Baring my Thoughts
ROE V. WADE
Nicole Gustave
Editor-in-Chief
I was born a year after this landmark ban, but now it seems that the ban is on the verge of being overturned yet again in my 48th year on this planet. I got to thinking about my mother, see I am one of six children, and growing up we didn’t have a lot, in other words, we were very poor. Some months we would go without electricity, in other months we would go without a working phone. Food was scarce, and the government provided by way of food stamps and box grocery handouts, but through it, all my mother kept us kids feed and housed. Yet, I wondered if given the chance would she have thought of having an abortion to spare me and my two younger siblings the poorness in which we lived, and to perhaps better her life with my three older siblings? Raising kids was no cheap thing, but in today’s economy, I would say that we had it pretty good growing up in the late 60s through the 80s. Don’t get me wrong me and my siblings are the children of the same man, and he was in the home too, but my mother reared, taught, provided meals, and chauffered more than my father. I can remember watching my mother sit at the dinner table with barely any food on her plate, and me saying to myself that I will never be her. See, in my thoughtful comment I blamed us, kids, our very existence caused my mother to suffer through the lack in her life, and she would have been better off not having any children.
As an adult woman, I now see that my thought as a child was selfish, but I take comfort in knowing that it was out of love and care that I thought that thought. My education on childbirth and sex was a program called NOVA, my mother had me watch it, and back then television censorship wasn’t like today, so I watched the “subject” woman give birth in all of its painful splendor. I became nauseated, and I told my mother that I was never going to get pregnant. In my neighborhood girls were getting pregnant as young as 14 years old, and my mother worried that I would become the latest teenage pregnant casualty. Fortunately, I still had that NOVA program on repeat in my dreams that gave me nightmares and served as a daily reminder of the physical pain that I would endure if I gave birth. My mother used to say that a moment of pleasure in the dark can turn into a lifetime of pain in the light, so thank goodness for abortions, because I didn’t go through that pain.
With the certain over-turning of ROE V. WADE, I think about the young girl becoming pregnant by a male relative, the woman raped by someone unknown or in some cases known to her, or understanding that her life does not include a child or more children. I can only think of the mothers, like my own, sitting at a dinner table with barely any food on the plate, and wondering what an abortion could have done for their lives. Men are free to wander through life with barely a scratch, meanwhile, women bare the pains and scars of what their bodies can do, now that’s not to say that all men are deserters when a woman becomes pregnant, some are excited and full of happiness, but unlike women, they have a choice, and can walk away if they so choose. I think about the women who have children and have no stable relationship with the man of the child she is carrying. I can only wait with bated breath that more will be done in the coming months to ensure that we too have the right to choose and to walk away.
With gratitude and fab-U-lousness,
Nicole Gustave
Creator and Editor-In-Chief
Staff
Deborah Polchek, Managing Editor
Penelope "Glam" Piper, Contributing Editor/Writer
DiMarco Managing Editor/Men’s Edition
Cynthia Dyson, Fashion Director/Stylist
Chastain Howard, Living In Style Contributor
Antonio M., Advertising