POLITICAL Poem: Fear My Uterus, by Taylor Lagyak

woke up on a Friday morning,
and was greeted with the news
that America truly hates women.
They have hated us
for raising our voices,
for getting out of the kitchen,
for trying to make our own choices.

Not even 50 years
have we been able
to make the choice of abortion.
And you don’t need to know
exactly why – it’s none of your
God damn business – but you know
that we’ve been raped,
abused, fucked by our fathers and brothers,
or we had the child we so
desperately wanted, but it wasn’t viable.
So why would you let us
relive our cruelest dreams
through the act of giving birth
to something we never wanted
in the first place?

Have you thought of Becky?
Fucked by a stranger
on her way home from work,
and will be forced to give birth
to her rapist’s baby.
An abortion would have
saved them both from the trauma
that life continues to push.
What about adoption?
What about the 400,000
kids in this broken system?
They cry themselves to sleep,
and some may even wish
they were aborted in the first place –
I know I’ve been there.
What about all the abuse
these children face in the system?
You’re forcing us to keep a child
that no one will ever love,
but they’ll love taking advantage
of a child that thinks that this
is supposed to happen.

What about my own mother?
Some preacher just had to take advantage
of a young girl, devoted to a religion
that’s supposed to love,
supposed to forgive,
supposed to take care of their people.
Fuck your fuckin religion,
riddled with pedophiles and rapists
who abuse their power
to spread her legs instead of their words.
Let’s not forget her mother;
what would she have done
if her baby girl was carrying, at 12-years-old,
the offspring of her mother’s own boyfriend,
the preacher?
No, she refuses to help her daughter
with her own mistake
of even letting that happen in the first place;
she must have led him on anyway.

She must have led him on.
That’s what you all say,
yet you weren’t there to see it all happen –
how no consent was given,
how it was and a condom was used,
how she almost killed herself along the way.
I only wish you would hear
the trauma you have caused
by letting this be overturned.

We’re not welcoming
this handmaid’s tale.
We’ll take to the streets,
create an earthquake to shake
the thrones they think
they sit upon.
These people already have
one foot in the grave,
let’s push them off these thrones
and bury them in our pride.
Let’s throw all we have
at this church we call a Supreme Court
who made us realize that
they don’t hate women;
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they fear us.