A Question Has Finally Been Answered for Me

 Now that the Idaho Supreme Court has upheld abortion restrictions in that state, my question is whether nearby Ontario, Oregon, about fifty miles from Boise and basically a suburb of that major city, was going to be a place close enough to offer abortion services.

That question has been answered.  Planned Parenthood is in the process of opening a clinic in Ontario.  Ontario is right on the Idaho-Oregon border.  Ontario is accessible on I84 from Boise, or else people from the Idaho side of the Snake River can cross the bridge right into the main street of Ontario.  It reminds me a bit of Stateline, Nevada, where casinos were built on the Nevada side of the California line.  One could walk across the street from Harvey's or one of those resorts, and be right in California.  It was funny as hell.  One could play the lottery tickets in California, and then go back across the street to pay the slots.  It was a little harder to do at Hallelujah Junction or Bordertown because there wasn't much in the way of businesses on the California side.

As this rather slanted article notes, the closest abortion clinic previously is in Bend, something like three or four hours away west of Ontario.  The writer must be antiabortion because she gives a ton of keystrokes to the antiabortion protesters who were at the proposed Planned Parenthood facility in late July.  Malheur County has a strong right-wing streak, but I think even there if something like this was put to a vote, Planned Parenthood would prevail.  Of course, Ontario is in Oregon, so any question of making abortion access impossible is moot.

The reporter interviewed some protester there, and one of them said he thought to the effect that men need to quit using women and leaving them with a burden.  That "burden" is the baby or babies he and other antiabortion activists say they protect and care about.  What a man like this really believes is if a man gets a woman pregnant, then he should marry the woman.  That is what happened in the bad old days before abortion was legal.  I remember that time although I was young.  Even when I graduated from high school in 1973, right after the USSC legalized it, shotgun marriages were still common.  "Unwed" motherhood was just starting to become more accepted then, but the old ways of pre-Roe America were still entrenched.  The marriage-and-babies way of life was still embraced by young women.  Almost all the women I went to high school with married by age 25, which by today's standards is still very young.  Back then, it was ancient.

What gets me is this 1950s mentality is still very much alive in the United States.  At the rate things are going, women here might wind up like the women in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over.  Not a good thing to look forward to, but I just don't see this happening.

If anything, this antiabortion push is going to be a bigger failure than Prohibition.  Women are not going back to the kitchen and play house.  They just aren't.