Herban Sprawl

3 December 2009

A friend just sent me an article by Barbara Ehrenreich about the Pink Ribbon Cult. It was, as ever, an astute summary of the situation with women’s health issues. As a breast cancer survivor, she is uniquely positioned to make the point that women rolled over and played dead about the Stupak Amendment that removed our reproductive rights through insurance maneuvers, yet are up in arms about the study that has shown mammograms to be of little help.

As a card-carrying liberal female, I have to concur with Ehrenreich. I want to know the causes of breast cancer. I was in the high risk group, thanks to my mother’s death from it at age 55 in 1970. I was 19. It was an impressionable experience because this was before chemo.

Then, one day after my annual exam with Dr. Garst (a saint!), as he handed me my mammogram prescription, we were talking about aches and pains and I told him about how my mother had gotten really bad bursitits in her shoulder after a spirited game of horseshoes. Our family doctor sent her to Chicago to have cobalt treatments in that shoulder. “Was she right or left-handed?” “Right.” “Which breast was diagnosed first?” “Right.” “You aren’t high risk, Hon. They were using cobalt for all kinds of stuff back then and then figured out it was causing cancer! Hell, they were using it on KIDS!”

I had to have a biopsy after a mammogram detected spots. I was a wreck, and let me tell you, they didn’t call me with the results within 24 hours… THAT policy is now way different because nobody in Carilion wanted to deal with ANYBODY like me ever again. [If I helped even one other woman by raising hell the way I did, I will consider the experience worthwhile.] It turned out to be calcifications.

What bothers me is that women will talk about these experiences, but not the horrors they lived through with unwanted pregnancies. The stigma that has been attached to abortions is incredible. Yet, according to an article Ellen Goodman wrote, if you have a group of women collected somewhere, one in three of them has had one. The Stupak Amendment would never have passed if women weren’t treated like pariahs for having had abortions.

I have said this before in this space. Women just will NOT talk about abortion from a first hand point of view. Case in point: me.

Yep. I got pregnant when I was in no way shape or form able to shoulder the responsibility of having a child. Was it a hard decision to make? No. Have I ever regretted it? No. What motivated me to do that? Respect for the life that child and knowing it would never have a decent mother, be economically safe and possibly be born with defects because I was taking the pill at the time. It was a no brainer for me.

But how many women have enough nerve to stand up with me and admit this? Precious few, and I can already hear the breath being sucked in by the people around me who have never known. Sorry to disappoint you all, but at 58, there are certain things I am willing to fight for. Legal abortion without financial restrictions is necessary and it is OUR RIGHT. I am disgusted by the number of women who are so goddammed selfish and fearful that they won’t speak up. Take off those stupid pink ribbons and start marching for the rights of women who, like I was, are in no position to have children. It is far braver of them to admit this and deal with the problem before it becomes another statistic of child poverty, or worse.

And before the right wingnuts paint me as a child-hater or child-murderer, let me assure you I do love children. During the 20+ years I spent as a public school teacher, I loved hundreds of them and sometimes I was the only one doing the loving. The older I got, the more I realized what a wise decision I had made.

Today, I am experiencing the same feelings gay people have when they take the plunge and come out. My own family has been unaware of this, so those of them who are regular readers are in for a shock. But it was time to put my money where my mouth has been about starting the dialogue. There is no way that miserable and woman-hating amendment would have passed if women had been the first to put aside their pride and privacy to talk about this issue. We’ll talk openly about our HRT, or lack thereof, we’ll talk openly about mammograms and other matters related to our plumbing, but talk about having had an abortion? Nope. Most emphatically not.

We’re the ones who have allowed the stigma to be attached to this, so if we lose our rights, maybe it’s our own damn fault.