, which hit my slightly immune-depressed little person pretty hard. Still struggling to get well. More on that later.)

When I woke up that morning, I knew I had to do something to support women’s reproductive rights and healthcare in America. Such as they still are.

Maybe this happened because I am a regular reader of the Lucian Truscott Newsletter and he had just posted a fantastic piece called The Handmaid’s Court which I read before bed the night previous.

Maybe I can attribute it to the public vilification we have just witnessed against Dr. Claudine Gay, the now former president of Harvard University, whose concerns are not about reproductive rights but about being a knowledgeable Black woman in a leadership role at a longtime bastion of white male privilege.

This is what it comes down to. We are women who vote but we cannot exercise our opinions, nor physically control what happens to us, nor make choices in the best interests of our lives.

Because State government officials, nearly all men, have decided and ratified laws saying that these rights are not universal rights, because their fundamental Christianity tells them that women should not be able to govern what happens to their bodies.

Because even though our Constitution, which governs all of us and our laws and lawmakers, guarantees a separation of Church and State, their fundamental Christianity based on a book based on here say, is more right about what women should have than what we tell them we need.

I do not begin to know every woman’s pregnancy story. I do know about several that ended in abortion, because having a child with a particular partner would have amounted to a grievous error in life’s plan, not to mention a very unhappy and impoverished child with separated, unhappy parents.

Abortion. That word has been so weaponized against us. We are talking here about women’s reproductive health, not some garbage can procedure. The CDC reports that in 2021, 11.6% of 1,000 women ended a pregnancy for a total of 622,000 for that year. Out of 168 million women living in the US. Well before the Dobbs decision in June 2024. 93.%5 of these pregnancies were ended before the 13th week. Cleary, women are not as irresponsible as our State governments would have you believe.

But gee, what about adoption, says your Representative. Tell me who you know who has the fortitude to carry a child just to give it away. The emotional life of the mother - or of the father, for that matter - is never taken into consideration.

But let me tell you another story. This is my story. If Roe. v. Wade had not existed in 1990 and I lived in Texas at the time, I would most assuredly be dead.

Because I was pregnant with twins then and a high-risk patient. At 12 weeks, the sonographic equipment in my doctor’s office failed to detect fetal heartbeats. A few days went by and I did not miscarry. My doctor sent me to the hospital, a large medical center, where another sonogram with the most advanced equipment available, equally failed to detect fetal heartbeats.

Still, I did not miscarry.

Because I was a resident of New Jersey, a dilation and curettage procedure was scheduled for that day, no questions asked. It was emotionally traumatic because it was the second time, but I knew I would survive to try again.

But what would have been the outcome had a been at a hospital in Texas, in today’s world?

“Oooh, let’s wait another few days and see what happens! Those little beats may just be hiding!”

No, they weren’t hiding. I was carrying dead fetuses around inside of me. And within 3 days I would have been septic. Sepsis is associated with a high rate of maternal mortality. In other words, dead.

So how many of those 622,000 abortions performed in 2021 - 93.5 per cent were before the 13th week - how many of those were for fetal death, or genetic abnormalities incompatible with life, or some other extreme medical cause factor? Hard to say, because that is private medical information covered by the HIPPA statutes. But I will bet that a large percentage of these were necessary, life saving procedures. Even if the life saved was the mother’s, for either medical or mental health reasons, which are equally as valid.

What feels true to me in so many ways is that these harsh, legally indecipherable laws in states like Texas and Alabama (and Tennessee, Louisiana and Idaho) are meant to punish women for having the inconvenience of fertile uteruses. To punish women for their slatternly misuse of fertility by virtue of their rogue lifestyles. To corral, assault, embarrass and control women and their rogue fertility till they learn to behave like wives and mothers from the 1950s.

Because God told them women are chattel, not because He believed Eve when she admitted fault and forgave her. Not because every life is sacred because we know that ends when a woman with six children she cannot feed asks for SNAP or welfare support, and is denied.

And now the courts are coming for contraception? Oh hell no.

Who is with me? Do not quote me Scripture here. I’m not gonna take. it.