COMMENTARY: Bro vs. Wade — one man’s long journey to reproductive choice

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, July 6, 2022

I’d like to address the elephants in the wombs.

The elephants are the GOP and their conservative ilk. The wombs are half the U.S. population. It’s my firm belief that if men had babies, access to abortion would be in the Bill of Rights.

I decided very early in life that I never wanted children. This idea was vocalized at the age of 16. It was after a sumptuous Swanson TV dinner when I said to mom, “I want a vasectomy.” An incredibly intelligent and accomplished person, she put down her martini and said, “You’re an idiot.”

“Exactly my point.”

This earned me a lecture on how getting neutered was not going to happen.

Fast forward to college. I had reached the age of reason, 18. I could now be drafted, vote, buy guns, and drink. All on the same day if I wanted. Exercising my reason, I went to the campus health clinic. It was a modest affair that offered a small, windowless waiting room apparently designed to spread air-borne diseases.

I turned in my form to a woman who, by the looks of it, may have been born, or even fought, during the Civil War. In a very loud whisper, she said, “You want a what?”

There was an undeniable sternness in her voice, no doubt still angry from General Sherman’s march to the sea. She informed me, and the rest of the room, that the clinic was there to treat things like twisted ankles, bronchitis or chlamydia, but not geld its students.

Years later I’d graduated from dental school, joined the military, and was stationed at a Marine Corps Base in California. Now with free healthcare, I soon found myself on the edge of a paper-lined examination table asking for a vasectomy.

“No problem,” the physician said. “The only requirements are that you’re in a stable marriage for 10 years or more and have at least two kids.”

“Two kids?” I said, “you know what a vasectomy is for, right?”

Denied again.

Back on the civilian side of things, I asked around and found a urologist that was pretty good at this sort of thing. I called his office and a pert receptionist said, “A vasectomy? I am so sorry, but I don’t think we can do that today.”

Ah, the land of fee-for-service medicine.

A few days later I found myself on another paper-lined examination table. Finally, the door opened and the urologist with his apprentice came in with a chart. The glove hanging out of his back pocket indicated he was coming from, or going to, the golf course.

As he and his apprentice snipped away they talked breezily about the L.A. Dodgers’ pitching staff. I felt like shouting “hey, keep your eye on the ball!”

Seriously though, I realize the comparison of my choice not to have children and that of a pregnant woman is not one of apples to apples. While these issues don’t come from the same tree, they do come from the same orchard.

Using the elephants’ logic, my vasectomy prevented the birth of perfectly formed babies, to loving parents, at the perfect time in their lives, with the financial wherewithal to raise them.

But let the elephants never forget what did not happen in my story:

I didn’t have to travel to a different state for the procedure.

The clinic itself didn’t have to be checked for bombs.

I never had to cross an angry line of protesters telling me their god was daming me to hell.

My doctor was never threatened with assassination.

I have never been called out and shamed. I’ve never had to justify my decision to people I don’t know, who don’t know me and who have no idea what circumstances formed my decision.

I never faced prosecution.

The fact that I can so easily act on my reproductive prerogative, while women go through hell is morally repugnant.

I cannot imagine the rage I would feel if I lived in a country that for most of its existence has denied my gender a vote in the very government that taxes me, a country where I got paid less for equal work, paid higher for equal products, and had a career ladder that led to a glass ceiling. Or now, that the Supreme Court has triggered a raft of laws that would deny me sovereignty over my own body.

If I lived in a place like that, the wrath of a thousand angry gods could not quell my fury.

Yet, even with all this institutional adversity, here they are, grandmothers, mothers, and daughters who for millennia have withstood societal bigotry through their intellect, strength, wit and wisdom. They have a brand of toughness men will never know.

Even with all this appalling inequity, the elephants bellow their love of freedom and democratic principles. But let me leave you with this: any society that lets one-half of its people make an incredibly intimate decision by following their conscience and the other half by following the mandate of the state is neither free nor democratic.

Chris Austin is a Voice of Vashon radio host and writer and a stalwart volunteer at Vashon Heritage Museum. Over the years, he has authored many commentaries for The Beachcomber.