There’s No I in Uterus, but There is an Us
“Honey, I think we should talk about, you know…it’s completely natural at your age…sex.” The most infamous convo you hope to avoid as a teenager and wished you had never had when reminiscing as an adult. Luckily, I can barely remember mine. I was 13 or 14, watching with my mom what had to have been some kind of sexual situation on TV because she blurted out, “do we need to talk about…?” Her voice trailed off. My blunt “no!” response was the end of that. Some people don’t have older siblings or spend six years at an all girl’s high school where the boy drama was always off the charts, but some do. I belong to the latter group. It’s still usually a parent’s duty to “teach” their child about good old hanky panky. What happens if parents can’t go through with it? Adolescents need a fail-safe, a place to teach them that even though an afternoon delight sounds charming, it can have ugly consequences. School.
Sex ed is our society’s responsible parent who is meant to entrust our children with all knowledge about sex. We are and have been failing our kids. Abstinence, a complete lack of sex rhetoric is still taught and highly stressed in 19 states of the U.S. including Louisiana, Indiana, Wisconsin and Arizona. A sorry attempt to delay the inevitable with pure thoughts and repressed hormones. If sex itself is absent, abortion must be the scarlet letter of sex ed. A word so shameful and taboo in our country, I’m still learning about it now while writing this piece. Back in February, the NY Times covered a Supreme Court ruling temporarily blocking a Louisiana law that could have left the state with one doctor authorized to provide abortions in one clinic. I hold onto the hope the law doesn’t pass. Abortion is the ghost story of our society too terrifying to whisper about. A moral and ethical test no one wants to face.
Adults’ fears of this topic have left boys and girls ignorant. Maybe more teenagers would practice safe sex using every means possible if they understood the gravity of its aftermath. You can’t cure an abortion with antibiotics. When I see conservative male politicians, aka old white men making false statements like “if the baby was born alive, they would just let the baby expire,” according to Michael Long (politifact) and Todd Akin’s famous assertion that women’s bodies would somehow block an unwanted pregnancy in the case of a “legitimate rape” (one of my personal favorites; NY Times 2012) I want to shout “fuck you! No uterus, no opinion!” It’s a woman’s body, her battle between her notions of right and wrong, her trauma. Right?
My sister and movies taught me about sex, Sex and the City taught me about abortion. Carrie and Samantha had abortions in their early 20s while Miranda contemplated having an abortion and not telling Steve. Did Steve have a right to know about the pregnancy, let alone the abortion? Was Miranda obligated to tell him? I’ll always stand behind a woman’s right to choose, but we no longer need to feel it’s only a women’s issue. Pewforum’s 2018 poll of views on abortion by gender revealed that 60% of women and 57% of men believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Men are in the fight for women’s rights to choose even though it can be hard to believe this reality in Trump’s pussy grabbing America. It shouldn’t be treated as a feminist issue. Feminism means equal treatment of and between both men and women in all aspects of life. Men are a part of the dialogue whether we want them to be or not.
BBC had a 2017 article covering England’s choice to make sex and relationships education compulsory in all schools, starting from age four. If the Brits, our parent country are doing this, so should we. Huff Post rated the top 10 most intimate podcasts about love and sex like “Modern Love,” “I want it That Way” and many more. Their pithy summaries entail aspects of sex, but many are about relationships and intimacy. Even Carrie Bradshaw’s Sex and the City column, with Sex in the title is mainly about exploring different avenues of a relationship in a city filled with horny, but perhaps hopeless romantics at heart. If the children are our future then adults and schools are doing them a disservice by not preparing them to go into battle unified. The truth is our only weapon we should wield together. If I ever went through the physical and emotional trials of an abortion I would want to know that, even if men couldn’t empathize with me, they’d understand and respect the fact it’s a difficult decision unique to each woman. Sharing our burden of our reality with men doesn’t make us weak, but continues protect our rights as women.