Why I Am Pro-Choice

The ban on birth control via the landmark Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut which overturned the ban on contraceptives for married couples, happened in the early sixties mid-1960s. Most young women find that hard to wrap their heads around.

“You mean,” said one of our daughters, “that the government controlled what happened between men and women in the privacy of their own homes?”

Yes, I am.

“But wasn’t there birth control as far back as Margaret Sanger in the 1920s?” asked the other daughter.

Yes, again. But it was illegal until 1963.

My girls, who have been privileged to grow up in times when birth control is readily available and abortion legal, and women’s voting and financial rights are established, shake their heads as if to say, boy what a mess life must have been ‘back then’.

So it is with the overturning Roe v Wade — it is something that seems to have the potential to send us straight back to the messed up life ‘back then’. It is a frightening prospect.

But the consequences of overturning Roe v Wade are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to women and rights. Here are just some of the rights that can be in jeopardy.

Voting: The 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920, a century and a half after this country was founded as a free nation and men had the vote. Still the amendment did not give the same rights to Black and indigenous women. That would come much later.

Body autonomy: Women were subject to male rule concerning their health and sexual freedom by their husbands, religious leaders, and their doctors. These people ‘knew what was best’ for women who were relegated to a child-like status until the 1970s. Yes, you read that correctly, the 1970s.

Credit in a woman’s own name: With the passage in 1974 of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, women were finally granted the legal right to open a credit card in their own name. Even then the amount they could borrow from a credit card was often smaller than a man would get with the same credit and financial profile. Married women also couldn’t open a bank account without their husband’s permission.

Owning a home: It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that a woman could even access a line of credit independently without a man, (husband, father, uncle, or brother), to cosign her application. To go further on home ownership, if a married couple, both working were applying for a mortgage for a house, the only way a woman’s salary could be factored in for the mortgage payments was if she could prove, via a doctor’s note, that she had had a tubal ligation. This proved that she wouldn’t be out of a job and a paycheck, and the requisite mortgage payment, due to a pregnancy.

Education: Not only weren’t women not allowed to obtain a law degree or go to ivy league colleges before the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, but they faced discrimination in the educational setting in many other ways as many men felt that women were ‘incapable’ of handling the rigors of educational stress.

Adoption: No matter their wealth or being well-established in their communities, without a husband, women couldn’t adopt a baby.

It seems incredible in the year 2022 that even a remote possibility of women losing their rights in any way can exist but it does. Overturning Roe v Wade is only the beginning of what could happen to human rights, rights that are not singularly women’s but should be equal to both sexes.

Taking away the rights of any one group of people sets the stage for the potential loss of rights for all. If anyone thinks this couldn’t happen, they need only to look to history to see how subtly and consciously rights and liberties can be taken away.

© 2022 copyright Kristen Houghton all rights reserved