In the wake of S.B. 8, I’ve been thinking about the way I was raised to think about my body, and the way I will raise my son to think about his.
BY SUSAN REBECCA WHITE
NOV 04, 2021
When I was in college, I signed up to volunteer at a women’s center—to walk women from car to clinic door, in the hopes that my presence might mitigate the impact of the ever-present protesters, who zeroed in on each arriving patient with cries of, “Mom! Mom! Please don’t kill your baby!” The night before my first shift, the friend who had originally invited me to volunteer asked what had motivated me to sign up. There was a big difference, she said, between saying you were “pro-choice” and showing up at an abortion clinic at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning to prove it.
I had recently read Zora Neale Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God and was struck by the line, “You’ve got to go
there to know there.” I repeated this line to my friend, adding that while I
had always intuitively supported abortion rights, my support had been abstract.
Now, I knew that not 20 miles from my college, real women, during a time of
personal crisis, were being singled out and screamed at by strangers as they
made their way inside a medical facility for a procedure that often proved to
be both physically and psychologically painful.
Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/11/abortion-stories-men-raising-boys.html
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