For This Mother's Day

this piece about how women are really treated in this country, especially mothers and would-be mothers.

We've got a long way to go to treat women like they truly own their bodies:

While the rights and dignity of pregnant women are further eroded, forced sterilization and laws that cap the number of children a woman can have if she uses public assistance continue a shameful history in this country of dictating who gets to add to their family. Indeed, lawmakers play a dangerous game when they think they should decide whether a woman becomes a parent, instead of ensuring that every woman can make her own decision based on what is best for her and her family. This is especially true when it comes to the decision to seek an abortion.

In recent years, hundreds of laws were introduced with the goal of making it harder and more expensive to get an abortion or closing clinics to shut off availability of care. Many of these restrictions make the news (hello, North Dakota) and cause a big uproar among advocates (think Virginia's mandatory ultrasound law) and rightly so, but there are efforts that are just as widespread, but simply do not get the same attention - legislation that effectively withholds abortion care altogether.

Those politicians who don't want abortion to be legal at all push bans that deny health care coverage of abortion in order to make it unaffordable. At the federal level, politicians have cut off care for women who use Medicaid or Medicare, as well as Medicare beneficiaries, federal employees and their dependents, Peace Corps volunteers, service members and their families, Native American women utilizing Indian Health Services, and women in federal prisons.

I am glad I don't have to worry about pregnancy and all, but now I have to worry about health care and approaching my so-called "golden years."

It's a bitch.