Roe v Wade: You've made it to 34...may you go on forever!

Today is the 34th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision, Roe v Wade, that ensured a woman's right to choose what does or does not happen to her body. Bloggers are honoring and celebrating and shouting that fact from the virtual rooftops by writing about why we each are for choice. Here are my reasons:

I'm Pro-Choice...because I'm an American who honors the Constitution and all the Founders sought to create of this country. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"--it's the second word that's salient here. Liberty: just another way of saying free to chose.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I was around before Roe v Wade. I've had friends who have given birth and had back-room abortions. I remember one who told of pulling wads of packing from her vagina in the Greyhound bus on the way back to Pittsburgh from West Virginia, where she could find someone to abort her. I've stood and rubbed another's back while she delivered a daughter, who was pulled from between her legs, wrapped up and hustled off to the nursery before she even got to hold her. I remember how missing your period felt like a harbinger of doom--and for some it literally was.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I've worked for the Movement and I know the statistics, and I've seen the pictures of what happened when abortions were illegal. I'll never forget one photo in particular, NARAL had it on a brochure I think. It was a woman with short dark hair, lying on her stomach with her arms outstretched and her legs drawn up the way a baby lies in its crib belly down. Except she was lying in a pool of her own blood, and she was dead. To me, that photo was the most eloquent visual possible, and I wanted to blow it up and throw it on all the desks of legislators after the Anti-Choice people delivered their photos of fetuses.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I value what is over what may be. The real here-and-now woman is far more important to me than the potential of any child she may or may not bear.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I don't believe my religion or any religion, which are after all man-made, should have the right of dominion. You say potahto, I say potato--both words get to the same vegetable, after all.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I don't want some goddam man who has never had his legs in the stirrups telling me what I may or may not do. It's burns my chaps and frosts my hide that the Anti-Choice movement is the province of men. Who the fuck are they to have even an iota of say in the lives of women they are not related to? Get another hobby-horse, buddy. If your life lacks meaning, find some other passion to make you feel important.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I'm Pro-Family, Pro-Kids, Pro-Loving Relationships.

I'm Pro-Choice...because I'm an intelligent woman and I don't see how I could be anything else.