My daughter is four. She came home from school and told me she was playing a game called “Princess Gets Rescued From a Tower”. The kid of two feminists, living in a liberal city in a blue state, at the age of four, has internalized the idea that princesses need rescuing.
I did four years of residency in ObGyn and three years of residency in Psychiatry. I am an MD and a practicing psychiatrist. I don’t have the bandwidth to look at the numbers right now, but I will tell you from personal experience with hundreds and hundreds of patients that women are the strong ones. Most of the babies of teen girls I delivered had no support apart from their own mothers. I wrote “father of baby not involved” in the chart more times than I can count. Most of the pregnancy terminations I performed were for girls and women on their own. Nothing made me feel like I’d made more of a difference than providing a desired termination for a teenager and placing her IUD. Now that girl gets to continue her education, develop her frontal lobe, and decide who she wants to be and what she wants to do. She doesn’t have to be a baby trying to raise a baby. She doesn’t have to be another cog in a system that perpetuates the cycle of poverty in order to keep women and people of color from working towards equality, equity, fairness and real change.
Make no mistake. The overturning of Roe vs. Wade today is not about saving the lives of the unborn. It is about control of women’s bodies and agency, particularly poor women without the resources to travel out of state for a pregnancy termination. Women are meant to be property. Don’t believe me? How many letters have I received addressed to “Mrs. Husband’s First Name – Husband’s Last Name” instead of “Dr. My First Name – My Last Name”? How many people think my kids have their dad’s last name, because he’s the man and when you get married you’re supposed to give up your identity? Yes, it’s only a name. Yes, it’s tradition. But try speaking up against it— even that one, small thing— and see how much resistance you run into.
Now women want more than our own names. We want to be paid the same as our male colleagues. We want our voices to be heard in legislation and government. We’d even like to be the president someday. At bare minimum, we’d like to decide the timing and circumstances of when we become parents, because women still carry the majority of responsibility for raising children today, with rare exceptions. We are on a tightrope with no safety net, because there’s so little in the way of institutional support for people who end up with a baby to support and no way to put food on the table.
People who are thinking about how to get from one day to the next aren’t in the streets protesting. People who are terrified that they’ll be beaten or raped by their partner aren’t rallying for change. People who are trying to raise a child on a minimum wage salary with no parental leave benefits, without any sort of support, aren’t getting an education. People who are working two jobs to keep a roof over their heads aren’t voting.
The princess in the tower may need a rescue now, but ask yourself who put her there. Ask yourself who robbed her of the tools to escape, because she’s strong and capable. If you’re a woman, stay safe. If you’re a woman of privilege, help your sisters. If you’re a man, speak up for us. And if there’s any part of you who feels that this is a move that will help any human beings at all, including the unborn children who are the proposed beneficiaries, I cheerfully invite you to get fucked. Nobody wins when women are forced to have kids they can’t or don’t want to support. Not them, not the kids… and not you.
