When I was a young woman, in high school and college, I truly believed that the wars against women were done, old news. Just as I expected soon to see an end to Affirmative Action as a necessity, I really understood at the time in the 1980's that America's view of women as sub-citizens was evolving. I read The Handmaid's Tale and then Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and felt comfortably able to dismiss them as dystopian fiction, as though we had safely traveled down the proper leg of Terry Pratchett's Trousers of Time (a lovely metaphor for the multiple path choices facing the universe at any given moment).
Here we are in 2012 and we seem to have travelled back in time 30+ years or even switched trouser legs inadvertently. WI Senator Ron Johnson dismissed women's health needs today (displaying as much ignorance of medical coverage and costs as he displayed distain for females). OK has proposed an embryonic personhood bill. The AZ Senate has approved an anti-abortion bill. The GOP stands for small government in healthcare issues before the Supreme Court while at the same time proposing one after another legislative bills to enlarge government supervision of, involvement in, and interference in women's health (so long as the government doesn't have to pay a penny to the providers on the women's behalf, apparently it has an infinite budget for interference).
I truly have been quiet, complacent, satisfied. Yet I can't. I know what's at stake.
Let her lips be sealed only when she so chooses. Her body, her choice, her decisions.
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