Let me tell you a story.
When I was a company commander, we gave an article 15 to a soldier for smoking pot. So what, right?
She was pregnant. It was her third offense of smoking pot while she was pregnant. (we’ve been in the process of throwing her out for a while. It’s a long story.).
We all know that smoking regular cigarettes during pregnancy is bad. Smoking pot is worse. Not just for mom but for baby. But when we called child protective services, I was basically told there was nothing they could do, not even open a case, because the child had not been born yet.
I wanted to act to protect this unborn child and could not because to do so set a dangerous precedent about whether mom’s life or the baby’s life was more important. While I may have wanted to tie her down and slap her silly, there was nothing I could do. Nothing.
Why am I telling you this? Because the war against my uterus is heating up. Ladies, I bet you had no idea your uterus was such a hot bed of evil did you? Legislatures all over the country are taking away the right to health care. The right for you to make basic decisions about your health care.
And yet, I wanted to make some pretty basic decisions about this young woman life. Against her will.
How is my wanting to make a decision any different than what these legislatures are doing when they pass bills saying that pregnancy now begins two weeks prior to conception. Or that birth control is murder.
Why are these the questions that keep me up at night? Why am I lying awake, wanting to put a young woman behind bars because she’s smoking pot and causing harm to a child that I will have no stake in? It’s not my kid, it’s not my body, it’s not my family.
And yet, this decision haunts me.
On the flip side, the legislative decisions being bandied about centering around my uterus enrage me. How are they different?
These are things I think about. This is what worries me. That my decisions are no different except in the scale of them.
