From Starhawk —
I was moved, last night, listening to Senator Gary Peters from Michigan tell Rachel Maddow the story of his wife’s abortion, how, when her waters accidentally broke four months into a very much wanted pregnancy, and the fetus had no chance of survival, the hospital refused her an abortion, threatening her life.
You can watch the video here: https://www.msnbc.com/.../senator-voices-pain-politics-of...
With the Republicans poised to jam through an anti-abortion activist to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat, it’s time for a #metoo moment for reproductive choice, time to fill the airwaves and flood the politicians’ phones and email accounts and offices with our stories. If you are a young person, you didn’t live through the era of back-alley abortions, of pierced wombs and infections and premature deaths. But those of us who did have stories of our own—and it is time to tell them now.
If I had an abortion story, I would tell it. I don’t. My story is what might at first seem like the opposite. I was always careful, and I had access to birth control. But the pills made me bloated and uncomfortable. Diaphragms and condoms were awkward and not always effective—and required a meticulous discipline that in my young and wild days I wasn’t always capable of.
So I got the newest (at the time), most advanced form of birth control available—an IUD. It was the infamous Dalkon Shield, which gave me and thousands of other women silent infections and left us with scarred tubes—something I didn’t discover until, in my early forties when I was finally ready to have the child I had always longed for, I couldn’t. That is the greatest sorrow of my life.
What does this have to do with abortion?
Just this—physiology is complicated. Things go wrong. Accidents happen. Those of us who bear a uterus and all that goes with it have many, many choices to make over a lifetime. We are the ones who live with the consequences. We have the right to make those choices, to wrestle with the moral dictates of our own consciences, in these most intimate of decisions.
I know people of good conscience who are anti-abortion, who also work for peace and feed the hungry and truly cherish life. But the anti-abortion forces, on the whole, are the same forces that are trying to take away health care from millions of people, the same forces that condone ripping children from their parents’ arms at the border and locking little ones up in cages, the same forces that oppose fertility treatments, that deny climate change, that refuse to do something as simple as wearing a mask to protect the lives of others.
We must do everything we can to stop them from blocking our choices, restricting our freedoms, and taking control of our basic right to self-determination.
The Democrats may not have the power to keep the Republicans from ramming this confirmation through. But power ultimately rests with us, the people. Now is the time to use it!
If you have a story, now is the time to tell it.
If you have a voice, now is the time to raise it.
If your Senators are standing on the side of choice, send them your blessings and support. If they are determined on this travesty of justice, flood them with outrage! Donate to their opponents, and vote them out!
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