God Bless the USA

By Katy Reagan

Friday, June 24th, 2022

Roe v. Wade Overturned

That’s what I wake up to, a notification from Twitter highlighted on my phone screen. It can’t be real, I think to myself. Then I open my phone, and I’m flooded with the news from every news source, every social media. It is the beginning of a dystopian novel, and it is real. It is my life.

My life.

My life because I don’t want kids right now. I don’t want them with my fiancé, and I don’t want them with a stranger if Godfor-fucking-bid I become the one out of six. I’m twenty years old and I can barely take care of myself. I can’t even drive yet: I accidentally put the car in park as I was reversing yesterday, but you want me to bring a child to term? Violently push it out of my still-growing body? Raise it? Thanks so much, but I’d rather die right now because that is my nightmare. Lucky me, though, because that’s my next option.

If I do get pregnant, they don’t give a fuck about my already-beating heart. They’d rather me die in childbirth than abort a non-viable pregnancy. If in the future I am trying to conceive, but my body rebels against me, they want me to still have to give birth to a child that hasn’t made it past my womb. I have to grieve the death while they’re inside of me and outside of me.

It’s about trauma. It’s about control. And I am so goddamn angry.

And scared…because what the fuck am I supposed to do about it? Write this strongly-worded nonfiction piece? Cool, thanks, that’s helpful. So helpful to me, to the terrified women across even this campus, to the people with uteruses dying from this intrusive government ruling.

I am a goddamn child. I cannot bring a child into this world. But I don’t get a choice in the matter.

There is no poetic ending to this. There is no grand thing I have to say that will change minds. I’m just scared.

And tired.

And numb.