Thirty Five

I work for Planned Parenthood. I work to raise money to fund reproductive health services and education for the counties we serve, and to fund the advocacy that protects our right to provide those services. One of the services we provide is first term abortion, a medical procedure that terminates a pregnancy in its first three months. My work is incredibly important to me, but most of the the time I try not to talk about it too much. Now is not going to be one of those times.
Today is the 35th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that protects a woman's right to choose. Its author, Justice Harry Blackman, wrote the decision six months after helping his twenty year-old daughter find an illegal abortion.
This case is at the center of all the work I do, and it's weak. It's easy to knock holes in Roe, and it's easy to put limitations on it. The only thing that keeps it standing is the grassroots movement that I am proud to belong to, and the power that individual men and women can exert when they raise their voices in support of what they believe in. In the end, that's probably all that can keep anything standing.
Roe vs. Wade is about life and death. Both its supporters and its detractors can agree on that. They say we're ending innocent lives. They say we're killing babies. We say something different. We say that Roe saves lives.
Banning abortions won't stop women from having them. It will stop poor women, young women, minority women, rural women, and abused women from having them safely. They will go back to back alleys and coat hangers, while women with resources will find private doctors or fly to other countries in secret. We know this is what will happen, because it happened before. Ten thousand women died from botched abortions the year before Roe passed, and thousands more were scarred, mutilated, or left sterile. Without the protection of this case, women would die in the thousands again.
So many people believe what we do is wrong, that our doctors are murderers, that we're liars and child-haters, that we protect rapists and pedophiles, that we brainwash women who would otherwise be good and loving mothers. Strangers scream at me on the street when I walk into my office and harass our patients with bloody portraits of crying infants. I don't blame them. If I believed, truly believed, that there was a building in my neighborhood where they killed infants and lied to their mothers, I would be out of the street screaming with them.
I don't believe that. I do not believe that a ball of cells smaller than a quarter is a viable human life. I've seen literally hundreds of women walk through our doors, and they don't believe it either. The mothers and fathers who are our doctors and nurses don't believe it. But none of that belief means anything. All that matters is the law that says that it is your right as a human being and as a patient to decide the outcome of your pregnancy with your doctor. As long as that stays on the books, they can scream and wave their signs and call us killers from dawn til dusk, and they can't stop us. It's the law, and its on our side.
I don't want anyone to have to have an abortion. They're very painful and deeply upsetting and they force you to make a choice that you wish to hell you'd never even had to consider. I want every child in this world to be conceived and born with love into a world where they are cherished and wanted. I want women to understand their bodies and know the right time to become sexually active, and choose when the right time is to become mothers. I want us to be an educated, caring society that puts its children first.
We're not living in the world I want. We live in a country where we tell students nothing about their bodies or their sexuality, where women and men have no access to contraception, where there is incest and rape and plain goddamn bad luck and bad planning. We live in a country where we need Roe vs. Wade. I wish we didn't, but until we don't, I'm going to do everything I can to keep it standing. Here's to another 35 years, Roe. I hope to God that we don't need them.