I don’t know how to write about all that hasn’t happened since the fall of Roe
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
I don’t know how to write about all the things that have not happened in the year since Roe v. Wade was overturned. (That isn’t quite right; that makes it sound like a thing that happened, instead of a choice that people made, high-handedly, breezily, cruelly. It makes it sound like a natural event, an act of God. But the arc of the moral universe, bent ever-so-slowly toward justice, did not simply snap back. It was yanked.)
You know how ... in a nightmare, when you are screaming, and it doesn’t make a sound? That sensation, but all the time. Whenever cruel new laws are passed. Whenever rusty antique laws snap into place. Time after time, touching millions of lives. Every day, someone’s life is ruined.
Around the country, every day, people are living the nightmare experience of having their lives, their autonomy, taken from them, and then being forced to live those altered lives. Robbed of the most basic control over their bodies, the most basic ability to make decisions for themselves. Robbed of their life by being robbed of their choices. Now, you can be forced to live out the consequences of someone else’s choices for you, someone who will never meet you or understand what you are sacrificing. Someone for whom this is all theoretical.
And we are all being robbed of the gift of those freely lived lives.
I want to know what is missing from the universe from the loss of that autonomy. What hasn’t happened, and also what won’t happen. I hate that I don’t know. I want the world to be labeled, footnoted, annotated. Someone should be sitting on this bench; there should be music playing; this person should not be struggling to pay for diapers. This is not how the world is supposed to be.
Sixteen million people don’t live within reach of an abortion clinic , and so we live in a worse world, a world where 16 million people cannot live their lives like full people. And for as long as we remain in this world, the loss will accumulate. I want to be able to know precisely how cruelly we have robbed ourselves.
I am a parent, and I love being a parent, and I love my daughter with a fierceness that sometimes terrifies me, and like most things that are precious, the thought of forcing parenthood on someone who did not seek that preciousness feels unfathomably cruel. Cruel in large ways, taking your body and decades of your life and forcing them in another direction, and cruel in mundane ways, like robbing you of the ability to go for a walk by yourself.
It feels ghoulishly, cartoonishly wrong that you can simply decide that half of people aren’t people. (They would not do this to us if they thought that we were people. Yet in this year since discovering that I am something less than a person, I have felt the same as I ever did. I still see my reflection in shop windows. When I speak, I think I’m audible. I don’t know. I have been screaming.) The idea that there is one version of life where you get full autonomy from cradle to grave and one where you simply don’t — absurd! Absurd on its face! Absurd, and ridiculous, and cruel.
I am a parent and I want to say to my daughter, this is not how the world is supposed to be. I wish I could see the shape of what is gone. I wish I could say to my daughter, you will never get to hear your favorite song, because it won’t get written. The person you will like most in the world, you’ll never get to meet, because her mother was forced to give birth when the state of Texas thought was best, not when she planned to or wanted to.
I don’t know how to write about the things that aren’t there, that should be, that won’t be. Things used to be better, is a terrifying thought. People are deliberately making it worse , is a worse one.
I want to be able to tell my daughter: It is not supposed to be like this.
I wish I knew all of the things that hadn’t happened this year. I wish I could write about them. I wish they’d happened.
This is not about some transgender nonsense and while I have since the beginning neither flagged nor deleted any comment on my seeds or anyone's my finger will quick to judge on this one. Do not dismay, those who trans-pretend to defend women will seed 100s of articles pretending they do and you can trans-pretend along with them.
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Ms Petri's article requires nil input from my dry loins.
... another major voting block that republicans will be lucky to shave off a double digit percentage of in 2024.
People not content just doing their own thing have decided every one else must live as they do.