abortion is a fact of life
abortion will outlive brett kavanaugh
I’m falling through a veil of disorientation. It’s like my body is rebelling – oh, so I’m not the autonomous person I thought I was? Perfect. I’ll stop functioning. Farewell!
Everything feels futile but talking most of all. Explaining, reasoning. Parts of my brain still live in the world where rhetorical arguments are useful – but other parts have caught up. I’ll think of something, some idea, and the up-to-date part of my brain will say “No, hush hush, your words and arguments are not going to solve this problem.”
We know what we have to do in the long term:
But in the short term? I don’t know. I can barely move.
I feel incorrect. Like I’m looking up through water at a world we once knew. I wasn’t under any illusions that things were going to be okay before today–but it doesn’t really matter. The body can’t abide by the tricks of the mind–” Are you surprised,” “We knew this was coming”--that only works on the brain. The body doesn’t speak that language.
A month or so ago, I was riding a Citibike between dog walks. I was on a quiet street, going slowly, but a car began to turn into a garage, the driver was talking to people out the other window, and he didn’t stop. But I realized he wasn’t going to stop, and I screamed, and he didn’t hear. Without thinking, I flung myself to the side, and he ran over the bike’s front wheel, missed me by a few inches.
I felt stupid and confused when telling this story, even minutes after it happened. Sure, I’d saved myself, but what if the way I flung my body by instinct was stupid, an incorrect response? Nobody said that, but I wondered.
I realized, later that afternoon, why my response was so automatic: it was an emergency dismount, just like I’d been taught when I rode horses for fifteen years. It was taught to me, and then, when I got older, I taught it to children. I hadn’t thought of it in years. But my body did it, old faithful.
I remember being a child, seeing an envelope from Planned Parenthood in our foyer. Asking what it was, my parents telling me. They were always so honest. I’m so grateful.
Everything is embarrassing: I got a push notification on my phone that said “Joe Biden on the reversal of Roe v. Wade: It’s a sad day.”
The president’s response is to call it a sad day. Everything is so deeply humiliating.
On days like this (how are there so many!) I often lie on the floor with my dog. I think to myself, here we are, two reproductively useless beings. Bloodlines will end with us. How lucky, how full of grace, to be a creature for whom it is an option to simply exist, and not be used as a vessel and discarded. How rare is that, how rare is it now, and how much rarer will it get.
Abortion is a fact of life. It will always exist. Abortion is intertwined with human nature. You cannot have one without the other. Abortion will outlive every ghoul on the Supreme Court, every person wailing about the triumph of fetuses in Twitter mentions, every rapist who is emboldened by law. Attempting to legislate a process as old as time will not change the fact of its existence.
“looking up through water” is exactly it. thank you