Enough is enough. The anti-women contingent in this state keep pushing us back into the hole we crawled out of in the 1960’s. I remember when I needed summer jobs during college and looked at the “Help Wanted – Female” column in the newspaper. I remember thinking that a neighbor’s daughter who went to pharmacy school was a disgrace to the neighborhood. What kind of girl would want a “man’s job”? There was a time when I wouldn’t dream of going to a female doctor. That kind of thinking doesn’t change easily. It’s taken some of us 40 years to really believe that women are intelligent enough to make good decisions. Now I choose women as my primary care physicians and support women running for political office.
My letter on this subject will be in the Post Dispatch tomorrow. I’m really fed up with playing defense on women’s reproductive rights.
How in the world did we get to the point where a handful of radicals can
dictate to the citizens of Missouri what kind of birth control they can use?These are the same people who don’t want the government interfering with their
health care decisions and scream “socialism” when we try to help our uninsured
neighbors. These are the same people who cut funding for mental health
services, early childhood education, and who kick severely disabled people out
of the only “home” they’ve ever known.It’s not enough that they’ve made it almost impossible for a woman carrying a
fetus that dies in the last trimester to get an abortion. It’s not enough
that they scream “sinner” at young girls impregnated by rapists who hate the
thing the rapists left growing in their belly.I doubt that most Missourians realize what nonsense passes for legislative
action in Jefferson City. They will find out when they need emergency
contraception and can’t buy it. One of the bills passed by the Missouri House
and now being rammed through the Senate would make it impossible for rural
women to buy the morning after pill because pharmacists can decide for
themselves which drugs they “believe” will cause an abortion. That could
apply to any prescription from a woman’s doctor.We shouldn’t even have to be discussing this. Couples should be able to make
their reproductive decisions in private. Period.When citizens cede their decision-making power to extremists, their rights
disappear one by one. We’d better celebrate the 50th anniversary of “the
pill” now because it may not be around much longer. And we’ll have no one to
blame but ourselves.