I am a seventy-five year old mother of two daughters, and grandmother of one granddaughter. I have been the victim of inappropriate sexual behavior and predation within my family, as well as by neighbors and strangers; other members of my family have also been victims. I remember each and every event vividly to this day, still repeatedly questioning how I could have, or should have handled or avoided them better. I will always have those questions. I don’t want my granddaughter or my great-granddaughters-to-be to ever have those questions. I never got pregnant from those types of events, but others have and still do, even granddaughters and great-granddaughters.
I now have many questions and thoughts about whether we need Roe v. Wade or its equivalent. I have lived through a period of American history that has granted more rights to the disenfranchised of our nation after long fought battles for equal rights. Women, people of color, indigenous peoples, and members of the LGBTQ community have been grudgingly granted human and civil rights they have always deserved, after finally overcoming centuries-old and eternally unwarranted biases. We, as a nation, have still not achieved full equality; but we’ve been moving closer to it. With the overturning the half-century-old Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights, (authored by Justice Alito) I want to know what has validly changed to make that ruling not longer settled law. The right to end a pregnancy has been the law for two generations. Since the end of slavery, we have never taken away rights in this nation. I have Five BIG Questions!
BIG Question Number One: Is Roe v. Wade about power and rights?
YES. Some men, in and out of government, think they have the right to employ power at the expense of other people’s rights.
Question: Did we all hear Republican senators dismiss and attack a female college professor testifying that she was assaulted sexually and traumatized by Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who had already perjured himself in prior nomination hearings?
YES. These senators also offered sentiments expressing ‘Boys will be boys.’ ‘Just young kids sowing their wild oats.’ ‘We’ve all been there.’ or ‘No harm, no foul.’ attitudes. And, in solidarity, they supported his lies. (Anyone, regardless of gender, who has been the victim of sexual predation knows there is harm; there is injury, and there is lasting trauma.) These men didn’t care because they never were the victims.
Question: Did Justice Alito really cite Pleas of the Crown?
YES. That’s the 1736 treatise (published six decades after author Sir Matthew Hale’s death) that defended and laid the foundation for the world-wide marital rape exemption. Alito’s argument for ending Roe v. Wade included a citation from the man who literally had two women executed in a witch hunt.
Question: Are we still giving women less equality under our criminal laws? YES. Leges Henrici Primi, a very early treatise of ‘laws’ in the reign of Henry I, written c. 1115, treated pre-quickening abortion as a misdemeanor, and post-quickening abortion as having lesser penalty than murder or homicide. After almost a thousand years, pregnant American women still have fewer rights over their own bodies. In spite of the fact that the rights of U.S. citizens regarding autonomy or sole sovereignty over their bodies (regardless of gender) are not specified in the constitution or its amendments, Federal and State governments and courts have taken the position that they have power and jurisdiction over only people who have uteruses and are of child-bearing age (pubescent girls, trans men, cis-gender women). We are citizens, voters, and the majority of the nation’s population, yet we don’t have the same rights as cis-gender men. The Ninth Amendment is interpreted to include natural rights into the Constitution suggesting that all of the most important freedoms might not have been listed. Other amendments and laws have followed, but none specifically articulate that men have more rights than others. And still Leges Henrici Primi influences (with its current viability caveat) the Supreme Court. Question: Did Congressman Matt Gaetz, known for bragging about his sexual conquests, with especially young women, really tweet this?
YES. @mattgaetz · 11H
How many of the women rallying against overturning Roe are over-educated, under-loved millennials who sadly return from protests to a lonely microwave dinner with their cats, and no bumble matches?
Question: Do American men like Matt Gaetz feel entitled to sovereignty over women’s bodies?
YES. While millions of heterosexual American men enjoy mutual, loving relationships which include sexual intimacy, there are legions of men who were taught to feel entitled (by generations of entitled men) and to believe their sexual attention to any woman should make her feel blessed as opposed to used, abused or taken advantage of. These men use alcohol, drugs, threats, gifts, or lies to gain entry into vaginas. That is their only intent, except for the illusion of power it gives them and the actual power it rips away from their sexual partners (consenting or not). In previous centuries men, stronger, larger, heavier, and, if necessary, meaner than the women and girls they’d subjugated, relied upon brute power when charm failed.
Now, in the year 2023, when generations of women have acquired more acumen, knowledge, skills, interests, and capabilities in addition to the ability to bear children, we have “Incels” who rage that women won’t give them the attention and sex they so sorely need and deserve. Women have had to come from behind for centuries, finally earning comparable pay, professions, civil equality, and personal respect. They have more life options than simply being a receptacle for semen. They have every right to prefer caring, respectful men in their lives. That must be really hard for men who think they are superior to women. What better way to denigrate, devalue, and violate other humans than to simply be superior to them. Power, it’s an old device and has worked for millennia.
(See next blog for Question Two)