Abortion Access is on the Ballot

by 40th Ward Precinct Captain, Anne Wagner

When I was in college in the 90s, I worked as an escort at Planned Parenthood in Southwest Ohio. Every Saturday, I would get up and help women cross picket lines so they could access birth control, pap smears and yes, abortions. Escorts were needed because the sidewalk was filled with protesters and a few years prior, someone had blown up the original clinic. These mornings were filled with bizarre characters. There was the family with seven kids who lived in a trailer on welfare, shouting about Jesus and their hatred of the government. There was the professional looking woman who would morph into a possessed demon screaming at me that I was going to hell while she shoved a picture of an aborted fetus into my face. The most ‘interesting’ day was when the Knights of Columbus marched with a swimming pool lane divider as a rosary. They carried a statue of some saint while reciting Hail Marys. It was comically medieval. The image of 50, middle-aged, overweight, white men, marching slowly down the street with their fat stomachs falling out of their Knight uniforms, while wearing hats out of a British naval skit, is seared into my brain. Every Saturday was a spectacle and it seemed impossible that this irrational mob could have sway over rational people. I was wrong. Since the 90s, as we now know, there has been a coolly strategic movement afoot to strip away this right and with it, a woman’s choice to determine her future. What does that mean? It means my daughters and granddaughters will grow up in a country with less rights than I had. It means that the country fundamentally only sees women for their biology. It means that the male gaze has become the male grip. 

I am a long way from that young woman who sat outside Planned Parenthood in a vest with a vague sense of who she was and why she cared about this issue or any other. It was as if my activism was a premonition. It would be needed in the future. The future that is now. I am no longer young. I am reminded of this with every hot flash. I have been married and divorced. A single parent to two girls. Mourned two miscarriages. Worried at night about paying the bills, about being enough to take care of us. Choosing a career over a personal life. Choosing motherhood over everything else. Ultimately these burdens and joys were mine. I was not ‘regulated’ or limited by someone else’s sense of my place or role. Joan Didion famously said, “People with self-respect know the cost of things.” I knew the cost of my choices. They were mine to make. But now there seem to be forces increasingly interested in taking choices away. Abortion. Voting rights. Who you can marry. The right to be safe from gun violence. Like a bully, hollowing out the self-esteem of Americans by denying them the dignity of being left alone, whether they believe in abortion or not.