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Danskfisk's avatar

When Roe was overturned my 32 year old daughter, a PhD in biochemistry who is presently working in a lab looking for new cancer therapeutics, told me if she and her partner (an engineer) decided to have kids she was moving to Europe because she was unwilling to risk a pregnancy in the US. She had been heavily recruited by EU firms and will have no problem getting a job/residency overseas. Today she told me she's actively looking to move. She is certainly not the only person in this situation. GOP's posture on reproductive health, gun safety, immigration and million other things contribute to the choice of talented people to take their talents elsewhere. It's the elevation of the mediocre white man that's behind ALL OF THIS. Disempowering talented women, immigrants and people of color so the Bretts and Matts can succeed on nothing more than their whiteness and wealth. I AM RAGEFUL

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Patricia Eddishaw's avatar

Yes, it's the sneers on their faces and in their voices that generates the most anger and rage in me.

It's the smugness, the sense of superiority and control, expressions I thought I had long erased from my memory banks. But apparently, I had just mentally filed them away in an archived folder and they have all re-emerged.

I am 80 and so came of age before both Roe and the Pill, back at the beginning of second wave feminism.

The memories that bubbled out of my archives were of all those men who so cavalierly refused to hire me, refused to approve a mortgage, or even a bank account - those men who felt perfectly entitled to explicitly say "no you can't have this because you can get pregnant".

And then they would almost literally pat me on the head, call me a girl, and usher me out of their offices.

And as much as I don't want to feel these feelings all over again, I somehow feel compelled to do so. And so I remain on Twitter and occasionally engage with yet the newest and latest generation of these men, who may well respond and tell me to "just keep my legs shut" and stop being a slut.

We can't afford to look away. But we can prevail and today's youth will accomplish it. I watched last year as my grandchildren, newly eligible to vote, rose up en masse to resoundingly win the bellwether referendum here in Kansas.

Should they have to fight this fight all over again? Of course not. Will they do it and do it well? Hell yes.

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