Vote No on Prop. 4

Proposition 4, for those who might not be aware, is about parental consent. It is about amending the California constitution to force pregnant teens to obtain said consent before obtaining an abortion. There's a mandatory waiting period of 48 hours, too – just enough time for your parents to beat you up or send you to a convent or both. Or else, in another breathtaking breach of your privacy, you could run the gauntlet of the law and try to prove to a judge why you shouldn't have to inform your parents. Whee!

Allow smart-assed little Kaitlyn to make up her own mind about her body, her life, her future? Heavens, no! Never mind that most teens who get pregnant do involve their parents. Never mind, moreover, that the ones who don’t probably have damn good reasons for it.

Would the knuckle-draggers behind this ballot initiative really prefer that teenage girls go get illegal abortions? Oh...right...of course they would. Most of them don’t give a flying fuck about real teenage girls. They are grimly determined to strip them – and us older girls too – of our constitutional rights. The right to determine our reproductive destinies makes us equal citizens. Without it we are slaves.

It all brings to mind those heady days when we marched on Washington for reproductive freedom, busloads of college students and senior citizens and sensitive men shouting "U.S. out of my uterus!" I made a ton of money on "Dykes for Reproductive Rights" t-shirts. We waved signs with wire hangers that said "Never again!" That was before the internet. Now I do all these slightly more grown-up (read: lazy) things like writing emails to my Senators and signing a dozen progressive petitions a week and sending donations online.



California voters have defeated this sort of ballot initiative before – twice. It just keeps coming back, like a nasty fungus under the bathroom carpet. Go here for a good Los Angeles Times op-ed on the subject.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: no one has any business telling a woman what to do with her body. You can believe what you want, but your rights end where her body begins. You cannot control someone else’s sovereign self – and no, a fetus is not sovereign, at least not before it is viable outside its mother’s body, not while it requires her consent and her blood vessels to fulfill its potential. It may have rights, but its rights do not trump those of the girl or woman carrying it. She is the one with the SAT test, the orchestra rehearsals, the abusive dad. Or maybe the four other children, the meager paycheck, the violent boyfriend, the partner-track job or the diabetes. The point is, she’s the one who gets to make the decision. Not you.

No matter what the Just Say No abstinence-only-teaching spittle-flecked bible thumpers think, people – including teenagers – are Going To Have Sex. And the reality is, women and girls with unwanted pregnancies Will Have Abortions, whether they are safe and legal or not. If my college boyfriend had gotten me pregnant, you can bet your boots I would have done whatever it took to get an abortion, legal or otherwise. Wouldn’t we prefer, since it’s gonna happen, that it’s done legally, with sterilized instruments, by a trained, caring doctor? Because the doctors who perform abortions, by and large, genuinely care about women and girls, their families, their lives and their futures. They are principled and, in this dark era of death threats and clinic bombings, truly heroic. Pick up This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Susan Wicklund and I guarantee you won’t be able to put it down.

The people who want to outlaw abortion are too often the same people who oppose paid parental leave and social services for poor women and their babies, and slouch mutely on their couches while the Roves and Rumsfelds of the world send tens of thousands of young Americans off to war to bomb the arms off Iraqi children, before coming home in festive flag-draped coffins.

Every child should be a wanted child. That old bumper sticker sentiment from the patchouli-scented flowering of the women’s movement still rings true. When women get to decide when and whether to give birth, families and communities get healthier. (Don’t even get me started about the Shrub administration’s ritual denial of funding to organizations that provide family planning in developing countries.) No woman or girl should be held hostage to a being inside her body that she does not want to bring into the world – with all the accompanying sickness, pain and risk of death – for any and all of the reasons that she might list on those forms at the courthouse. Every child born should be a blessing, the answer to fervent prayer. And lord knows that in these days of global overpopulation and dwindling resources, every child not born is a blessing too.

So, Californians, please give your sisters credit for being full human beings and vote No on Prop. 4. Thank you.