Imagine this: One day you wake up and discover an entire state has passed a law that declares you are worthless.
You are no longer a person. You are a package - a package for a potential person. Picture the styrofoam Big Mac carton tumbling along the shoulder of the interstate. Remember the discarded, dented Budweiser can you kicked aside at the campground to pitch a tent. Recall the time you scraped a month-old Popsicle wrapper from the side of your garbage can. That's you.
Or rather, that's me. I am a discard. I am debris. I am a useless scrap of life, sacrificed.
"The momentum for a change in the national policy on abortion is going to come in the not-too-distant future," said Rep. Roger W. Hunt, a Republican who sponsored the bill. To his delight, abortion opponents succeeded in defeating all amendments designed to mitigate the ban, including exceptions in the case of rape or incest or the health of the woman. Hunt said that such "special circumstances" would have diluted the bill and its impact on the national scene.
Washington Post, February 23, 2006
Yes, that is my own bitter overemphasis above in that block quote, regarding the - don't laugh now - Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act.
I've taken a while to weigh in on this, waiting for the numbness to wear off. Well, it hasn't, and it seems it might not, ever. So I write anyway.
I can't rant like Maryscott (as disposable as a Bic now, in Sioux Falls) or dissect a legal argument like Georgia (as valued as a discarded condom wrapper at the foot of Mount Rushmore). All I've got for this one is grief. Great grief. I mean, they no longer even pretend I'm of value in my own right anymore. The mask is gone, the gloves are off and I'm despised and in a world of political hurt here, folks.
I feel like I've been jilted by an entire state, like the guy said to me: I was just pretending to love you all along. Actually, you bore me. You're brainless and a bother. I just wanted you for your body. Your body ... Your body .... And then slapped me on his way out the door. Slam.
And now there's this new guy in town, nosing around the edges of my life, name of Mississippi. He too seems to be awfully fixated on my body and its sexual potential. Hell, it seems there's a whole rabid pack of lustful Southern states itching to get their laws into my pants.
Funny how these guys all want me to stay home and raise their precious children - brainless, worthless and unable as I am to make moral and ethical decisions on my own behalf. Some kind of mother I'd make, eh?
Perhaps I'm taking this so double deluxe personally because I have two daughters, one of whom, if we had the godawful fate of living in Pierre, South Dakota, would most certainly be affected by this law. Sixteen years old, with half a dozen heart surgeries already under her belt, she'd probably be in that iffy gray area of getting a legal abortion there - the only exception to the ban is if the life of the mother is clearly at stake - and the illegal place of simply limping along for a few years with a failing right ventricle that was overloaded with fetal blood during pregnancy. And then, you know, dropping dead at age 23.
Let's just say South Dakota moved last week from ... oh, 48th on our list of college-shopping states to 50th.
Yeah ... yeah ... yeah, guys. I know this bill as written isn't likely to pass the constitutional test. I know they're just funning me and my girls, like the frat boy drunks who're going to wake up with a headache the next day and tell me: Really. I didn't mean it. I love ALL of you ... your brain, your courage, your humor, your ... uh ... your tits. No ... wait ... scratch that last one. I've got a hangover. Quit picking my words apart! Slap. Slam. Out the door. Leaving me shuddering and stunned with this message:
Rubbish reproducing rubbish reproducing rubbish, daughter to daughter to daughter, female begetting female begetting female, ad infinitum.
Not one of us sacred or of worth, once born.