I began to notice, years ago, that as pregnancy ultrasounds became more and more detailed and lifelike, men who formerly supported abortion rights began to hedge. This pissed me off, because the implication seemed to be that women were like children themselves, and didn’t understand what they were doing when they chose abortions. (It reminds me of the kind of vegetarians who seem to think you couldn’t eat meat if you ever saw a cow.) That’s why everyone should read this:

But as a broader strategy, the notion that educating women in the grotesqueries of termination will be a game-changer is absurd. As Richards could tell Daleiden if he asked her his question, women already know what abortion is. We know more about blood, innards, fetuses, and the babies they may become — in short, about life in reproductive bodies — than anti-abortion activists seem to understand.

The average age of menarche in the United States is 12; the average age of menopause, 51. During the intervening decades, most women bleed regularly, and if you think we emit that chlorinated blue water in the maxi-pad ads, you are incorrect. I was in high school the first time a friend joked about a “period chunk.” I was also in high school when I first heard that an acquaintance had had a grapefruit-size dermoid cyst removed from an ovary; as is not uncommon with those cysts, it contained teeth, hair, and skin.

The act of controlling or preventing pregnancy for a heterosexually active woman is filled with corporeal maneuvering. It can entail the daily, timed consumption of pills; implantation of a subdermal device; the obsessive monitoring of temperature and vaginal secretions; fiddling in unseen recesses with caps and diaphragms. Even the in-vogue set-it-and-forget-it IUD is not always as easy as it seems. Getting mine involved a snapped wire, retrieval, reinsertion, and the manual dilation of my cervix, which was the most exquisitely terrible pain of my life — and I am the veteran of three uterine surgeries, two of which resulted in babies and one in the removal of 20 fibroid tumors from my uterine wall.
Continue reading “The secret of abortion” →

I guess it’s only going to be worth $7.73?

Will it be Susan B. Anthony or Harriet Tubman? Eleanor Roosevelt or Rosa Parks? Or another important woman from American history?

These will be among the names the nation ponders after the Obama administration’s announcement late Wednesday that a woman will be featured on the $10 bill, the first time in well over a century that a female portrait will grace the United States’ paper money.

The redesigned bill will be unveiled in 2020 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the right of women to vote. The Treasury Department is launching a massive public campaign to solicit suggestions through social media and town halls for what the bill should look like and who should be on it. The only requirements for candidacy are that the woman be deceased and embody the theme of the bill’s new look: “Democracy.”