We women don’t need Roe v. Wade. We can choose not to get pregnant in the first place
Roe should die
At 75 years old, I can remember life before Roe v. Wade, a decision that came out of the 1970s, a decade when we women became vocal on how we were treated and perceived on many issues: wages, access to high-level jobs, whether we could work and be parents. Roe was caught up in the melee.
After all these years, it seems that Roe was an unnecessary issue. All we really needed was access to contraception. As I remember, we already had access to abortion to save the life of the mother. That is all we need.
A woman’s right to choose and have control over her own body means the ability to choose when and under what circumstances to become pregnant in the first place. The right to be free from any kind of violence, including rape and incest, is already available to anyone. Equal wages, job opportunities and child care should already be rights afforded to anyone. These are how we have personal autonomy.
Let us stop bemoaning the fate of Roe and recognize that it was an unnecessary oversimplification of our rights. Just let it die.
- Mary Bognich, Overland Park
Going backward
Does 51% of the population know they have just lost a civil right? I am 80 years old and a grandmother. Yesterday, I dug out my ERA bracelet from the 1970s and wrote my U.S. representative, Sharice Davids, to offer to help in her campaign.
I fear for my granddaughters because Title IX could be next, or gay marriage for my friends, or any of our rights to cross state lines to seek reproductive health care.
The answer is at the ballot box, my dear sisters. Get busy in a campaign to restore what has been lost. And, for goodness’ sake, vote to win back your rights.
- Carolyn Wilson, Overland Park
Oh, we care
Not long ago, Sen. Roger Marshall said in The Star of Jan. 6, 2021, that “no one back home is talking about this event” (June 10, 1A, “Jan. 6 hearings already being downplayed in Kan., Mo.”) I am a lifelong Kansan, and I have been watching every minute of these hearings. I am very concerned about what happened and well aware of Marshall’s absolute complicity in this attempted coup.
Even after the extreme violence of that day, he chose to side with “Team Coup.” Not only have I been watching and discussing with my neighbors and friends, but so have my two teen daughters — both of whom will be old enough to vote soon.
We are watching, we do care and we see what’s happening.
- Amy Voelker, Olathe
Not big news?
One might think that the stunning and jaw-dropping sworn testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, former top aide to Donald’s Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, with her firsthand knowledge of the former president’s intentional, unprecedented attempts to overturn our legitimate election on Jan. 6, 2021, would be screaming, large-typeface, front-page news.
Despite such bombshells as Trump’s statement regarding armed insurgents (“I don’t ----ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me.”), his attempts to commandeer his limo to go to the Capitol and his procrastination of calling off the failed coup participants from their violent, deadly actions despite pleas from his own family, GOP members of Congress and staffers, The Star sadly viewed this information as backpage news and relegated it to 11A Wednesday. (“Former aide: Trump was told protesters had weapons on Jan. 6”)
No big deal, just another normal day.
- Jane Watters, Kansas City
Exclusive ‘public’
Ramesh Ponnuru, in his defense of recent Supreme Court decisions, wrote, “They reflect the text of the Constitution as its provisions were originally understood by the ratifying public.” (June 29, 13A, “US Constitution is conservative, like it or not”)
In the late 18th century, the “ratifying public” consisted almost exclusively of white, property-owning men. Nothing more need be said.
- Tom Witwer, Overland Park
His own life
Well, since Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wants to revisit the gay marriage decision, perhaps he — a Black man married to a white woman — will agree to revisit Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage.
This game can shake out a couple of different ways, Clarence.
- Donald Pickard, Kansas City
