Reproductive freedom: That’s male privilege

One afternoon, when I was in the seventh grade at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, everyone in my class was given a strange and horrible paperback book. Its glossy pages had pictures neither we nor our parents had been warned about: images of dead babies.

The book was about abortion, a word I’d never heard, and while I don’t remember its title or who’d written it, these many years later I still remember a picture of what looked like a trash bag full of dead babies.

I question the wisdom and purpose of sharing such graphic images with 12-year-olds, especially without their parents’ consent, and I don’t know if the book had the longterm effect on me that the nuns wanted.

Of all the columns, editorials and stories I’ve written over the years none has been about abortion. I doubt if I’ve even written the word “abortion” before now. More than all the other emotional and controversial topics, abortion is the most personal, with consequences that may last for years.

Because I believe the decision to have an abortion is so personal and that such a personal decision should be left to pregnant women, I’m pro-choice. But I reject the cookie-cutter caricatures of what it means to be “pro-choice” and “pro-life.”

While there are many in the “pro-life” movement who want to have control over the bodies of women over which they should have no control, I know many who identify as “pro-life” who are moved out of genuine concern for the lives of children. Their concern doesn’t stop at birth but is supportive of programs that enhance the quality of children’s lives.

I don’t know anyone who identifies as “prochoice” who is “pro-abortion.” I don’t know anyone who likes, looks forward and can’t wait to suggest to a girl or woman that she have an abortion. Behind every decision to have an abortion are painful considerations and looking ahead to the consequences.

But it must be a choice, and it must be a choice made by the pregnant woman.

Texas’ new abortion law, SB 8, banning the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy — a time span during which most women don’t know they’re pregnant — is unspeakably intrusive and cruel on different levels. There are no exceptions for rape or incest, and there is no consideration for fetuses who will be born with an illness resulting in a short and pain-filled life.

In the most personal, emotional and painful decisions individuals and families must make, the state has intervened to make it for them.

The same state that won’t enact mask mandates to protect a 15-yearold girl in school now

mandates that the same 15-year-old carry the child of her rapist to term. Who has a right to force that decision on one already victimized?

The law allows private citizens to sue anyone — including people they don’t know and have no connection to — who “aids or abets” an abortion in the state. The plaintiff would recover legal fees and $10,000 were they to win. The Texas Legislature has created an incentive, a cottage industry, for neighbors to spy on neighbors and strangers to snoop on strangers.

As dark as SB 8 is, it became darker when, just before midnight Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block it.

Just like that — not in October at the start of a Supreme Court term or in the frenzied final days in June. While many of us slept, the court, essentially, rendered Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision protecting a woman’s right to have an abortion, invalid for women in Texas.

SB 8 and the Supreme Court remind us that some of us are privileged in not having to live by the restrictions forced on others. They also remind us that, as a society, we continue to harbor an unhealthy obsession with a woman’s uterus and what she can and can’t decide about her body.

Male privilege is never, for a second in our lives, having to worry about our reproductive rights being compromised or denied by legislatures and courts.

Male privilege is having an unregulated reproductive organ.