For weeks, I have been battered by my television and my computer. You all know what I'm talking about. I don't feel like regurgitating everything others have beautifully written or pasting in hyperlinks to articles about the hundreds of nefarious assaults on women going down in this country. You all know where they are coming from and what they mean.
I want to give voice to my loneliness. Yes there is anger, seething, boiling anger, and yes there is pain, deep and necrotic to my soul. The hardest part is the loneliness. One night I tried to explain it to my endlessly patient and empathetic new husband, but the words slipped away from me, like rabbits down their holes.
I'm ready to write about it.
What is at stake is women's ability to have authentic and freely chosen lives -- nothing less. Contemplating this within the context of my own life, completely free of denial and magical thinking, leaves me alone in the crowded room of fellow bloggers and colleagues and friends who share my pain and the pain of so many women, a pain that, late at night, becomes the solitary experience of each woman.
Let me tell you about my own privilege. I was a child when the older generation of women was fighting for the rights I enjoyed, and desperately needed, when I became an adult. I need to tell you how greatly I benefitted from my foremothers, because my life would have turned out profoundly different without them.
These are the gifts my first husband and I received through the rights that were fought for, and won, by feminists before I was born and during my early childhood:
• As a teenager, I was able to take birth control pills to ease my menstrual cramps, PMS and acne without anyone shaming me.
• As a young woman, I was able to take birth control pills to prevent pregnancy -- before I knew I was infertile.
• In my mid-20's, diagnosed with stage 4 endometriosis and polycystic ovarian disease, I was able to take birth control pills continuously, skipping the sugar pills, to suppress my symptoms, ease my chronic pain and prepare me for many different surgeries.
• As one of the early IVF pioneers back in the 80's, I was able and willing to attempt pregnancy and help doctors refine the techniques that would help many, many more women in the coming decades. IVF was seen as a beacon of hope for couples desiring a child, not an assault on the rights of zygotes.
• Because IVF was legal and, for the most part, safe at that time, I was able to eventually become pregnant after many years of trying.
• I now have an adult daughter whose life was created on a day of luck, St. Patrick's Day, 21 years ago. She would not be on this earth if certain politicians and religious zealots had their way, and I cannot imagine a life without my beloved daughter.
• Having lost my battle with endometriosis at age 32, and undergoing a complete hysterectomy, I have relied on continuous use of birth control pills as hormone replacement for the past 16 years. Other forms of hormone replacement resulted in enormous cysts in my abdomen -- birth control pills are my only option.
• Our adult daughter now takes birth control pills for the same reason I first used them. And thus one generation has come full circle.
I took all of this for granted.
When I think about the last 30 years of my life as a woman, I am humbled by the choices I had that other women in the world do not, and that are at risk of being stripped from American women today. When I think about an America where a woman like me would not have the treatment options and the blessings I had, I feel anticipatory survivor's guilt.
I sometimes write about anomie. It's one of my favorite words, acquired in college Sociology 101, describing the moral disconnect one can feel between his or her own personal values, and the values and laws thrust upon the individual by society. I am writhing in anomie these days, and it is a very lonely place.
That loneliness is exacerbated by the silent apathy of so many women (and men) who do not understand or approve of why I am screaming my agony through social media. They do not get why I am fighting through the white noise of the internet to cajole my personal and professional networks on Facebook, Twitter and the blogs where I write to broadcast and amplify my voice, just as I do that very same thing for others who are calling out to a variably engaged/indifferent/antagonistic panoply of human beings who either do or don't care that women have essential human rights. In these moments of screaming, I am wrestling with my loneliness, beating it back, smothering it.
My favorite American author, David Foster Wallace, once said that writing "is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved." I'm working on it, and this is my way. Are you lonely too?
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While I may fully recover and I may not, it's not recommended that I get pregnant again. Another pregnancy could result in a heart transplant or even death. Being hospitalized for heart failure is the scariest thing I have ever gone through, and I don't want to go through it again. Because of this, pregnancy will never be an option again.
I live in Kansas. A state that is passing a bill which makes it okay for doctors to lie to pregnant women about being pregnant if they think that woman is an abortion risk. Because of my new health issues, I guess I would now fall into that category. It was truly sickening that any such bill would even be considered. How is a doctor lying to you okay? In my case, a doctor lying could possibly be my death. (While my husband has scheduled a vasectomy, so we are being proactive, you always hear those crazy stories).
The fact that women's rights are being stripped away is absolutely terrifying. Women's freedom, health and lives are on the line and it baffles me why these Republican men don't care.
It's going to come out that a lot of these reproductive health problems women treat with the Pill are actually problems of poor nutrition. Women are the ones encouraged most to abstain from meat (yes, this matters and no, we're not herbivores, sorry PETA) and to restrict calories. We're also the ones growing the babies. These two facts cannot co-exist in a healthy woman's body. Period.
That said, all too often men refuse to wear condoms, and even if Roe vs. Wade weren't being eroded, women need backup contraception available to us. Until child support is adequately enforced, the adoption industry quits preying upon us and there is real help available to poor mamas that doesn't aim to turn us into a permanent slave underclass, this is the way it has to be.
As for feeling lonely, I suppose I can relate, but just try being a female Catholic health care provider with slight eco-feminist tendencies in this climate. It's a pretty effective way to get attacked from all sides.
Thanks for this article. I've been surprised at how many of my friends have heard absolutely nothing of any of this.
"Why aren't health care providers speaking up? Doctors, OB-GYN's, etc.?" Surely, they will lose money and their professions will lose skilled professionals. Or have they already accepted defeat in our broken medical system??
"What about all the drug companies that put out the birth control? Did their lust for money evaporate or did they just lose their monopoly on the current formulas to generics?"
"What about the Universities, the CDC, FDA, and research facilities that use female reproductive cells to cure diseases or develop vaccines for our population to enjoy healthier lives? (i.e. cervical cancer vaccine) When did public health take a back seat to an agenda that wants to 'take a break' from name calling in the political showroom?" Shall we begin to sell patents on life as well? Who will run that market? This is the point where liberty of life succumbs to madness. A quiet war surging within the genitals of a nation, where the weapons of mass destruction are not bombs and guns, but large metal probes and ignorance.
"If a woman is deemed unworthy of being responsible for her reproductive system, will it then be illegal for her to abstain even if she is in a legal union? Will future laws read that rape is inevitable and therefore OK?"
And I say that so that you know what we do have in common. What we don't have in common is the blogging. Where does power come from? Whose aim do we ultimately serve?
I see no point to adding my voice to the pool of people allowed to provide the Counter-Argument and Proof Of Freedom of Speech in our Sham-Society. I have lost all faith that it matters that we continue to reach out to the thoughtless and the powerful. Thinking human beings already know all about anomie. Either we already fear and loathe the culture we have been thrust into, or they already have made the conscious choice to support The Way It Is for their own benefit.
The Powerful still need us to participate Willingly in their ponzi scheme, so we are allowed the freedom to speak and write.
I am ready to fight some more, and I am confident we will be successful in our equality.