Final Update on “Something Ugly This Way Comes”

Final clarification from the patient representative at Good Samaritan’s in Lafayette, CO, came in a phone call yesterday.  It seems that while the Little Sister of Ya-da-ya-da stand firm on their refusal to provide reproductive choice and care, they are “fully in support of advanced directives and sane end of life options.”  It is my cynical and well informed opinion that they are more likely “fully in support of” Medicare and ACA funding.

Be that as it may be, there is no insurance lobby to bring pressure on behalf of women and men in childbearing years to assert their rights to birth control and other forms of family planning.  There certainly is no pressure or special interest group powerful enough or rich enough to stand up for a woman’s right to choose.  Speaking of which, I once heard Chris Matthews demand to know why women talk about choice rather than just saying abortion.  He didn’t seem to understand the issue.  Let me make it clear, as I made it clear in an email to him.  We have always had abortion on demand in this country – we do it in hospitals now instead of garages.  De-legalize it and we go back to the garage; back to coat hangers and knitting needles; back to women bleeding out in piss filled alleys because they can’t get medical treatment fast enough to save their lives.  Therein rests the choice, and more to the point anyone who thinks that their smug and superior religious prejudices will prevent desperate women from pursuing desperate options has a serious problem – they are fucking delusional.

No one, be they a politician or a priest, a nun or televangelist has the legal right to tell a woman that she can’t have an abortion.  Safe, medical and therapeutic abortion has been the legal/medical standard of the land since Roe v. Wade became settled law in January of 1973.  A 7-2 majority in the highest court in the country upheld a woman’s right to control her own body by applying the 14^th Amendment’s implied right to privacy.  The only thing that can and will be done is the limiting of access to care.  Through state’s rights and religious freedom the tenets of one religious view are being legislated and commercialized into public policy that deprives women, of all faiths and creeds, of the ability to control their own reproductive processes.   Thus, taking us back to the 1950’s when the state, the church and/or the men in our lives owned our bodies, leaving us no option but to have children until our uterus prolapsed.  What you may ask of all the unwanted, poor or starving children that result from such an arcane policy?  Well, the Catholics and other denominations have their charities which have yet, by the way, failed to solve the problems of poverty or hunger.  While most of the politicians making these idiotic laws consider bloated corporations more deserving of their assistance then hungry children.

So, the next time we have an election those who don’t turn up to vote because they are lazy, apathetic or think they are proving some obscure point by “sitting it out,” might give some thought to who the hell they are empowering, disempowering, disenfranchising, marginalizing and even helping to harm unto death.  They might give it some real deep thought because the rights, options and future with which they are gambling very well could be their own.