Trust Women: a Learning Experience by Melissa A. Bartell
Posted By Melissa Bartell on January 22, 2010
I was born in 1970, which makes me three years older than Roe v. Wade. It also means that I grew up in a world where safe, legal abortion was a fact of life…or so I thought.
When I was eighteen and nineteen and living in San Jose, Operation Rescue, the militant anti-choice group, targeted our city as part of their “Summer of Rescue” campaign. My mother, who is not just one of my closest friends, but also a personal hero, was sitting across from me at the breakfast table one morning. I don’t remember which of us saw the blurb first, in the underground newspaper, but there was a “call to action” to be part of a grassroots activist group, at the time called BACAOR – the Bay Area Coalition Against Operation Rescue. We pronounced it BayCore.
In addition to fund-raising and writing informative brochures, those of us who volunteered went through physical training to do clinic defense – literally learning how to stand arm in arm, forming a human wall between anti-choice demonstrators and clinic doors. We learned that any time they were demonstrating, we had to hold a counter-demonstration. We learned to woo the mayor (a wonderful, strong woman), and the police force (the woman we worked with was amazing). We learned that we were allowed to defend ourselves, but never EVER could we start anything physical. We escorted patients, many of whom were entering clinics for routine medical care, and not abortions, so that they wouldn’t have to deal with plastic fetuses being shoved in their faces, and, when doctors were afraid to enter buildings, we escorted them, as well. It was a summer fraught with tension, filled with passion, and just enough danger to put things in perspective.
We worked with groups like Act-Up and Queer Nation, organizations that taught us to reclaim words like MILITANT, and further taught us that reproductive rights and GLBT rights go hand-in-hand.
And I learned.
I learned how blessed I was to have a mother who stood up for what she believed in and taught me to do the same.
I learned that I am fortunate to be surrounded by other wonderful, amazing, STRONG women who will with equal depths of caring, either kiss away my tears, or kick me in the ass, sometimes both.
I learned that the men who marry such women are some of the smartest, kindest men on earth, but also the most patient.
I learned to trust other women with my life.
I learned that they could trust me with their lives.
I’m lucky.
I grew up in an environment where reproductive choice was a “given,” and where we had safe-sex lectures at the dinner table.
And yet…
I have friends who don’t see our rights being eroded away by laws allowing doctors and pharmacists who can refuse to prescribe birth control, by states banning abortion except in extreme cases, by men – none of whom, mind you, who can actually get pregnant – making decisions about other people’s bodies, women’s bodies, MY body.
And I am scared.
And I am tired.
And I will continue to fight.
Because trusting women, means trusting myself.
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