Call to Action: Day 4 of the Resistance

The Women's March, which had representation in all seven continents, took place on Saturday, January 21st, to the tune of 3.67 million marchers on the low end and 4.6 million on the high end of estimations. More than one out of every 100 Americans took to the streets to voice their outrage at this incoming administration and voice their determination to fight and resist at every turn. Many people, Drumpf included, voiced their confusion about the necessity of this march. They argued that women already have all the rights and privileges that they could possibly need. What was the point of this march, really?

A bill was recently introduced to the House of Representatives on Tuesday, January 17th. A full four days prior to the march, and yet nobody knew about its existence until yesterday and today. Even now, most people you inform of the existence of this bill are surprised to know that it's there. This bill, titled H.R.586, posits that "human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilization." This is why women marched. This is EXACTLY why. Because from the moment Drumpf set foot into the Oval Office, we knew that he and his administration would start decimating reproductive rights as we know them. This bill sets a dangerous precedent for our country, on a number of levels, and needs to be voted down.

If this bill passes into law, it will make abortion access, and very likely contraception, a thing of the past. With life defined as beginning at fertilization, abortion will be criminalized and defined as murder (even though, interestingly enough, when you ask pro-lifers what the punishment should be for women who have abortions, they usually cannot, or will not, give an answer). The "pro-lifers" who believe that contraception terminates pregnancies, some of whom are our political representatives, will look to deny women access to birth control using the language of H.R. 586 as their justification--seeing as "alternative facts" are perfectly acceptable now, the legitimate fact that contraception does not actually terminate pregnancies will not matter. Women's bodily autonomy will be a distant memory, and all the bloodshed from pre-Roe v. Wade will return to our doorsteps, back alleys, and hospital ERs in very short order. This bill will also set a dangerous precedent for women who have wanted pregnancies and are facing a miscarriage, fetal anomaly, or other medical issue that requires an abortion (early or late term). What's to stop Congress from forcing women to carry non-viable pregnancies to term, even if it kills them? What's to stop Congress from criminalizing miscarriages and imprisoning women for something along the lines of "suspected abortion?" What's to stop Congress from ultimately using The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary tale? 

The reality is that bills like these, laws like these, do not "save babies." They kill women. Women like Savita Halappanavar, who died after being refused a life-saving abortion during a miscarriage. Women like all those who died prior to the Roe v. Wade decision--approximately 5,000 women ANNUALLY in the United States--bleeding to death in back-alley abortion clinics and dying of sepsis in hospital emergency rooms from DIY abortions gone wrong. Women who poisoned themselves with whatever they had in their medicine and/or kitchen cabinets rather than go through with an unwanted pregnancy. As I wrote in a previous post, women will have abortions, bills and laws notwithstanding, whether they are safe or not. Whether they are done by a professional or a back-alley "doctor" or the woman herself. These politicians know this. They know. They know that women who do not want to be pregnant will do whatever they have to do in order to no longer be pregnant. They know that women who do not have access to safe, legal abortions generally end up injured or dead. 

But, as I also mentioned in that same previous post, it was never about protecting women's health. Our political representatives who claim to be "pro-life" are fully prepared to ignore (or even condone) the fully preventable deaths of actual living, breathing women, fully prepared to step over the corpses of women in the streets, in order to prove how "pro-life" they are. The fact of the matter is, we have laws in this country that state that we cannot be forced to donate organs, blood, or any other living tissue to another human being, EVEN AFTER WE ARE DEAD, unless our express consent has been given. And yet, somehow, it's perfectly acceptable to force women to give up their bodily autonomy for approximately 40 weeks--from the moment she becomes pregnant, her body is no longer hers. She becomes a mere vessel for the fetus. In many states where abortion access is practically nonexistent, pregnant women literally have fewer rights than corpses do. To say that this is unacceptable is the understatement of the century.

For those of you who have read up to this point, for those of you who are beyond angry, I'm issuing a call to action and I want you to do three things:

1. Contact your House representative and tell them to vote NO on H.R. 586
2. Contact your Senators and tell them to vote NO on H.R. 586
3. Read this short story titled "ILU-486". Bookmark it. Read it every day that you feel like you can't fight anymore, because this could very well be our reality if we don't fight back NOW.

I Just...Don't Want to be a Mother. There, I Said It.

[TW for severe gender essentialism and sarcastic violent imagery]

Actually, that's not 100% true. I'm about 95% sure that I don't want to be a mother. The other 5% is telling me that I will change my mind someday, but I can never be sure that it's my actual instincts telling me this or if it's the patriarchal idea that's been drilled into my head since day one that all women MUST WANT to become mothers or else they fail as women. Almost any time I find myself in a conversation about parenthood and my lack of desire to become a parent, I am made to justify my decision. It's interesting to note that, in the same conversation, any woman who expresses a positive attitude towards, and a desire for, motherhood is not made to justify her decision.

Most misogynists and gender essentialists seem to think that nurturing a child is the ultimate thing a woman can do with her life. Forget a career, forget traveling the world, forget everything else you've ever wanted to do with your life; unless you have a child, you're nothing. And gods forbid you ever express your complete non-desire to have children. At best, you will be told that you will change your mind in the future. At worst, you will be told that you are a selfish freak of nature and that you're not a "real woman." I actually had a woman in an online Pagan forum tell me that I was sick in the head and that I deserved to die alone and unhappy because I didn't want to have children.

Is choosing not to have children selfish? Yes. And I'm not saying that choosing not to have children is selfish as a bad thing; I think it's fucking great to be able to look at your life and what you want to do with it and realize that having children is truly not something you want. For example, there are so many things that I want to do with my life where children would just not fit. I want to be a college professor and write research papers for a living, which is going to take up a HUGE chunk of my time. I also want to travel the world, go out with friends on a regular basis, take in shows, go to a week-long Pagan festival in the woods, pick up and go to the beach on an arbitrary sunny day just because, spend a weekend doing nothing but relaxing in a bubble bath and reading, etc. etc. If I were to have children, I would never be able to do any of these things. I just wouldn't have the time. And, simply put, I just don't have the patience for it. Crying children, rather than warming the cockles of my ovaries, make me want to shoot myself in the face just to end the suffering.

Although I suppose there is an altruistic aspect to choosing not to become a parent; there's that whole "not having a child you don't want and fucking up all of your lives because of it" thing.

What it boils down to is this: parenthood is a deeply personal choice, a choice that nobody but the person and/or people involved in the process of creating (or not creating) the child can make. It is not a decision that anyone has to justify to anyone else. Do I have an agenda against women who want to become mothers? Not at all. I give the utmost credit to and absolutely applaud the women who are ready and willing to make the sacrifices that are necessary in order to take on motherhood. Notice the key words there: "ready and willing." These women made a choice to become mothers, and that is what feminism is all about: CHOICE. If you want to be a stay-at-home mom, great. If you want to be a working mother, fantastic. If you don't want to be a mother at all, more power to you! You are not any less of a woman because you have chosen not to make use of your ovaries. So many people seem to think that wanting children is this inborn, biological force of nature that nobody can escape, but the fact of the matter is, ever since I was a child, whenever I envisioned my future, it never had children in it.