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I am having a hard time believing that he spent his teens and twenties and thirties celibate; he married in 2004 - when he was 39 years old. In all those years was there never a failure of contraception? A failure of reticence? A surprise?
Then again, he was 8 years old when Roe was decided. (Gorsuch was 6 , Roberts was 18.)
When I went off to college in 1969, contraceptive prescriptions for unmarried women were hard to get. There was no gynecologist on staff at the health clinic, but there was Planned Parenthood just downhill from campus and their services were price friendly and open to discussing safe sex options.... and then providing the care.
None of that was useful if somebody's sperm slipped through.
Brett never had to query his friends, and the friends of his friends, hopeful that he'd find someone who knew someone who could help - for a hefty price and no guarantee of medical expertise. Just through random conversations over 7 decades of life, I can say that most people in my orbit have been Pregnancy Adjacent.
Perhaps, not so for our current young Republican Supremes.
In addition to abstinence (sure, he burned off all those adolescent hormonal influences weightlifting with Tobin) there were legally sanctioned options: condoms were sold on the open shelves of Walgreens; the women in his life had access to a variety of methods of prevention; and abortions were safe and legal, should something go awry.
Roberts was a senior in high school when Roe was decided. Perhaps he was once Pregnancy Adjacent? Perhaps that's why he wanted a more nuanced approach to the gradual diminution of women's right?
I had all these thoughts in random, unfocused fashion until TBG gave me the title for this post. We were Pregnancy Adjacent a number of times, he said as he recited them. Then he paused, thought, declared that was all.
That you know of, I said.
His next pause was longer, thoughtful, then sorrowful.
Not that I know of.
One thing about Roberts is he didn't want to do this. He had to since there was no doubt it would pass and it allowed him to write his opinion that would moderate it. Many don't believe in abortion but then along comes their own experience and they find they changed their mind. To me, what the court did was terrible and it will reach farther than perhaps they intended. To take our world back to the one when the Constitution and Amendments were written was just wrong in the minds of most of us, I think. I know though many cheered it based on their FB posts. Fine to feel that way for yourself but now pushing it on everyone else, that's where it seems wrong to me. We are a messed up country. Rain (I don't like the new system for commenting. Hope it won't be that way on my blog... which I haven't written in for too long; so don't know)
ReplyDeleteThere is a new comment system I'll have to check it out,
DeleteThe consequences are dramatic (the Freakonomics discussion of the social costs of banning abortion is most illuminating). I agree - if you don't believe in abortion, don't have one.
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I can understand the view that abortion is wrong, but just as we have different opinions we have different life experiences that become personal truth. I do not understand -- literally cannot begin to comprehend -- how it is possible for one individual or group to impose their opinion on another. Do they suddenly have the ability to walk a mile in another's shoes?
ReplyDeleteIf rights of citizenship depend on where one lives, surely we need to drop "United" from the name of this country.
A valid opinion that abortion is wrong must also accept my valid opinion that it is right. To think that others can know what goes into a personal decision like that...... I'm flabbergasted.
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Like Olga, I have been thinking about that word "united" too. "States rights" has been a buzz word for a long time for getting away with imposing loss if liberty and personal freedoms on many. Leaving it up to the states is a guarantee of unequal justice under the law. A former student, now a lawyer living in Las Vegas and a strict constructionist, tells me you can always move to another state. She tells me this action has nothing to do with women, only language in the constitution. I tell her that when that constitution was written women had no rights whatsoever. It went on and on. I did not agree to disagree. I object!
ReplyDeleteIf it's not a war on women, then where are the Paternal Responsibilities Act sponsors? No woman gets herself pregnant.
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