We are not living in a democracy,” reproductive rights activist and women’s study professor Carrie Baker declared at the end of the Leading Ladies “Life After Roe v. Wade” Zoom event last Wednesday. “If you were ever going to get out and vote, this is the time,” she emphasized. Her strong statements capped an hour-and-a-half of some terrifying but elucidating information shared by Baker and the other panelists.

Tonight at 7pm, Leading Ladies is hosting a Zoom panel to discuss Life After Roe v. Wade with Professor Carrie Baker, a reproductive rights expert and activist; Krisitie Monast, executive director of HealthQuarters; and Sara Stanley, executive director of HAWC (Healing Abuse, Working for Change).

Who can forget Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist? That endearing little boy who lived in a workhouse in London where there was never enough to eat and he plaintively asked, "Please, sir, I want some more" when he finished his bowl of watery gruel. Oliver and his mates hoped for something better in life when they became petty thieves for Fagin, but even Nancy’s kindness did little to change their lot.

Two memories came to mind immediately when the leaked Supreme Court decision about Roe v. Wade hit the news. One was of a story a friend told of an abortion she had in college in the late 1960s in Boston. She was picked up in a car, blindfolded, and taken to a basement where she could hear rats scurrying about. When the procedure was over, she was returned to her dormitory. She was frightened beyond words and thought she might die, either in that dank, cold basement or from some infection afterwards. Nonetheless, she felt this was her best option. She and her boyfriend were not yet ready to marry – they would a year or so later – and they had plans to enter the Peace Corps for two years once they did.

As the question looms about whether or not women in this country will continue to have the right to decide when and if they have children, we thought it important to look at the unequal care and consideration that pregnant women in this country receive. Perhaps no other problem is more emblematic of intersectionality – what the Oxford Dictionary defines as “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage” – than maternal health care in the richest country in the world. So here goes.

This week, we are focusing on reproductive rights, so clearly under attack right now while headspinning misinformation is being circulated about the place of abortion in our history and in the collective health of women.