Slut. Prostitute. So much sex she can't afford the birth control. Boyfriends around the block. Aspirin between the knees. Now, add this in... single motherhood as child abuse in Wisconsin.
Is it 1968 again?
Let me tell you what it was like to be unmarried and pregnant in 1968.
There was no access to birth control unless you were married and had your husband's permission.
The pill did not yet exist (edit: for you, if you were unmarried.).
You could get an abortion IF a panel of three psychiatrists said that bearing a child would be hazardous to your mental health. Of course, lots of women had no idea that you could even get a hospital abortion. It wasn't common knowledge. I was working in a medical facility as a nurses' aide, and I did not know. If you did somehow obtain the abortion, you then would have on your medical record that you were too mentally ill, too unstable to bear a child.
On the other hand, if you WERE unmarried and pregnant, social workers and yes, some physicians labeled you mentally ill. Don't believe me?
Read this.
And this.
Either way, you were labeled - mentally ill. Neurotic.
An unwed, pregnant woman who had been abandoned by her inseminator was often abandoned by her family, as well. Many of us were locked up in maternity "homes" ( really, maternity reformatories) to have our babies and to "give them up" for adoption.
We didn't give our babies up. Our babies were taken.
We were forced to carry children and then give birth. We were labeled sexual deviants, highly conflicted women. We were told over and over and over, while locked up in those places, that we were so ill, we would harm our own babies. Imagine that. A charge like that, made up out of whole cloth. Based on some woman's theory that any unmarried pregnant woman was a very sick individual. A borderline criminal.
Can you imagine that?
Perhaps you can.
We were cut off from the outside world. There was one phone in the reformatory. Your phone time was monitored. At that time, there were of course no computers, or personal communication devices. We were not permitted outside the home at all for the first month as a resident. After the first month, you were allowed to leave with a chaperone, for one hour a week. Our mail was monitored. We were not permitted to see our friends. We were not permitted to have any personal money- we might use it to flee during that one precious hour a week. We were not permitted to have personal clothing, beyond underwear. They provided the clothing, so if a girl walked away from that place, during that one hour, she could be picked up and charged with petty theft.
Just imagine that.
We were told, at every moment of every day, that we were sick. We were sexual deviants. We were sluts, nymphs, fallen women. damaged goods, dangerous women preying on poor, innocent men. We were borderline criminally insane. We were unfit mothers.
UNFIT.
Do you know how we were treated in labor?
We were drugged out of our minds. We were placed into leather restraints on the delivery table. Our children were delivered by forceps. Our children were disappeared immediately into "adoption." We were permitted no knowledge whatsoever about our babies. We were not permitted to even know their names. We did not know who they were, where they were, or even if they were dead or alive.
That was called the "treatment" for our "neurosis".
Do you know what happened to women who would not sign adoption papers? Some were drugged and given papers to sign while drugged. Some were threatened with involuntary commitment to a mental facility , with involuntary sterilization. Some were committed, and given shock treatments. Some were threatened with removal of any subsequent children. Some had their babies literally snatched out of their arms.
i personally know women who had each of those experiences.
Do you know what happened to those women after they lost their child to "adoption" ? They had, and they still have, emotional pain every. day. of. their. lives.
Every day.
For women my age, it has been four decades of daily emotional pain.
You do the math here.
Republicans want 1) no birth control. 2) No abortion. And 3) To make single parenthood an incident of child abuse. Child abuse IS A CRIME. They want to criminalize single motherhood.
The domestic adoption industry has been on the decline since 1973, for reasons of readily available, safe abortion, and readily available, safe, birth control. The monetary value of a healthy adoptable infant for the adoption market is astronomical.
I ask you: are criminal mothers fit mothers? Should they be raising their own children?
You do the math.
Do the numbers add up to 1968?
I ask you plainly: Is it 1968 again? Will women be forced to carry pregnancies, to be declared unfit, to have their children forcible removed and then "placed" into "adoption"?
For the sake of our daughters and granddaughters, we can not allow anyone to turn back the clock to those days.