apply for a loan without a husband or father as a cosigner (1970s)

You’re still nicer than me; I probably would have wound up blurting out “If your mother had aborted YOU, the whole world would be better off!”

Amen to that. My mother was shamed for having gotten pregnant in HS. She was sent to an awful late 1940s Catholic home for fallen women. Her child was taken from her a few weeks after he was born. For a few weeks the nuns had the moms breastfeed their infants, why not save on formula, right? Then, one day, her baby…

Margaret Thatcher (who I utterly despise both for her politics and her pull the ladder up Jack approach to women in politics) pointed out when she came to power she could declare war but she couldn’t buy a sofa on HP without her husband signing the forms.

There were two women soliciting signatures for a petition to “make abortion illegal” as I was leaving work today. Since I work at a church they probably figured they’d rack up a bunch of points as people were heading home.

Thank you for this. It has me reconsidering the story of my great-grandmother Fannie, who died suddenly in 1901 at age 33, leaving my 11-month-old grandmother. The family story (the one I heard anyway) was that Fannie had an ectopic pregnancy, and as a nurse, knew what it was; supposedly she let it kill her rather…

She’s always been reluctant to talk about it, but my 62-year-old mother once mentioned that she’d had two abortions back in the Soviet Union, and the after-effects had nearly made her infertile. (I’m the nearly, after 5 miscarriages.) I don’t know the full details, but Soviet medicine was awful and birth control…

This is so true. You can’t brutalize women as a society and then expect them to be perfect nurturing angels. If you force a woman to have a child she doesn’t want, odds are her relationship with that child will be extremely complicated. Or, of course, the woman may not be around at all.

My beloved Aunt Kitty came close to shocking me one day when I was visiting her in Gainesville, FL. While driving past a building with a crowd of people standing outside, she raised one perfectly manicured middle finger to flip off the Right to Life protesters gathered around the local branch of Planned Parenthood.…

Very sad. I had a great-great aunt who was locked away in one of NY state’s infamous insane asylum as a young woman (Willard...interesting history) in her early twenties. From what my mom could find out, it seemed she was possibly “eccentric” or maybe she was a lesbian, or maybe she was abused. Anyway she refused to…

Ugh I hate that question too. I’m adopted and every time people hear that during an abortion discussion they ask that after first (wrongly) assuming that I am pro-life.

My mom was raped as a young woman. She got a very hush-hush abortion (it would have been the early 70's and her family was Catholic). Since I am an only child, I hate the argument “what if your mother had aborted you?” First of all, I wouldn’t know the difference?? Second, if my mother had not had that abortion, I may…

In my parent’s house, there are framed photos of two very sad women. One is my great grandmother, who stopped speaking for 2 years when her daughter died after falling down a well. The other is my great great aunt, who died of a botched abortion when she was 17. It’s never been a family secret or a morality tale, just…

I figured it had to do with his drug use. Parenting is hard. People with drug habits tend to be avoiding things. Not a good combination.

When I was getting a divorce because my now-ex-husband went off the deep end with his verbal and emotional abuse, I read that a study showed that most mid-life divorces are initiated by the woman because the husband is “behaving badly” (their words). I was so impressed by this, I wrote it in my journal. Sounds like…

This sucks...that’s all I’ve got.

Huh. I didn’t see that coming.

I find Millenial couples on social media annoying in general. It’s like gross sloppy PDA with slurping sounds but via a public relations proxy.

STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE!! JUST FUCKING STOP!!!!

Sitting in a parked car, reading a book, waiting for his child’s school bus.