Editor:

Recently, while numerous states were passing laws severely limiting women’s right to choose our futures for ourselves, conservative newspaper columnists and TV pundits were lavishing praise upon the mostly male legislators for their emphatic message that pregnant people have no right to decide their own futures or the use of their own bodies. 

Legislators and columnists alike piously pitied all the poor “babies,” deriding the women for their choice. Not one of those self-righteous judges gave a thought to the women themselves.

Since 1973, 55 million American women have made a choice for their own futures (the same right available to our founding mothers, but was snatched away in 1850, when male doctors of the AMA decided they were missing out on a lucrative business opportunity. Fifty-five million women chose education and careers over motherhood in their teens, or chose not to bear the spawn of their rapists, or decided that the children they already had were enough, or that their own health and safety precluded children. 

Fifty-five million women claimed their own destinies rather than be forced into motherhood because of a man who took no responsibility for his own fertility. Fifty-five million women made a choice, and saw that it was good  — good for themselves and for their families.

The wing of Christianity behind this drive to destroy women’s right to bodily autonomy considers sex outside marriage and for any purpose besides procreation to be sin — a concept found only in religious, not civil law. They want to force all Americans to abide by their religious dogma, and they are trying to use our civil authorities to do so, all under the guise of patriotism. They wrap their dogma of forced female servitude in legalese and appeals to emotion.

The First Amendment to our constitution forbids the establishment of religion in government. These assaults on our constitutional freedoms are un-American.

Fifty-five million American women have claimed their freedom. Let’s make sure our daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters also have the freedom and liberty to control their own lives. 

Marci Shaver

Torrington