Tamara Vallejos’s Reviews > Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights > Status Update

"For those who are troubled by America's high abortion rate, the good news is that we already know what will lower it: more feminism. More justice. More equality. More freedom. More respect." BOOM.

"Instead of seeing a low-income mother as a burden to society to whom government grudgingly doles out dribs and drabs of 'services' that are never enough to lift her out of poverty or change her children's prospects, we need to flip the equation: What does this woman, and the millions like her, require to raise her children to be decent, healthy, well-educated, productive, happy adults—and to be one herself?"

"What would the United States be like if we really valued motherhood? Not in a sentimental, flattering sort of way, as when we say motherhood is the most important, hardest job in the world. That's obviously false." HA.

"On average, child care consumes 49.5 percent of a low-income household's monthly expenses."

"The whole world runs on women's unpaid or grossly underpaid labor, and it always has. When that work is an extension of female domestic roles—caring for children or the elderly, preparing food, cleaning houses—it is ill paid, insecure, low skilled, and low status. But when it is done within the family, it is so deeply mystified and romanticized..."

"The ability to end a pregnancy is deeper than a right: it is basic self preservation. Maybe there could be a society in which women were legally compelled to bear every child they conceived and yet did not find themselves thereby hampered, impoverished, trapped, chained to a hated partner, consigned to a lesser life. But that society would look nothing like the one abortion opponents want to bring about..."

"We think we value mothers in America, but we don't... The work of mothers is so unvalued that a judge in Nebraska, previously a lawyer for Operation Rescue, can deny a sixteen-year-old in foster care the abortion she wants on the grounds that she isn't mature enough to choose that abortion—but apparently is mature enough to go through with pregnancy and childbirth and raise a child. Anybody can do that."

"It's only nine months, how selfish not to make some nice couple happy... [but] one study found that twelve to twenty years after the adoption three-quarters of birth mothers still felt grief and loss. Curiously, no one is suggesting this long-lasting suffering means women need to be counseled out of it, much less that adoption should be banned."

Oh, and shocker: "The ten states where women's status is lowest are solidly Republican with churches wielding a lot of political and cultural power." Who would EVER have guessed? Sigh.

Apparently, I've lived in five of the "ten states where women's status is highest (measured by economic security, leadership, and health)." They are all democratic with strong secular cultures. Makes sense!