At age 75 I have seen the past in our futures, and it is ugly. Young American women and men are shockingly quiet about the looming threats to their bodies and futures. Quietly, women are becoming the property of antiabortionists. They seem not to know, let alone rise up against, the lust of antiabortionists to rule their bodies and force them to bear children. Those puritanical so-called “right-to-lifers” will happily dictate the futures of young women while jamming their religious and political views into the love lives of those women. The antiabortionists will be the first to abandon them once babies are born and will be the first to forget women maimed by chemicals and backyard butcher abortionists.

We have gone two generations with birth control and abortion safely available as needed. We have become complacent thinking Roe v. Wade was secure and our progeny safe. My generation has been too polite, discreet and silent. We have left our children and grandchildren ignorant of the horrors that consumed too many of our contemporaries.

Our young are unaware of the travails and losses of earlier women forced to have children or seek secret, illegal, incompetent “help.” Younger generations, please do not be naïve thinking antiabortionists will stop there. The “right-to-lifers” will reimpose the dark days of my youth when unmarried young women and men were blocked from all forms of birth control and sex education was a feeble sham one hour one day in the last year of high school.

We elderly must get real and vigorously, loudly oppose antiabortionists who, like rapists, act as if they own the bodies of young women. Young women and men, you must also rise up and defend yourselves from the prudes who wish to rule your bodies and lives!

Phillip Davis

West Gardiner