blogging for choice
Jan. 22nd, 2007 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseToday is Blog for Choice day--the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I think.
I wasn't always really pro-choice. My mama raised me to be, but I didn't understand the things she told me for a long time. She said that the government shouldn't control women's bodies. And I thought, but it does. It tells us not to use our bodies to stab someone. It tells me to not imbibe alcohol. I said that I was pro-choice but. I could never get the idea of the poor little baby out of my head.
Then I grew up. I became sexually active. I started hearing some of the stories of the women of my family--my grandmother who had a college scholarship, was going to be a journalist, got pregnant at eighteen and never got to go, married instead. My aunt, who got pregnant within months of her youngest's birth, who didn't know about it until the second trimester because she was nursing an infant and a two-year-old and trying to deal with my uncle's extreme depression at the same time. she told me once that she thinks, if she had had that baby, my uncle would have died.
And I grew in to my feminism, read about how so so many fertilized eggs never implant in the womb in the first place, about how fathers are not obligated by law to donate their kidneys to their babies, so how can women be legally held to giving their blood and their breath? The image before my eyes when I had disagreed with my mother had been of a baby floating in a bubble. I had to grow up before I could see the woman, could see that the baby was living off of that woman's life, was connected to her like an organ.
My doubts didn't last very long. It makes sense that I had them--little kids don't understand a lot of things. What's sad is that not everyone can grow up enough to see what giving birth does to our mothers. I didn't know it then, but my mother was very sick after my little sister was born. It took years for her body to recover, and in those years she was scary-thin and weak and had horrible dizzy spells.
I want children very very badly. If I could choose babies now and college later, if I could still have my full strong life easily after raising children, I would do it in an instant. I can't right not--the world gives us higher education at one point only, for the most part. I have to build my career right now. But children will happen for me before I finish my PhD, if I can do anything about it. I want love need babies. But no woman should be forced. Two months ago, I was doing a bit of jiggering with my birth control--switched from the patch to the ring. I didn't like it, and switched right back after a month, but somehow in the change of hormones my period that cycle was three days later. I've never had a late period in my life--almost ten years of menstruation and I've always been regular as a clock. And I was late that once, and I was so so afraid. No woman should have to be afraid like that.
I wasn't always really pro-choice. My mama raised me to be, but I didn't understand the things she told me for a long time. She said that the government shouldn't control women's bodies. And I thought, but it does. It tells us not to use our bodies to stab someone. It tells me to not imbibe alcohol. I said that I was pro-choice but. I could never get the idea of the poor little baby out of my head.
Then I grew up. I became sexually active. I started hearing some of the stories of the women of my family--my grandmother who had a college scholarship, was going to be a journalist, got pregnant at eighteen and never got to go, married instead. My aunt, who got pregnant within months of her youngest's birth, who didn't know about it until the second trimester because she was nursing an infant and a two-year-old and trying to deal with my uncle's extreme depression at the same time. she told me once that she thinks, if she had had that baby, my uncle would have died.
And I grew in to my feminism, read about how so so many fertilized eggs never implant in the womb in the first place, about how fathers are not obligated by law to donate their kidneys to their babies, so how can women be legally held to giving their blood and their breath? The image before my eyes when I had disagreed with my mother had been of a baby floating in a bubble. I had to grow up before I could see the woman, could see that the baby was living off of that woman's life, was connected to her like an organ.
My doubts didn't last very long. It makes sense that I had them--little kids don't understand a lot of things. What's sad is that not everyone can grow up enough to see what giving birth does to our mothers. I didn't know it then, but my mother was very sick after my little sister was born. It took years for her body to recover, and in those years she was scary-thin and weak and had horrible dizzy spells.
I want children very very badly. If I could choose babies now and college later, if I could still have my full strong life easily after raising children, I would do it in an instant. I can't right not--the world gives us higher education at one point only, for the most part. I have to build my career right now. But children will happen for me before I finish my PhD, if I can do anything about it. I want love need babies. But no woman should be forced. Two months ago, I was doing a bit of jiggering with my birth control--switched from the patch to the ring. I didn't like it, and switched right back after a month, but somehow in the change of hormones my period that cycle was three days later. I've never had a late period in my life--almost ten years of menstruation and I've always been regular as a clock. And I was late that once, and I was so so afraid. No woman should have to be afraid like that.