Abortion and the pill: The reason women have made any ground at all [View All]

[Der Blaue Engel]

toward equality.

That's what it comes down to. Reproductive freedom is the greatest contributing factor in our current level of participation in society.

I was watching "The Prize-Winner of Defiance, Ohio," yesterday, in which a mother of 10 (TEN!) had to find ingenious ways to feed and clothe her children because her husband, while not a bad man, simply was not up to the challenge. He was just one more dependent. Just a few short decades ago, this was reality for many women.

Evelyn Ryan is an example of the extraordinary odds against a woman when she is not free to make her own reproductive choices. Few women can do what Evelyn did just to survive. Can you imagine what else she might have done in a world where she had the choice of whether and when to have a child? This is what the anti-women voices of America would have for all of us: women who are slaves to biology and the whims of others.

I'm having difficulty being coherent about this, because it affected me so much to see the reality right there and to suddenly make that connection so starkly, even though I had known it on a gut level before:

Abortion and the pill have saved our lives. To those who would compromise our right to either of them, I will fight you to the death if that's what it takes. I am throwing down the gauntlet. NO QUARTER ASKED AND NONE GIVEN.