A few choice words.

I just finished reading this piece* on last weekend's March for Women's Lives, and I'm feeling a wave of emotions. Pride that hundreds of thousands of women, including all sorts of celebrity types, were willing to stand up and shout for reproductive freedom. Fear that the freedom today's college girls take for granted is hanging by a thread, and that unless we put John Kerry in the White House, we may return to an era in which religious conservatism and thinly-veiled misogynism conspire to strip women of the right to make their own decisions about child-bearing. And a little wistfulness that I couldn't be there on the Capitol Mall to raise my own voice for choice.

Twelve years ago, I was there. In 1992, along with fellow members of the Vassar Pro-Choice Coalition, I boarded a bus in Poughkeepsie filled with excitement and energy and a bit of trepidation. I disembarked in Washington (actually, somewhere in Virginia near the Pentagon City metro stop), and found myself in a sea of women. Winding my way through the crowd, armed with a "Pro Choice, Our Choice" sign, I remember feeling as though I had given myself over to the throng, as if we were moving with a single body and chanting with a single voice, and that the hundreds of different colors, sizes, ages, and styles we represented were blurred into oneness.

The other thing I remember is this. As my friends and I made our way to the start of the March, we made a little game out of trying to spot men. A few of them (in addition to Bill Clinton and Al Gore and assorted other politicos) were in attendance, as brave and as passionate about choice as we. But they were only a few, perhaps one percent of the total number of marchers. And I remember thinking that we would never truly secure reproductive freedom unless the men were fighting by our sides.

I still think that's true. As thrilled as I am to see that so many women, particularly the younger crowd, are still passionate about protecting reproductive choice, I'm afraid we have not done enough to bring the men along with us. One anecdote in the Salon article recounts a teenage boy's credulity and dismay upon learning that women once used coat-hangers to give themselves abortions. This boy, and the millions like him, are growing up complacent and oblivious to the significance of choice. They need to know that when abortion is not legal, safe, and affordable, that their girlfriends and sisters and classmates have fewer options in life and work and education and career, and that the shrinking of those options in turn contracts their own independence and the range of their own possibilities. And they need to be angry about the hypocrisy of politicians who would restrict abortion while also eliminating family planning resources and sex education, stripping poor women and children of affordable health care, allowing public schools to deteriorate, and reducing welfare benefits.

Back in college, I had a button that read: "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." This is a little more strident than suits me now. But as we continue to fight a fight that should long ago have become a non-issue, we need the men on our side. It's our bodies, it's our choice, but we need their voices, too.
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Comments

I didn't make it to the march myself, but several of my friends did. I'm told that the percentage of men has increased significantly in the last 10 years. It's still only about 15%, but that's progress.