Stop Assault on Women's Health
I am a mother of a 26-year-old daughter. Next to my husband, she is the most important person in my life. Since the day she was born, I worry about her. When she lay in her cradle, I would awake in the middle of the night to make certain she was breathing. As you can imagine, given Covid and now the Delta variant, I worry daily that she will catch this infectious disease.
Now I have a new worry.
While, thankfully, my daughter does not live in Texas, over 7 million women with the ability to become pregnant do.
When I was a teenager I learned about right-wing fanatics concerned about sex before marriage. My education to place in my home, at the dinner table where my father preached nightly about my virginity. I remember sitting with my grandmother, his mother, asking why it was so important that I be a virgin. She shook her head and said, “I don’t know why he has become like this.” I asked her if I had to be a virgin when I got married. She sighed and said, “I don’t think you should buy a shoe until you try it on.”
What will happen to the girls in Texas who might willingly or unwillingly have sex and discover themselves pregnant? Most doctors won’t perform an abortion until the fetus is six weeks old as it might be incomplete and thus endanger the life of the mother. Texas law SB8 bans most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and is the most restrictive law in the nation in terms of access to abortion services. This is 18 weeks earlier than the legal standard set by Roe v. Wade, which allows abortion up until about 24 weeks, roughly the point when a fetus can survive outside the womb.
The Texas law is based on cardiac activity detected on ultrasound as a heartbeat which is false. It’s only electrical activity as the valves of the heart have not yet formed. The sound doesn’t even indicate the pregnancy is viable.
Let’s not forget that all life is based on energy and energy cannot be destroyed.
This small bit of energy will transform into something else if its path to becoming a baby is changed. Creating a law around a six-week-old fetus accomplishes nothing other than to burden a mother with a possible child (assuming it grows to sustainability and has no health issues) of which no support around raising the child (home, healthcare, education) is guaranteed.
We are a country founded on the separation of church and state. We currently have a federal law that allows for abortion.
Nearly 1 in 4 women will have one abortion by the age of 45.
I don’t have a number for how many of them will become anti-abortion right-wingers once they used the law to help themselves.
We must be open about abortion and stop the stigma. Where is our flag? What is our color? What is our Facebook banner? Let’s finally come out of the closet and demand our rights. Let’s follow the path laid out by our gay brothers and sisters. Let’s begin by supporting our enslaved sisters in Texas while we ensure that our home states do not follow Texas’ lead. Let’s support Merrick Garland as he works to overturn the Texas law.
Now is the time we must have courage to stand up for all women’s reproductive rights!