Wish us well

 Don't wish me a happy Mother's Day.

 

I am a person.

 

A person with a uterus.

 

A person who has grown fetuses. Birthed babies

 

I am a person who has chosen a path.

 

A path that was sometimes made rockier because people can identify me as a woman.

 

Considered less. Valued less. Always expected to do more ... with less. 

 

Separate. Not equal. That's life. 

But as we face a new dystopian future, I am a very unhappy mother.

 

True, I have moved past the phase in my life where my body can grow an organ to sustain a fetus. But my body has done this twice. Both times it was daunting and not without unpleasant and frightening complications. 

 

I didn't fully understand the seemingly limitless risks involved in pregnancy and childbirth as I was about to undertake them. A lot of the choices came down to probabilities calculated by others with more knowledge about all the complications that could occur. The cynical part of me would tell you they didn't want me to worry my pretty little head about.

 

The truth is there are so many things that can go wrong, it would be near impossible to explain all of them in the course of a single office visit.

 

That's what I told myself In the aftermath of my pregnancies: Everyone did their best. Because how could an ordinary person willingly put themselves at such risk when the outcome could be as life ending as life affirming? 

 

People who want babies will.

 

But why should people who don't want children be forced to take any of those risks?  A decision made by five people in a marble courthouse who firmly and cynically  believe laws that made abortion understood as a constitutional right were, instead, “wrongly decided” and not “settled law” after all? Five originalist thinkers working us back into a place where our inhabitants are either enslavers or the enslaved.

Unacceptable.

 

Your husband can’t make you give him a kidney, but he can make you give him a kid? 

 

And the state will enforce this labor. And not only will it enforce it, it will ensure that the labor is as hard and hurtful as humanly possible.

 

Do we accept this as we have accepted restricted access to abortion and birth control? Like we have allowed over-burdensome regulations: Forced cooling periods; multiple and unnecessary medical procedures. Extreme scrutiny including the gauntlet of harassment that has accompanied us to even the most routine medical exams and procedures?  

 

Do we accept another hurdle to proper care like we accepted the impossibility of getting birth control from the dominant Catholic healthcare system?

 

As I contemplate these questions, I wonder what my life would have been like had this country fully embraced my humanity. I can’t imagine what my daughter’s experience will be when our country denies hers entirely. 

 

The dystopian future that Margret Atwood showed us just a few decades ago in literature seems closer than ever to becoming real life. Parts of it have always been here. 

 

It’s not ironic that the handful of extremists on the Supreme Court shaping this future have relied on the great injustices of our past to get us there. 

 

There is no going back. Not because we have come "too far," but because we haven't gone nearly far enough. 

Don't wish your mother a happy day today. Wish her a healthy one.