I SIT AND SEW
This past week, Georgia became the sixth state to pass Draconian anti-choice legislation, and this series is our response: an emergency fundraiser for Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and NARAL. Georgia’s LIFE Act and the other pieces of monstrous, dystopian anti-choice legislation that have manifested in Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Ohio are all part of a wider agenda intended to dismantle the protections of reproductive rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. Though this legislation will certainly meet opposition at district and appellate levels, these laws are universally geared towards engineering a hearing before the Supreme Court as swiftly as possible, with the goal of overturning Roe v. Wade now that Kavanaugh has a seat.
Furthermore, these restrictions are part and parcel of a coordinated, systemic effort to restrict the rights and attack the agency of cis women, trans women, trans men, racial, religious, and ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ community, non-binary individuals, immigrants, and low-income people.
Reproductive rights are inseparable from economic security, and these brutal, authoritarian, oppressive anti-choice laws will disproportionately affect populations who already suffer the most and have access to the fewest options.
The curtailing of reproductive rights impacts every single one of us. May we help each other shake off the yokes that suffocate us and deprive us of our basic human rights.
If you are not in the market for perfume or beard oils, please consider volunteering as a clinic escort locally, or donating to / volunteering with the following organizations:
The Center for Reproductive Rights
The American Civil Liberties Union
Access Reproductive Care: Southeast
Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund
And SPEAK UP. Talk about the real repercussions of these malevolent new laws. Challenge the stigma of talking about reproductive rights and condemn attacks on reproductive rights. Educate your friends, family, and neighbors and mobilize them to fight for reproductive justice.
I sit and sew – a useless task it seems,
My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams –
The panoply of war, the martial tred of men,
Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken
Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death,
Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath –
But – I must sit and sew.I sit and sew – my heart aches with desire –
That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire
On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things
Once men. My soul in pity flings
Appealing cries, yearning only to go
There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe –
But – I must sit and sew.The little useless seam, the idle patch;
Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch,
When there they lie in sodden mud and rain,
Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain?
You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream
That beckons me – this pretty futile seam,
It stifles me – God, must I sit and sew?
– Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
