“We are not playing around.”
It was January 22, 1990. I know the date because somebody on the news had just mentioned the seventeenth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that guaranteed a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.
I was watching with my then three-month-old daughter on my lap -- and in a perfect storm of post-partum hormones and current events, I thought to myself, How lucky, to be a girl born now. Her generation would never have to worry about an unwanted pregnancy the way my generation had.
Right. And while abortion rights are no longer a practical concern for women my age, we are committed to them in a way that defies biology. We were at-risk college students and young adults when Roe v. Wade came down; we weren't born into our rights the way my daughter was. We are unique for being the first generation to have those rights, and unique in our anger at seeing them taken away for this generation. They are unique, sadly, in reverse. They started out with reproductive rights in place, only to grow up to be vulnerable.
I provide that context -- a new buzzword, thanks to Vice-President Kamala Harris and her coconut tree -- to try to make sense of the thrill I felt, the near-euphoria, at the news that she will make reproductive rights a building block of her Presidential campaign. I have been a Democrat all my voting life, but the visceral rush I felt listening to her speech to Black sorority members, one line in particular, was something new.
"We are not playing around," she said, with a bit of a smile, and it was as though someone had flung open all the windows and let the breeze rush through. I knew her position on reproductive rights -- there's a video clip of her at Bret Kavanaugh's Supreme Court hearing, challenging him to cite any law that gives the government the power to make decisions about men's bodies, which he could not. There are other clips that are uplifting in their sheer clarity, especially when President Biden found it difficult to be outspoken about the issue. And now there is a clip of her vowing that as President she will sign a law reversing the state bans that limit or ban abortion.
"We are not playing around." It sounded very familiar. It sounded, in tone, like women I remember from the late Sixties and early Seventies.
The author Marcel Proust was supposedly sprung from a bad case of writer's block by a plate of madeleines, the cookies his mother had once made for him, the scent and taste of which unlocked a sea of memories that enabled him to write. "Not playing around" did for me what those cookies did for him -- unlocked a memory of the past that will inform the future.
Democrats have for the last many weeks been in a debilitating limbo, as we worked our way through emotions that sounded very much like four of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, and depression.
But then something remarkable happened before we got to acceptance, the fifth and final stage. We got interrupted by a selfless decision from President Biden, and no, I do not want to be distracted by the question of whether it should have happened sooner, because we need forward motion, not Monday-morning quarterbacking. I do not want to diminish the instant groundswell of support for Vice-President Harris, either, by second-guessing whether we picked a nominee too soon, or picked the wrong one, or are ready for a President who is both a woman and of color.
I want instead to embrace not playing around, because all that matters is what happens next, and because in its no-nonsense tone it echoes a landmark book, the 1970 "Our Bodies, Ourselves," which loudly proclaimed that women's bodies were in fact women's bodies, and not a territory to be colonized by politicians, most of them men. It's a clarion call, one that stands to unite generations of women who might otherwise wonder what we have in common -- as well as the men who stand with us, because reproductive rights are a family issue, not women's work.
We're going to hear endless slogans and sound-bites in the weeks ahead, but this, I think, is different. It's a statement not of policy but of intent; in fact, it transcends policy. Former President Trump spoke of unity until he abandoned it in favor of insulting nicknames and attacks. Vice-President Harris' position on reproductive rights is likely to energize women voters up and down the age spectrum, from those of us who knew what life was like without those rights to those who've just had them taken away by a stacked Supreme Court tasked with doing exactly that.
And there's something more at work here, seems to me, which might make this exactly the moment when we're ready for a woman President. Reproductive rights are theoretical, even for the more empathetic man. They're personal, even for the most policy-oriented woman. To dip back into the Roe v. Wade era one last time, the slogan among feminists, back then, was "the personal is political." That's what not playing around is about, to me. That's why I have to figure out if a swing state needs a California volunteer on election day.