If someone asked me what I wanted for everyone for Mother’s Day I would say that the best and highest-priority gift should be the right to full autonomy for all women over their body.
It’s a brutal irony that, if conservative fuck-heads have their way, women would never have that autonomy. For some inexplicable reason, the fact that women are the ones who can carry a child, means that their body is not their own. What goes on inside their skin should be decided, not by doctors, not by themselves, but by lawmakers. Somehow politicians are the ones best qualified to decide on when a woman should be a mother, regardless of her own inclination.
Of course once a forced-pregnancy is over and the child now does exist, they don’t care if it’s cared for, educated, has health care, and, in some cases, is allowed to even stay in the nation that forced it to exist. So it’s not really about the babies. And it sure as fuck isn’t about the women who had to sacrifice their life, health, and finances to have it. It’s about “an issue”, one contentious enough to make lots of money from, and passionate enough to put people into power.
Let’s be honest for a moment. No normal person supports rape and incest. No normal person would murder a woman because her body can’t support a pregnancy. And yet somehow here we are, and this is what we’re arguing about.
What it comes down to is this: women aren’t viewed as fully human, they’re less than human. They need to be herded, prodded, controlled. In Afghanistan women can no longer show their face in public. In the US, we’re not very far behind.
What I want for Mother’s Day is for women to have the right NOT to be a mother if they want to. That would be the best gift in the world.