A Children's Story?

 

(Editor's Note:  The following guest-blog was submitted by Mike Box, an old friend from undergraduate college days who is currently a retired and very active grandfather living in the Kansas suburbs of Kansas City, not very far from where a couple of my own grandchildren live.  Mike has been a political activist his entire life.   We first met in the late 1960's when he was starting at Southwest Missouri State College (now Missouri State University) in Springfield and moving into the dorms.  I was his Resident Assistant in the dorms, and a sterling role model!)

A Children's Story

by Mike Box

Gather around children, grandfather has a story to tell you.

Kids, while I might not be the most ancient of days, I am old, old enough to remember a time before the United States Supreme Court weighed in on the issue of privacy in a case called Roe v. Wade. That’s the case that gave women the right to make their own choices about their own healthcare, especially when it comes to having babies. Do you think someone should be forced to have a baby? That should be a choice, shouldn’t it?

Well in the days before Roe, that was 1973, and before that if a woman, or a girl, got pregnant and she wasn’t married she didn’t have many good choices. Being a single mom wasn’t a badge of honor. Indeed, an unmarried woman with a child was a social outcast. She was viewed as immoral and promiscuous. There were several paths available. If the girl’s family had resources, she might be sent off to help an aunt in a distant state with an ailing uncle. In fact, she was in a home for unwed mothers. There used to be one just north of the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. One Sunday morning I saw these unwed mothers, ages from mid-teens to thirties, on the porch of that place. I never saw so many unhappy faces in one place at one time before, or after, in my life. They were sent there to deliver their babies, and those kids would either be adopted, if they were White children, or sent to orphanage. Not all the White kids got adopted, just some of them. 

 

Another option, abortion, was illegal. That didn’t stop desperate women from getting abortions. These abortions didn’t take place in medical clinics, the tools used weren’t necessarily sterile (free from germs that cause infections), and the providers weren’t educated in the medical arts to deal with complications like excessive bleeding. They call that hemorrhaging. If a person bleeds too much blood, then they die. The providers didn’t have the knowledge or legal ability to prescribe medicine to prevent infection or ease pain. Abortion, back-alley abortions, were dangerous. How desperate do you think you’d have to be to risk your life? 

 

A final option available for young White women was to scream rape. Children, I know it sounds like a scary movie, but the “rape” often occurred in some bushes, after dark, and in a spot between streetlights where it could not be seen. One day I overheard my mother and a neighbor lady her age talking. The topic was a teenage girl from the neighborhood. I think she had already graduated high school and was taking classes at the junior college, which was across from Westport High School on the bus line. Well, it turns out this girl had been raped by a Black man, they used a pejorative term beginning with the letter N, and the crime had taken place in a bush by the edge of the church property. The church was on the corner of our block. They wouldn’t listen to me, I was just a kid, when I told them that wasn’t how she got pregnant. I had seen the girl and her boyfriend having sex in the backseat of his car parked behind the church. But blaming the Black man was the solution in those days. The police picked out a Black man, arrested him, charged him with the rape. There was a trial. He was convicted. He went to prison. Have you ever been accused of doing something you didn’t do? Were you punished for it? Did it make you angry? Boys and girls, that’s not justice. 

 

The other day, children, the Supreme Court decided to try and take away the rights of women to make private healthcare decisions about abortion. One Justice invited cases challenging birth control and same sex marriage. A United States Senator called for cases challenging Equal Justice and calling for the segregation of public schools. That means that persons of color would have to use one restroom and White persons use another. That’s called separate but equal, even though by definition separate is not equal. That means that Black and Brown students would be sent to one set of schools where White children would go to a different set of schools. History has taught us that the Black schools were, and will be, funded poorly compared to White schools. Does that sound fair to you kids?

 

Children, I don’t want you to worry because adults are going to do everything we can to make sure women get their rights back and nobody loses any of their rights either. Kids, I just want you to be aware of what’s going on because when you are adults you may have to do everything you can to make sure women keep their rights and nobody loses any of their rights either.