"Her Body! Her Choice!"

I'm a middle-aged American white guy, so I should have absolutely no say in what any woman decides to do with her body. Period.

Neither should these 25 middle-aged American white guys (The Guardian has supplied mug shots) who voted yesterday in Alabama to outlaw abortion (with sentences of 99 years in an Alabama prison for doctors who perform the procedure) from conception, even in cases of rape and incest (yes, the doctor would get a longer sentence than the rapist).

January 21, 2017. Washington, D.C.

Reading about the men of Alabama blithely stripping away the rights of the women of Alabama, I keep thinking back to the Women's March in D.C. on the day after the current occupant of the White House moved in. We couldn't get near the speakers on Independence Avenue, but sat most of the day perched precariously on top of leftover inauguration-day cyclone fencing just outside the Hirschhorn Museum taking lots of photographs of the massive overflow crowd filling the Mall. One of the most common chants that we heard was "My Body! My Choice!" All of the men in my area would respond with a loud, "Her Body! Her Choice!" That's the echo I keep hearing today. I want to scream it again, but since I'm sitting here alone by a computer, I'll scream it into cyberspace hoping that one of those self-righteous holier-than-thou Alabamian legislators might get the message that women's bodies (in addition to being complete mysteries to them) are also none of their business.

As men we have the right to say, "Her body, her choice," or we can shut the fuck up. Period.