(because) The moon is always female (also the title of an excellent book of poetry by Marge Piercy)

The title of this post was my standard answer when I was pregnant with Art Child and people would inevitably ask, “Again?! How many babies are you going to have?”

It was none of anybody’s business how many children Husband and I chose to have. You know what else is nobody’s business? How many babies a woman chooses not to have, or why she and her partner, or she alone makes that choice.

Women have never been equal in this country (note that the ERA was never actually passed, though it was first introduced in Congress in 1923). We’ve been closer and further, but never equal. Now, after years of steady progress, we’re about to be manacled to the nursery as we haven’t been since the 1970s. This week the House passed a ban on abortions at/after 20 weeks. Will it pass in the Senate? Who knows? I’ll tell you what I do know, no woman chooses to have an abortion for the hell of it at any point in a pregnancy, and certainly not after growing a baby for 20 weeks. The vast majority of abortions performed beyond that point are done because of fatal fetal defects. Fatal. Not learning disabilities, not a fixable heart defect, or the “wrong” sex, or blue eyes instead of brown, not because a woman decided it was an inconvenient time after all. Included in this bill is the criminalization of doctors who choose to perform late term abortions.

Today I saw this gem. The White House is set to repeal the federal requirement that employers cover birth control (without copays) in their offered health insurance plans.  In order to keep this post under a gazillion words, I won’t even start on the fact that easier, affordable access to birth control has contributed to abortion rates being lower than at any point since the passage of Roe v Wade.

Make no mistake, this has nothing to do with being pro-life, this is about being anti-women. This is about further blurring the separation between church and state. This is about control, misogyny, and living under an administration that condones violence against women. If it was about pro-life, we wouldn’t have a White House and a GOP doing everything possible (which is a lot) to take away health care from women and children. They already let CHIP lapse, which means 9 million children are about to lose health insurance.  They’re doing everything possible to reduce with an eye towards eliminating Medicaid, which is the gov’t sponsored health insurance that covers the very poorest children and the disabled. Also today, reporting that 45 and the White House have given directives to do everything possible to have the ACA fail. This isn’t a political strategy, this is an inhumane, callous and calculated attack on the most vulnerable members of our society, to go along with the attack on women. If any of these pompous, hypocritical blowhards in the White House and GOP cared about life they’d care about tending to the lives of those who are here and suffering now.

It may take a village, but that isn’t what most of us have. This isn’t going to end. It won’t stop until women have no access to birth control or safe and legal abortions, because Big Daddy’s gonna take care of us. He’s gonna take care of us right into our mass graves.

What? You aren’t a member of the White House or GOP but feel so strongly against abortion that it shouldn’t be legal? Congratulations on the adoption of your 15th unwanted and/or medically needy child. Congratulations too, on raising your sons not to objectify women, not to ever have sex (married or not) if they don’t want a child, not to keep knocking up their wimmenz until their brains and their uteruses leak, not to rape, letting them know the responsibility of rape is on the rapist, always, never the victim, and of course, that they need to do a full 50% of the diaper changing, child rearing, school meetings and function attending, doctor visits, and of course, the laundry.  What? You haven’t seen fit to adopt as many children as you can stuff into your home, whether you can afford them or not, whether you’ve got the time to give each one of those children the attention they need, and are just fine with their health insurance being stripped away, and without raising them with the weight of being told how lucky they are that you rescued them like a wormy, emaciated puppy found in the parking lot? You haven’t explained to your sons that what she was wearing doesn’t matter? Did you explain to those oh-so-wanted-and-valued children that it was ok to vote for a man who thinks it’s his right to grab women by the pussy because he’s rich? No? You didn’t/don’t do all of these things? Then maybe, just maybe, you should live your life the way you see fit without stripping away anyone else’s rights, and everyone else can do the same.