June 27, 2022

Since Friday, June 24, I have had a mildly sick feeling in my stomach. I know the cause. It’s the Supreme Court ruling overturning the federal right to a legal abortion. This sickness in my gut is not keeping me from doing anything. I have been going about my normal daily activities. I had a lovely visit with my twenty-something daughter who lives in a state directly and immediately effected but the ruling. (Her situation is a topic for another day.) I am even getting some solid exercise in which, if I was truly ill, I wouldn’t be able to do. Then it hit me on my run this morning. That sick feeling, this is what oppression feels like.

Every time I think about this upheaval of a women’s right to choose, there it is, that pang of feeling a little bit sick. I have felt dread and apprehension before, many times but ultimately, I have control over those feelings and absolutely know how to overcome them. It’s simple. Face the task, at hand and get on with it.

This is different. This feeling is a reminder that I am viewed less than a whole person. I am a person of lesser value less the self-righteous men and women who feel their righteousness is more valuable than my humanness. This is what oppression feels like.

Overturning Roe V. Wade is not going to affect me directly in terms of forced birth, but it still affects me as a woman, a mother of a son and a daughter and it affects me as a person who works with children and young adults. People in there 20’s 30’s and 40’s have lives full of promise, opportunity and adventure ahead of them that may or may not include parenthood.  Their choices to delay or forego parenthood do not matter to the men and women in power who are making these decisions. Their choices are meaningless. There plans have no worth. This is what oppression feels like.

My grandmother and great aunt were suffragettes. Their participation and in a system that oppressed them means more to me now than ever before. I had a vision of them in their period-style clothing complete with fantastic hats marching in support of a woman’s right to vote. Now I realize they probably had the same sick feeling of oppression in their guts. The men surrounding them viewed them as less than. My grandmother and aunt were emboldened revolutionaries pushing a boulder forward. Finally in 1920, they pushed that boulder across the finish line.

One hundred and two years later, in 2022, we have just had that boulder rolled backwards and it is holding us down. That boulder on top of us . . .This is what oppression feels like.