Cancelled: Independence Day, because women have none.
Let me start by saying this is not my fight in the sense that I, personally, have something at stake. I am past child-bearing years so the overturning of Roe v. Wade and all the restrictions on a woman’s reproductive system that come with it will not effect me, but if you are like me, let’s not make the mistake of thinking this mess is not going to impact our lives because failure to fight such moral turpitude is complacent, and complacency is how the world goes dark. If history has taught us anything, complacent people get kicked to the curb because they don’t think the world is coming for them until it’s too late. Just ask any one of the 6.6 million people living in refugee camps.
Barring divine intervention — like Zechariah getting the nod from Archangel Gabriel about his elderly wife, Elizabeth, and her pregnancy with John the Baptist — that ship has sailed for me, but not for my daughters, and for them, and every other woman I love, I can never stop fighting until, and this is the tricky part, we EVOLVE into the amazing race of humans we were destined to be, not this crazy, tribal, hunkered-down caricature version of ourselves we have become.
Imagine living in Texas right now, having a miscarriage, and being too afraid to tell anyone because you think they might arrest you and send you to jail, leaving the kids you have at home to grow up motherless. Under the Texas abortion ban laws, you experience one of the most crushing moments of your life and rather than being able to look to your friends and community for support in dealing with such an unmooring personal tragedy, you are forced to hide your pain or risk the tragedy becoming public. Don’t think this is just conjecture. As Brian Stevenson chronicled in Just Mercy, Marsha Colbey spent five years in prison after the state of Alabama determined she was liable for her stillborn child’s death. The overturning of Roe v. Wade feels like a witch trial where the rules are rigged from the start.
I had two miscarriages as a married woman after trying for years to have a baby. If I had those miscarriages today, living in Texas, I may have ended up in jail. So I ask all the whack-a-mole legislators in all the states that wrote such disgusting…
