Deborah Lipp

This is a hopeful time to blog for choice. President Obama (I love saying that!) supports a woman’s right to choose. It says so right here. It also says that he supports policies to help prevent unintended pregnancies. It also says he wants to strengthen domestic violence laws.

It’s all interconnected. We can’t talk about a woman’s reproductive freedom without pausing to acknowledge that a woman is a full and equal human, and that reproductive freedom is human freedom. But that mean ol’ patriarchy rears its head. As long as domestic violence and rape are constants, as reality or threat, in the life of every woman, women are not free. As long as we accept these inequities as normal, or minimize their importance, it will remain far, far too easy to take women’s freedoms away.

Look, it’s like this. If the culture says we are less than equal, then how hard is it really to pass laws that restrict our freedom? Or treat us as addle-headed children who don’t understand our own choices? So when we work to make women’s lives better, y’know, as if they mattered, we strengthen reproductive choice because we normalize the idea that women are and should be free.

So my hope for the Obama presidency is that it advocates and legislates, in every possible way, the notion that women are people.

How strange that it’s something that even has to be asked for.