One of the most powerful moments from the Women’s March in Chicago this year was a moment I witnessed after the fact on video. A group of young women chanted loudly: “Our Bodies, Our Choice!” followed by a chorus of men responding, “Their Bodies, Their Choice!” The repetition of this call-and-response echoing in the city streets was stirring and profound. This is how relationships should be, I thought. This is respect between men and women at its most basic level.
I keep that moment in mind when I despair at each new blow to women’s rights, particularly reproductive rights: the continuous threat to defund Planned Parenthood, the waning availability of women’s health care clinics, and Trump’s latest signing of legislation that will allow state and local governments to withhold Title X federal funding for family planning services, whether they perform abortions or not.
As a woman born in the 1950s, “Our Bodies, Our Choice” was not a concept I learned from my nervous “let’s not talk about that stuff” mother, or from the Catholic nuns in grade school, or from the dry illustrations of reproductive parts in my high school “Health” class. The lack of openness and lack of knowledge left me confused and unprepared for making my own decisions about pregnancy, intimacy, and sexuality.
When I first visited Planned Parenthood as a young adult, the women talked to me about “my body, my choice” in the most straightforward, non-judgmental way. I learned about birth control, as well as my options if I became pregnant, including a safe abortion. Most women — mothers or not, married or not, gay or straight — are faced with the decision to have children or not in their lifetimes, and we must make sure it is always our decision to make.
I want our sons and daughters to walk through the world proud of who they are, just like those young men and women at the Women’s March. Isn’t knowing that you are in control of your body critical to any person’s well-being? Isn’t feeling safe in your body the most intimate grounding to all of life?
So as I honor the true origin of Mothers Day as a day women work together for peace, I recommit to work for a women’s right to a peaceful life through making her own decisions about her body. We need to continue to write postcards, boycott companies, call legislators, run for office, and vote the rascals out.
Our bodies, our choice.
Diane Scott
Member, Mothers and Others for Peace