Epic Churchillian column by the incomparable Clara Waldhari, who earned her advanced degree in journalism at the University of Arizona, where she met and married sagacious Carl Halbirt, our City of St. Augustine's first City Archeologist, 1990-2018.
By Clara Waldhari / St. Augustine
Posted May 25, 2019 at 7:44 PM
GUEST COLUMN: Our bodies, our decision, and now our fight (St. Augustine Record)
Forget The Handmaid’s Tale, a work of fiction written by the inestimable Margaret Atwood in 1986. Truth is stranger than fiction.
It is also amoral and outrageous that, in 2019, women face losing control over their reproductive health care. This is the right to make decisions about our own bodies. We are to be legislated by OWGs (Old White Guys) who have done in their lives nothing but contribute sperm. And not always in the way God intended.
The Republican Party has been working assiduously to take Roe v. Wade out of federal hands and place decisions for reproductive health care only in the hands of each state. We’ve seen in these past few weeks the degree to which women are reviled for their ability to continue the species. We should be exalted and celebrated.
Instead, the Evangelical Right has been the ants to our grasshoppers. We mostly coalesce when big hits threaten our dominion over our own bodies.
Medical ethicists don’t agree when life begins. Many do agree it is when the fetus is viable outside the womb. Until then, although it might be formed in human shape, aborted fetuses have not the developed systems to live. You might ask, “Why wait so long?” That is never an easy question. There are as many responses as there are unwanted pregnancies.
Some women don’t test positive. It’s too early. Others might be unaware or in denial or shock. Yet the choice to end an unwanted pregnancy is no one’s right or business but the pregnant woman and her doctor. This is not a matter for God or his poor, deluded, hateful minions on Earth to decide for us. Women can, should, and shall make their own decisions about what happens to their own bodies.
If you don’t like abortion, then don’t have one. Better, why not adopt some of those children born unwanted? Where are you all who profess to love God and Jesus and are taught to treat people (including women) in the Christian way? You are hypocrites. You have no comprehension of what a woman endures when faced with the choice of an abortion. Contrary to popular belief, the number of abortions has gone down in the United States. Many countries in Eastern Europe and other countries use abortion as birth control. Because we have access to the pill and other contraceptive devices (for men, which they refuse to use), abortions here have diminished.
The most brutal of all is to waive the right for victims of rape and incest. Have you Christians no comprehension? No empathy? Are you so stupid as to think rape is sex and not power? Are you so stupid as to ignore, despite your Biblical teachings, that incest is evil? Pitiable.
I believe now that Roe well could be overturned, given the demonic Supreme Court appointees made by your “president.”
We will be there. We will be everywhere. We will not take “no” for an answer. Your ilk is what is wrong with our species and each one of you in favor of recent states’ proscriptions should be extirpated with haste.
Tea Party-ers, you are included. OWGs know nothing about equality under the law.
I’ve been saying, “Stay Out of Our Wombs” for 50 years. I will use every day given to me by this universe to fight you to the figurative death.
Pro-Choice women will run for office, win, and be in positions to restore our reproductive health care. We shall never forget. We shall never again return to coat-hanger abortions and death by sepsis. We remember. And we shall win.
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