Minding Someone Else's Uterus

When I was kid growing up in a tiny beach town that was as conservative and Christian as it was laid-back and lazy, you could spot the popular girls by the jewelry they wore.

Trendy '80s bling, like the "Be Frie" and "st nds" (Best Friends) necklaces, were hard to come by on the Island. Instead, all of the beautiful and blond 11-year-old goddesses in my Awana club pinned a pair of tiny feet to their T-shirts, right above their hearts. So I did, too.

Not because I knew what the feet meant (I had the faintest notion of them representing a bunch of tiny babies who needed our help, and, well, who can say no to babies?), but because, being black and knobby-kneed, I wanted nothing more than to disappear into that crowd of blondes.

Nearly 20 years later, I have no clue where those tiny emblems of anti-abortion sentiment are -- and it kind of makes me sad. I've got a special space cleared in my jewelry box for such silver-plated collectibles of nostalgia. The feet would be a welcome reminder of how lemming-like the 11-year-old me was and how loud the 28-year-old me strives to be.

I was immediately reminded of the feet after reading Bonnie's post on Ohio's proposed "Father's Rights" bill, which would impose a new kind of parental consent to abortion procedures ("When the fetus that is the subject of the procedure is viable, no person shall perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman without the written informed consent of the father of the fetus.") There was a time when I wore the feet proudly to school, to church, to Girl Scouts and who knows where else, never realizing that by wearing them, a decision had been made for me and that I was making another decision for a woman I'd never met. And the woman I'd meet in the mirror years later.

I don't see myself as the feminist, pro-choice, reproductive-rights, right-to-privacy, poster-wielding abortion advocate. Weren't they the ones marching around campus and taking back the night while I was shaking my pom-poms on the sidelines of the football field? Didn't they watch The best of Janeane Garofalo movie marathons on Oxygen, while I seriously considered taking the Sex and City tour of Manhattan?

Sarah Jessica Parker told Glamour magazine a few years ago that "the real problem among educated, middle-class, primarily white young women is that secretly they know they will always have access to a safe abortion, so they don't have to support it." But what about other women? Maybe we (the educated ones SJP is talking about) should come up with "feet" of our own. Perhaps then, having been outed, we might have the courage to actually say something in support of abortion rights for all women -- the ones we don't know and the one we might meet in the mirror.