What Ema of The Well-Timed Period said about the difference between 20 year old men and 20 year old women — in general, yes, but under the current administration in particular.

Actually, technically, the difference being that young women with the same political connections, or political sympathies as the young man in question (the 20-year-old guy who got the nod from U.S. officials to supply $300,000,000 worth of shitty bullets and other munitions to the Afghanistan police and army) are permitted to make their own medical/reproductive decisions. Because “they’re different.” They “have their whole lives in front of them.” Because they “weren’t being irresponsible.”

This evening I went to a fundraiser for Cedar River Clinics. It’s one of only a handful of independent women’s clinics left in the United States that provides full services including pregnancy termination. The fundraiser was not for the benefit of the women who get those “free passes,” the ones who, as in the days before Roe simply “needed abdominal surgery, poor thing” with full complicity of discreet medical professionals. Instead it was to help those whom anti-abortion laws are designed to hurt most: those living in poverty, not speaking the dominant language, teenagers, the undocumented, the intimidated, the already ill, the overtaxed with other children, the domestically abused, those who don’t live in the meager 15% of counties where abortion services are available and must therefore travel, and those who don’t have money for a simple, early termination and must therefore race their bodies and the calendar to raise money for a riskier, far more expensive, later termination before it’s too late even for that.

If you’ve got a little extra (where “a little” is as little as ten dollars) you can donate here. And, if you’re up for something a little different, the inevitable anti-choice protesters are being put to good use with the clinic’s creative Pledge a Picketer program.