I’m not sure which part of this op-ed is the most dispiriting. A strong, strong contender for first place has to be the fact that a state legislator was reprimanded for saying the word “uterus.” Are you kidding me? How do people like this get elected? It is a part of the human body! Was the person doing the reprimanding (I am going to go ahead and assume said person was male; yes, I’m assuming facts not in evidence and I don’t care), offended because a uterus is part of the FEMALE body? Someone please tell me what is so icky about the word uterus. This is appalling. (And I haven’t even touched on the rest of the piece regarding the horrifying, hypocritical, backward, punitive, nasty bills and amendments to laws being pushed through statehouses all over the country, not just in Indiana and Florida).
You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to take this particular individual who can't stand the word uterus and wave a magic wand and turn this person into a scared 19 year old girl, one born into poverty who finds herself pregnant. She already has one child that she can barely afford to clothe and feed because she gets paid minimum wage. The father of that child took off leaving her without any help. Her parents kicked her out when she got pregnant with that first child. She is desperate and alone and afraid and she decides to have an abortion. Except – ooops! – she lives in Mississippi or South Dakota or Indiana or any number of other states where abortion clinics have been closed and the closest Planned Parenthood clinic is several hours away, not that she’d be able to drive there anyway because she doesn’t own a car – she takes the bus everywhere. And let’s just go ahead and decide that she can afford the bus fare to the clinic that is several hours away from her home. What she cannot afford is the abortion itself nor can she take a day off of work and forgo that day’s wages. It’s too bad there isn’t a Planned Parenthood clinic nearby where she could get help. Where she would be able to obtain an abortion (paid for with money from PRIVATE DONATIONS not federal funding). A safe abortion, with sterilized equipment and caring doctors and nurses to remind her that she did not do anything wrong, that she IS not doing anything wrong. So she becomes even more desperate and even more afraid. She decides that she’ll perform an abortion on herself with a coat hanger, just like women used to do before abortion was made legal in this country. So she goes ahead and takes a coat hanger and unwinds it and puts it into her vagina and through her cervix into her uterus (yes, uterus, that evil word that should never be uttered), and she scrapes and scrapes and scrapes and bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. And she cries because it hurts and she cries because she is all by herself and she cries because she is terrified. And then she prays and prays and prays that she doesn’t get an infection that could kill her because she was forced to use a coat hanger on herself. And she prays that she is all right and can continue to take care of the child she already has whom she loves with all of her might.
And then, at the moment that she is lying there on her blood soaked sheets, wondering if she will be okay, hurting and cramping and crying, I will wave a magic wand again and transform that girl back into the small, pitiful legislator, with the memories of his time as that 19 year old girl completely intact. And we’ll see what happens.
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