(no subject)

[novapsyche]

The scary thing is, I can imagine myself (or someone like me) bending down to my own children years from now, telling them, "I remember when abortion was legal." You know, how someone today might remember when LSD and pot weren't illegal.

The possibility itself is frightening.

I am not pre-pregnant. If anything, I'm post-pregnant. I've been pregnant before. I'm not planning on being so again any time soon. But if and when I do, that decision should be on my terms.

I already take vitamin supplements, folic acid, zinc, magnesium, iron--just about everything they recommend for women except calcium. I don't smoke. I drink socially. I'm not in the best physical health, but a good reason to get me to exercise is not because I might, at some point in the future, become pregnant. That's not a motivator for me.

I remember remarking to dionysus1999 not too long ago that there is a crackdown on women's rights in this country, and he kind of looked at me like I was spouting crazy talk. As a child born in the wake of Roe, I see it. The backlash some pseudofeminists predicted in the '80s and early '90s is finally hitting us. The movement just needed a president receptive to the ideas of regressive ultraconservatives. (Because the only way to make America strong is to make the family strong, which means a nuclear family, which means rolling back the freedoms privileges that women have enjoyed since the end of WWII. Never mind that the age that these people idolize lasted for less than twenty years.) To be honest, I can see things, if they get a foothold, going all the way back to when women were diagnosed as "hysterical" and confined to bedrest until they went somewhere mentally like in The Yellow Wallpaper.

I am not a descriptor of my womb. My reproductive status does not define me.