The March for Life in 2020 – Wikipedia
I’m finding it difficult to celebrate my 85th birthday, the anniversary of the decision half a century ago that legalized abortion, forbidding the states to outlaw abortion in all cases and asserting this freedom as a constitutional right. What has dismayed me most is the large photo at the top of the front page of The New York Times yesterday morning showing a sea of young women, wearing blue hats, their hands over their hearts as they rejoiced in this curtailment of our freedom.
I don’t understand. Perhaps some of my younger women readers can explain it to me.
I thought a parallel picture might show the three women I saw this morning, in long dresses and kerchiefs, patrolled by a patriarch with a long beard, outside the gas station, apparently stranded, the youngest woman of the group squatting on the sidewalk.
Instead I saw another photo from the demonstration in Washington, showing Dominican friars in their flowing black and white robes parading under a banner supporting this ban. It seems likely they never have and never will face the excruciating choice we women, if we are honest, face at many points in our young lives.
Should we accuse ourselves of carelessness? Of failing to use birth control, or to force our men to wear condoms which they seem to oppose and resent?
If so, I stand so accused. Before Roe v. Wade was passed, I secured two illegal abortions; well-off women always could. I might have prevented both my pregnancies with a little more wisdom than I possessed; one man was totally unreliable, and I knew this, and the other pregnancy would have seriously impacted my career.
But does any women deserve to suffer the consequences that denial to access will cause?
The repeal will impact poor minority women most. Studies show that women who will be denied access to legal abortion are four times more likely to live beneath the federal poverty line and three times more likely to be unemployed; they are also more likely to put up with abusive partners.
Who cares? Not the many among us, apparently, who believe that poor women deserve to be punished in every way possible. They are morally responsible for their poverty.
Another striking fact is that 59 percent of our citizens support legal abortion in all or most cases, 68 percent of Catholics support Roe, and one of our four Catholic women has had an abortion. Why can’t we summon the fire and the zeal to defeat an impassioned minority?
If Roe falls, twenty-eight states will immediately ban all abortions, headed, as always, by Texas. This includes states from Idaho and Arizona in the west to Ohio and Florida and covers 36 million women of reproductive age.
Not here in New Mexico, thank God, where our majority Democrat legislature and our woman governor have already worked to ensure that abortion remains legal. We’re within driving distance of a lot of Texas though, so pregnant women who live there will certainly overwhelm our one women’s health clinic.
God help us, so divided, so intent on preserving and enshrining our differences.
You are so right, Sallie. Abortion laws only apply to poor women. And, abortion laws don’t stop abortions; laws stop safe abortions from happening. We must stop forcing poor women to have babies they don’t want or can’t afford. It’s bad for all of us.
Thank you, Sallie, for your words and leadership on this sensitive subject. Being from TX and having an abusive husband there it was not questioned that I would be kept “barefoot and pregnant” as my TX father said after he found out about the abuse. My parents helped me with the divorce and moving to NM. I have four wonderful children and love them dearly from that relationship — which lasted 25 yrs. However, if I had not been “fortunate” enough to have had a medically necessary hysterectomy at the young age of 28 I am sure I would have had a houseful of children. I am very lucky to have had the ability to move to NM when I did in 2000 and found the support here that I needed. There are many women in TX who are stuck and do not have that opportunity to get out and move. Most places in TX are generally run by powerful men who reign with an iron fist, or in my case an abusive tongue. If you are somehow different, or choose to believe something different, you are ostracized and abused, or you just learn to keep your mouth shut. God bless those who have the courage to speak out in TX and other states which might consider knocking down these hard-fought laws.