OPINION

When pigs can fly, men get pregnant

Karen Coody Cooper
Karen Coody Cooper

The only way for women to achieve parity with men is to have the same opportunities as men. When birth control measures fail to ensure that, then abortion has to be part of the female arsenal. Without the ability to access the same opportunities men have, women’s intellectual participation as a group will be forestalled, controlled, diminished, and lesser men will be stepping ahead of us in the line as they always have.

It was mostly men who tried to wreck the Capitol Building and who fill our prisons. It’s time to give women their due rather than continue to repress female access to opportunities and leadership.

When our nation was founded, there should have been enough men with fortitude to include women as voting citizens. John Adams was for it and so were others. But the men who created our nation were too busily concerned with keeping slavery intact, and too cowardly to exclude the South. Most wouldn’t have minded having another sovereign ruler. There were not enough idealists to carry the day. And, so, here we are with so much unfinished business.

Poor families do not need more barriers. While a middle-class family might be able to handle an unexpected pregnancy, a single mother is too often forced to provide little in the way of attention or care for children while struggling with two jobs and one crisis after another. Once you fall into the hole, you are unlikely to get out. There are too many children in foster care, which has many fine caregivers, but also has a portion of child-abusers in their ranks. As a country, we fail at protecting children and women. Women die in childbirth, and too many children die from adult abuse.

Until women are allowed to experience the freedoms that men enjoy, our nation will be imbalanced and unjust. Perhaps the real solution is that all males get a vasectomy and risk reconnecting their tubes when, or if, they find the right woman who says Yes. Better yet, I would love to see a pregnant man and then we’d get this gender mess straightened out!

Karen Coody Cooper is a resident of Lake Worth Beach.