Dear America: please don’t invade your women

I honestly can’t conceive of something more invasive than being forced to carry and bear a child. I’ve been pregnant 5 times, miscarried once and given birth 4 times, one of which was stillborn. Thankfully, the government was not involved in any of the family planning decisions I made for myself and my family, especially the hard parts my health care professionals were managing. Side note though — the government did play an important role in my first birth, which took place in California and New Mexico while I was a military spouse beneficiary of the wonderful military socialist medical care available at the time. I sure miss that. 

My kids are now all adults, but I retain many reminders of the lifelong consequences of pregnancy and childbirth: stretch marks, a crooked, jagged c-section scar, gestational diabetes that became permanent. My rib cage is larger, my feet bigger, and my bladder has always less reliable than before kids (BK). And those are just a few of the side effects of my choice to have children. 

When I read today about how threatened Supreme Court justices felt when protestors showed up at their homes, my first thought was, “Oh no, let’s not do that. Let’s keep this professional,” but then I thought twice. I thought maybe this is what we need to do to make an impression on the justices. To give them a taste of their own medicine, as the saying goes. Those protestors are invading the personal space of the justices, causing them to feel violated. Welcome to the club. There’s some justice there, for any woman who has had to carry and bear a child in the years that Roe v Wade has been chipped away at. There’s some justice in learning what it feels like to have your privacy so invaded, because that’s exactly what they’re doing when they recommend overturning Roe v Wade as the means to controlling whether or not a woman can be used to breed babies for the population. 

Looking out a window and seeing a group of women milling around with signs, maybe chanting something like “keep your bans off my body” is pretty innocuous in comparison to forcing a woman to carry and bear, and often raise, a child. The former is mostly just annoying. The latter is horrific.