Acrylic by Margaret Karmazin

The midterm elections take place on November 8. Please vote, and urge everyone you know to do so. 

Persimmon Tree is planning a Forum for the winter issue as well — including, as topics, not only the status of women’s rights but also reactions to the election. Email editor@persimmontree.org ; subject line Forum Comment. Please include not only your name but also your email address and your city and/or state. We will accept Forum comments until Wednesday, November 23.

We won’t. None of us. We refuse. None of us are giving up our rights. SCOTUS be damned.

Women’s rights are under attack by two measures of power – money and laws. For every dollar a man earns, a woman earns 82 cents. Legislatures have become blatantly anti-female, yet Americans spout belief in equal rights even as we cut them down. No other country, some say, is better than ours… America, love it or leave it.

How about we change it? A new spirit will rise up. Laws created to promote the general welfare  of all Americans. Protections we all deserve. Rights we all demand.

The right to health care. The right to equal pay for equal work. The right to be safe in our communities.

The right to be female.

How much more will women take? Not much. Just watch us.

Battle lines are being drawn. We will not go back. Suit up, Sisters, and bring your brothers to the ballot box. 

Ms. Amini’s death has set off country-wide protests against a regime that “makes women second to men in politics, in parenting, in the office and at home,” write Vivian Yee and Farnaz Fassihi in the New York Times (September 27, 2022).

Now, Nilouar Hamedi, an Iranian journalist who brought Ms. Amini’s death to light, has been arrested and is being held in solitary confinement.

In response, said a woman quoted in the article, women are gathering to chant “No to hajab, no to oppression, only equal rights.” A woman identified as Minoo pointed out “We can’t impose what we think on one another.”

Their fight is our fight. Women in Iran and in the United States want the same thing: freedom to thrive, to explore the world, to be in charge of their own bodies.

We should stand with our Iranian sisters. If we do not have hajibs to burn, we certainly have letters to write, posters to make public, and votes to cast. Iranian women have moved into the streets. It is time for action.

Belinda, oil painting by Judith R. Robinson

Yet, my mom did it. She and my dad had some kind of appointment with some kind of doctor.  My grandparents came to babysit us. My younger brother knew nothing.

Days later, some of my friends got together.  We were reading Reader’s Digest of all things.  Big article about abortions being illegal.  My friends began talking about those people who would do such a thing – these baby killers.  I sat in silence, ashamed, harboring my family secret.  Those people….

Over the years, I thought a good deal about it.

In 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7-2 decision holding that women in the United States had a fundamental right to choose whether to have abortions without excessive government restriction.  Whoa.  What a concept. 

Hence, “a person may choose to have an abortion until a fetus becomes viable, based on the right to privacy contained in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”  Viability means the ability to live outside the womb, which usually happens between 24 and 28 weeks after conception.

What a liberating victory for women.  To be in control of our own bodies.

Of course there were the “pro-lifers” (a term I never liked, implying those pro-choice are really “pro death.”)

All this changed on Friday, June 24, 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade – dismantling 50 years of legal protection.

Now, we are back to the days where women once again are made to feel shame and guilt about a difficult and private decision involving  their own bodies.  Not to mention the legal aspect.  

How can we not mention the legal aspect?

Stripping women of their rights is a slippery slope.  What’s next?  The right to vote?

Women have come too far to lose their autonomy, control, voice.  We must fight like hell to gain it back.

Like over a million other young women, I went away to have the baby in secret, then relinquished her for adoption. The original birth certificate was sealed for ninety-nine years and a new legal document was created with the adoptive parents’ names. 

For most of us who landed in the predicament of unwed pregnancy, adoption was the only option. We were told that a two-parent household with the means of support would be the most loving decision because, of course, a single woman with a child was scandalous. Adoption became a lucrative business when money was exchanged for a newborn baby. Closed adoptions protected both parties from the untoward reputation of illegitimate birth, as well as protecting the adoptive parents from interference. The result was a generation of disenfranchised children who were left wondering who parented them and why they were given away, as well as women with agonizing guilt and lifelong grief.  

All of this changed in 1973 when the Supreme Court legalized abortion in the Roe v Wade decision. Women gained the right to decide whether to take an unwanted pregnancy to term, end it, or give up the baby to adoptive parents. We finally owned our bodies.  

But on June 24th, 2022, with the stroke of a pen, the United States was thrust backward into a pre-Roe v. Wade America. Some would argue that adoption, not abortion, is a welcome solution to unwanted pregnancy. These days most adoptions are open, meaning the birth mother and adoptive parents agree to communication and/or allow time together. In reality though, many adoptive parents deny the first mother visitation and, in some cases, communication. There is currently no legal recourse for the first mother if the adoptive parents refuse to communicate, leaving her again without a choice. 

There is no easy solution to unwanted pregnancy. But women deserve the right to decide the fate of their pregnancy and/or infant. 

My grown-up years were spent as a single and married and then divorced female. In none of those times previous to Roe passing did I feel I had autonomy over my body and wider life.  Apartments would not be rented to a single woman on the unproved (and unprovable) assumption that she was a prostitute.  Credit was hard to establish.  Newspapers divided jobs into gender listings. Men assumed that women who had dinner with them would let them stay the night.    

Now I am officially old, disabled, and still subject to a scrutiny I did not invite.  “I am woman.  Hear me roar!” was the cry that woke us all up during the Roe years.  

I envy young women who look so together.  Are they? How will they feel when the loss of rights over our bodies becomes the loss of rights over our minds? 

In these sad times, women and their bodies have become casualties of the Supreme Court’s drive to drain every ounce of self-determination from women’s lives. Fallout from the reversal of Roe v Wade has already emerged, as states adopt their own draconian version of anti-abortion laws. Women who are having problems conceiving and want to try IVF are next in line, along with women and girls seeking birth control.

And that’s not all. I know from personal experience that pregnant women who decide to have a child can lose their jobs. Despite laws on the books, it is not uncommon to be fired in the seventh month of pregnancy, as I was in the 1990s Last time I checked, which was yesterday, pregnancy discrimination is still thriving, a situation that is likely to exacerbate satellite issues women continue to battle, including systemic racism, LGBTQ discrimination, and the perennial wage differential in most professions.

I am well aware that, as women seek abortions in states where they can’t get one, they will die or be seriously injured and traumatized. Their unwanted pregnancy will become a curse, a mark of shame, like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter.

Where’s the hope in this scenario? On the playground, in the voice of that girl who knows how to scream, how to yell, and, I pray, how to speak up when it’s her turn. She’s got my vote.

Acrylic by Margaret Karmazin

So, I beg you to risk stepping beyond the boundaries of caution and fear of reprisal and speak truth, even if it means not being nice, because nice doesn’t live here anymore. At the very least, let’s post signs in our yard and paste bumper stickers on our cars. Call our legislators and bitch up a storm. Let’s draw a line in the sand and say, enough already. The only way we’re going to get even a little bit of nice back is for every last one of us to push back hard against those who want to take away our rights and, more importantly, those of generations of women yet to come. 

I love you all, but don’t you dare stay home on election day because you’re afraid, and you think it’s not nice to get involved or take a stand. Please vote these terrifying people out of office. It’s the only way we can survive.

It means that women’s reproductive rights are on the auction block, to be decided by each separate state. What rights will these state legislatures allow, which rights will be tossed out, what limits and purposes will they judge appropriate for a woman’s sexuality and reproductive system? Other rights may also be in danger. What about access to contraception, or the right to same-sex marriage?

In a state dominated by a moral theocracy, what status can a woman have? How much control will she have to determine her path if she cannot have control over the basic processes of her own body? What right does any state in the union have to meddle with a woman’s body?

I am well past my childbearing years. I was fortunate to witness the triumph of Roe v Wade and to have full rights to control my sexual and reproductive life. I have a grown son. But the day SCOTUS published their decision to overturn ROE V WADE, I was separated out as a U.S. citizen with fewer rights than my son or my husband. It doesn’t matter that I can’t have a baby or an abortion. The state has spoken and relegated my body to the control of state politics.

  As a woman, I am now an assembly of parts under dispute in court.

  In my grief, I wrote this poem: 

This poem came out of reading interviews in a couple of newspapers, as well as listening to what people I knew were saying after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. I also reflected on my own ability to make reproductive decisions as a woman who came of age after abortion was legalized.

There is no right to life for the fetus prior to viability. In the United States, there is a right for a woman to terminate a pregnancy. That is a fact. A fervent belief in an opinion is wishful thinking that promotes ignorance.

Can we please accept Roe as law and free women from this distraction for the important work in which we are engaged?

I don’t think healthcare should be carried in the business section of your paper. Patients are not customers and their illnesses not commodities. We need Medicare for All that guarantees medical access for sick people based on their needs, not their insurance plans or ability to pay. Politicians know Americans want a single payer system to finance health care, but answer to insurance lobbyists; and newspapers do not inform readers of the legislation that is written but held up intentionally from getting a vote. Politicians may agree to be listed as co-sponsors to legislation for the satisfaction of constituents, and still not bear any risks when there is no chance of a measure being put up for a vote. The collusion between government, insurance companies, and the media is obvious and beyond dishonest.

Thanks for at least the mention of the CEO compensation of 10 million dollars over last year. There’s an illustration of the greed that is rewarded in the U.S.

Angel, oil painting by Judith R. Robinson

Now, decades later, I had been continuing to glean hope from the margins, spurred most notably by appointments of women to the Supreme Court, most recently with the brilliant jurists Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. My physicians are mostly women. I see more women on my ballot each election cycle, in the blue column. And organizations like Emily’s List, which aim to gather more women to run—and win—various races, light up my hope. 

But the frightening blows of losing my rights to medical decision-making given the overturning of Roe, and the new ground staked out by a partisan Supreme Court that is choosing to take away right after right regardless of settled law, are terrible. Some on the Court are apparently considering a denial of other basic rights—marriage equality among them. Added to those awful blows, and closer to home, are the losses occurring in many states, including my home state of Wisconsin, as antique laws meant for and enacted in the nineteenth century are now going back into effect. A dystopia envisioned by Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale seems too close right now. 

And I find it discouraging in the extreme to hear even young women normalize male lack of participation in household and childcare tasks. In many heterosexual unions, “help” is really the worst of the four-letter words, as men are still given great acclaim for “helping out” around the house, the accepted assumption being that women are the ones who must eternally shoulder home-front responsibilities. There are those who say that men do so much more now—perhaps wheel the baby around the block, or do a bit of cooking. Yet it’s still true that women are the cruise-directors and general managers, making sure of doctor’s appointments, school calendars, homework, housework, and holiday planning. 

I am also, however, a woman of hope. I find a certain solace as I hear the rage and outrage over the recent assaults on our freedom. Not many want to go backward. Perhaps the sting of outrage will continue to fuel our actions and ensure voting. Perhaps more of the old-white-racist-sexist-males will finally totter toward their graves. 

I am planning to be around long enough to see more men cooking and handling childcare and more women running companies, campaigns, and Congress. And in my own life, simple household equality already reigns. My husband was telling me, earlier, what he was planning to cook this evening.