To all those cheering the demise of Roe v. Wade, I need to ask: What exactly are you celebrating? The woman who may die because she can’t end a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy? The young girl forced to bear a child born out of incest or rape? The woman living below the poverty line who does not have the means to feed her existing children, let alone an additional child?
Or are you cheering because you are rooting for a return to a white, patriarchal society that relegated women, people of color and the LGBTQ community to second-class citizenship?
Where is your support for children after they are born? Republicans have consistently rejected critical assistance to help vulnerable mothers care for their children. They have consistently voted against universal health care, paid parental leave, subsidized child care, supplemental nutrition assistance and child tax credits. They have consistently voted against regulating semi-automatic weapons. They have consistently voted against environmental protection.
I laugh through my tears when I hear Republicans calling themselves the pro-life party and the party of family values. How can you be pro-life and pro-family if you don’t care about mothers and their children after children are born? Pro-birth is not pro-life, and any Republican who claims the title of pro-life or pro-family is a cold-hearted hypocrite.
And speaking of hypocrisy, where are the laws that punish men for the unwanted pregnancies that women will be forced to bear? Why do the men whose sperm impregnate women get a choice whether to care for the babies they create, when that choice has been taken away from women? How can you criminalize abortion without criminalizing every man’s failure to support the children they father?
Every man old enough to impregnate a woman should be required to register his DNA with the state, so that paternity can be established whenever a woman gets pregnant.
I’m not celebrating. My heart is breaking, because my daughters will now live with fewer rights than they were born with. And if the disgraced, corrupted Supreme Court continues down this path, many more fundamental rights will be taken away from both men and women.
I will not celebrate until no child goes hungry, no person is forced to choose between food and medicine, and no more weapons of mass killing threaten us on the streets and in our schools, houses of worship and supermarkets.
I will not celebrate until we are all free to love who we love.
And I will not celebrate until we can agree that our nation is only at its best when it aspires to be a more perfect union, as our Founding Fathers intended.
Only then will America be great again.
Andrea Klausner
Vice-Chair
Southampton Town Democratic Committee
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