Tag: women

Women’s Role in Keeping Life

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I spent my evening today on the steps of the Wisconsin state capitol along with a few thousand others continuing the struggle for women’s rights. I’ve spent a lot of time on those steps over the past thirty years at a whole lot of rallies working for justice for a lot of people and a lot of places. Tonight as the crowd started to gather I found myself sitting and thinking of one of the first rallies I went to back as a student activist in the 1990’s. We were fighting the proposed Crandon mine. Frannie Van Zile, an Anishanaabe leader of the struggle from the Mole Lake Nation was speaking. I can still hear her voice echoing in my heart. Her words still guide my actions every day. “You women, you women out there. You are the keepers of the water.”

Women are the bearers of life. We are the keepers of the water. This is a great gift and a great responsibility. This is why many Indigenous nations historically hold women with great respect and why everything gets out of balance when women aren’t treated with the respect and honor that they deserve. Things are out of balance these days. The probable overturning of Roe v Wade is one clear sign.

Women must be held in respect as the bearers of life. Taking away their rights to protect their lives and safely make the difficult decisions to choose not bear a child is not respect for the child or the mother. What happens to the child that is born to a mother who doesn’t have the financial, social, or emotional resources to care for them? Is it better to be born unwanted into a world that can’t care for you and to become the scourge of those who are supposedly pro-life when you’re forced to fight to survive outside the womb? The foster care system is overburdened. There aren’t lots of people seeking to adopt. These children forced upon these women will simply die outside the womb either fully or simply in their souls. Is it better for a woman to be held victim to rape or to face the results a failed contraceptive every day for the rest of her life while the father walks away? Or is it better for her to die in the back alley? Clearly none of these options is good for anyone.

When we respect the women, when we hold them up and support them as they make the most difficult decision of their lives they become stronger. When they become stronger we all become stronger. It is when we care for and support these women that they can grow powerful, they can love, and they can bring back balance. Abortion is a painful choice, but it is a choice and as long as it is legal it can be a safe choice. If we lose legal abortions we will also lose women’s lives, and that is not pro-life. It is simply wrong.

No One Wants An Abortion

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No one wants to have an abortion. Let’s just start there. It’s not something a woman does because she wants to have a surgery that will leave her with memories and questions for the rest of her life. She doesn’t want to always be able to look back and ask herself would it have been a boy or girl? Who would it have been? What would she have been like as a mother to that being?

The right to have an abortion is perhaps one of the greatest signs of motherhood. Afterall, the mother’s role is to do the best possible for the being in her womb. Sometimes the best and the hardest is to protect that being from a life of pain and want. Sometimes the best and the hardest is to protect them from abuse or from severe health conditions that would make living impossible. Sometimes the best and the hardest is to protect them from entering a world in which they will be treated with hatred by the people who are supposed to love them. There are so many reasons that a woman may choose to have an abortion. None are so simple as she wants one. All are about doing the best that she can for the being that grows inside her and for herself as well. The mother’s relationship with herself, with the world, and with her understanding of God will all change, but she will have done what she needed to do to care for herself and for the being she carried.

How can the court be so cruel to these women and unborn beings? Without legal abortions these women will not be able to save the beings in their wombs from lives of ongoing pain. If they try they will risk their own lives. What will we have won to lose both the mother and the fetus? Maybe it is these women who would risk their lives for the well-being of someone who they will never know who should be in charge instead of these judges who are willing to force them to put their lives at risk.