Why I Did Not Celebrate Mother’s Day This Year

 I glanced through my Mother’s Day photo album, last week, in anticipation of  blogging about the Mother’s Days I’ve celebrated over the last couple of decades.  I thought such a walk down memory lane would provide some solace after the one I had to take a couple of weeks ago when I lost my brother, Michael.

My Mother’s Day memories are  great ones, filled with images of beautiful bouquets and funny cards sent by my son Daniel like this one below — which still has me laughing 20+ years later.

I intended to share the cards and the photos on this blog. Then, I thought: Wait just a minute! Surely, this is not the week to be obliviously celebrating motherhood. True, I’m a happy mother. I love being a mother to my son, Daniel. But I don’t need a Hallmark holiday to make me feel that way. Especially not this week.

The Leak

Call me a cynic, but I have to question the timing of the leak of a Supreme Court majority opinion that will likely overrule Roe v. Wade. I cannot be the only one who thinks that it was cynical/ devious/ just plain weird that Alito’s opinion was leaked in the week leading up to Mother’s Day?

Was that timing intentional? Orchestrated by someone from the anti-abortion contingent on the Court so that outrage over the opinion would be dissipated by a Hallmark holiday when we all feel warm and fuzzy about motherhood?

Fat chance! However warm and fuzzy I feel about being a mother, I also know it’s a difficult, onerous, expensive, all-consuming, sometimes heart-wrenching job. There is absolutely nothing that will make you feel warm and fuzzy about being a mother when you didn’t want to be one.

How Dare They?

But, I don’t want to regurgitate, here, the outrage which more eloquent women than I expressed over the last week. A few choice reactions stick in my mind:

Vice-President Kamala Harris’s fuming on TV: “ How dare they? How dare they tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her own body? ”

Also, journalist, Jill Lepore’s incisive feature in the newyorker.com about Alito’s “bizarre and impoverished historical analysis.” You know, the one in which he looks back to the 19th century to find that in our Nation there is no “history or traditions” of guaranteeing women a right of abortion or a right to choose.

As Lepore observed: “Hardly anything in the law books of the eighteen-sixties guaranteed women anything […] To use a history of discrimination to deny people their civil rights is a perversion of logic and a betrayal of justice.”

Or, who can make the case against the majority opinion better than Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale?  In an essay, titled Enforced Childbirth Is Slavery, she wrote:

“Women who cannot make their own decisions about whether or not to have babies are enslaved because the state claims ownership of their bodies and the right to dictate the use to which their bodies must be put.”

 Ignorant Legislators

The most disturbing part of a Supreme Court decision that most likely will send the issue of abortion rights back to the states is the specter of an ignorant patriarchy rearing up its old, ugly, Republican head with full force.

What are we to expect from dumb males who have already drafted draconian laws that are not based on any semblance of medical knowledge or understanding of how a woman’s body works?

Who can forget, stupid, ignorant (and now-deceased) Todd Akin, a Missouri republican running for the U.S. Senate in 2012? He came out against an exception being made for abortion in cases of rape. Why? Because as he understood it, “in cases of legitimate rape the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”  

Tell that to the approximately 30,000 women who become pregnant each year in this country through an act of rape.

Or, the equally ignorant, stupid Ohio lawmaker, Rep. John Becker, who introduced an anti-abortion bill in the state legislature mandating the re-attachment of an ectopic pregnancy inside the uterus.

How did he imagine that was going to work when an ectopic pregnancy is one where a fertilized egg develops in the fallopian tube, not the uterus, and if left in place eventually ruptures the tube and kills the mother? 

But Becker, and the Missouri republican lawmakers who followed suit, pressed for a  law requiring re-implantation of the embryo in the uterus; that is, removing it from the fallopian tube and re-attaching it to a blood supply in uterus. With what? Crazy glue? What dangerous dipshits! 

Or the Louisiana lawmakers who just proposed an anti-abortion bill bestowing personhood on a fertilized egg! Again, a position that demonstrates total ignorance and stupidity about the act of reproduction. As columnist Arwa Mahdawi writes in her guardian.com newsletter this week:

“I’m sure the people involved in drafting this law have no idea about how reproduction actually works (they like controlling female bodies, not learning about them), but between one-third and one-half of all fertilized eggs never fully implant. Which means someone in Louisiana needs to arrest God – he’s responsible for a hell of a lot of abortions!” 

A law like the one proposed for Lousiana means that using a morning after pill or even IUD contraception which prevents implantation of a fertilized egg could be criminalized as homicide.

Then, Enforcement?

So, how will these  laws be enforced if Alito’s majority opinion dismantles Roe v. Wade? It’s a well-known fact that most women delay announcing a wanted pregnancy till they are past the first trimester because most women know there’s too many things that can go wrong before then. Many pregnancies end in natural miscarriages, or spontaneous abortions as they’re called, before that date.  

So, how will a woman be treated by law enforcement in ignorant, backward states when she seeks medical help after a miscarriage? 

Will she be reported by some religious zealot nurse or staff member? Will some good “ole boy” sheriff materialize by her bedside to interrogate her about what she did to cause the miscarriage?

Will a court grant law enforcement a search warrant for her home to find evidence of reckless or negligent behavior that could have led to the miscarriage? What will be deemed as reckless or negligent behavior? Smoking a cigarette? Drinking a beer? Taking a prescription Vicodin after a root canal?

Life has never been particularly easy for the majority of women in this country. It looks like it’s  about to turn into hell-on-earth thanks to “four dudes and a woman who thinks The Handmaid’s Tale is a rom-com.”