The First Anniversary of No Roe

When Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, I kept waiting for my reaction. Waited for the wringing of my hands and for all the righteous anger I’ve been feeding for fifty years to well up and erupt. In my mind, I sat on the curb for a good while watching the parade go by – the evangelists, the abortion rights folks, pandering politicians, frightened doctors, women, who, if such things still existed, might be standing in a phone booth, digging through their purses for a quarter to make a phone call to someone, anyone who could get them out of their terrible jam.

But the reaction never came. Well, that’s a lie. The bitterness came. But it’s hard to demonstrate bitterness, to properly manifest its dark and piercing magnitude. It’s something so beyond anger, so cellular, biological. Bone-filled, if you want an image.

I listened yesterday, on this one-year anniversary, as news stations talked about women and girls in horrible situations because of No Roe. A woman whose fetus was determined to have a fatal condition – growing without the back of its head or with its heart deformed beyond words or a young girl who had been raped and had become pregnant. And it all sounded to me like the debates policymakers used to have about who were the “worthy poor.”

If you met certain conditions, if you were thrifty and sober and grateful, then you were the deserving poor. If you were bad with money, drank too much, and thought the government was too nosy and said so, then, well, you deserved directions to the nearest almshouse.

Yesterday, I listened to a very long public radio segment on how the abortion ban has affected women in Texas. Two women – one with means and another without – faced similar and catastrophic situations with their pregnancies. One traveled and one stayed home. We know what that means. The piece was about deservedness, how surely, a woman carrying a fetus doomed to pain and death after birth, should be able to get abortion care.

I wanted to pull the car over, roll down the windows, and scream YOU DON’T HAVE TO HAVE A REASON! You don’t have to tell anyone, justify anything, scour your life for reasons to have an abortion. You own your own body. It’s really the only thing you own in life. You own your own self and all the places and things in your own self. They belong to you. You get to say. You are the only one who gets to say.

And that was, I guess, the moment my bitterness turned back into its mother – anger.

Happy anniversary.

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Photo by Marissa Lewis on Unsplash