I’m not an expert on the Supreme Court, and I’m not an expert on constitutional law, and I’m not an expect on woman’s issues. And, frankly, the only reason I support a lot of federal powers is that there was no other available mechanism to give all American citizens their basic civil and voting rights. I wish every state in the union had seen the egregious unfairness of Jim Crow laws. I wish the courts didn’t need to explain that the government has no business banning contraception.
But, unfortunately, the United States of America includes several states where it is deemed appropriate to cede power to the government to regulate who we love, how we make love to them, and what to do when an unwanted or complicated pregnancy results from sexual relations.
Women have only recently escaped from the arranged marriage, they have only recently gained the right to refuse sexual relations with their husbands. It is only in the last few decades that we have lived in a society where we could even begin to hold a woman responsible for getting pregnant. And, unfortunately, there are still a lot of situations where women get pregnant through no fault of their own.
Every day, girls are raped or molested by their fathers, their uncles, their brothers, their priests, their teachers, and so on.
Every day, women discover that something is terribly wrong with their pregnancy, and their baby is going to be born with a variety of difficulties.
For me, the bottom line is that women can only be equal citizens when they have power over their reproduction. That means that women must be free to marry whom they want, at an age they want, and they must be allowed to use contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and they must be allowed to terminate a pregnancy that is problematic, or unwanted.
It’s ridiculous to think that every pregnancy is a conscious and willing choice. I think it is wrong to use abortion as a form of contraception, provided there are other forms of contraception available. But the real issue is: who the hell is the government to interject themselves into the personal, and often excruciatingly painful, matter of woman’s reproductive rights?
If the government is going to overreach it’s constitutional mandate, it should stick to doing it to protect people’s civil rights, not to trample them.
