How Baby

Yep, looks like it’s time for another comic about the right to reproductive freedom coming under fire again. We were about due.

It seems like every new day brings a slew of regressive laws being enacted in the States, which I’ve been watching with a helpless despair; what happens in our good neighbour yanks the Overton window for us all. Anyone saying ‘it can’t happen here’ is (besides dickishly missing the point) misinformed about the state of access to abortion in Canada, and how we’re only one bad election away from seeing a federal government composed of people who want to pass the exact same kind of laws. The ugliness of the trucker rallies alone should banish any idea that we’re somehow a bastion of progression.

Adding this to the recent push to deny access to trans healthcare, or to even tell students that gay and trans people exist – it’s just exhausting, knowing that all the social progress I’ve seen in my lifetime is being slowly chipped away. More and more pressure to stay in the cramped little box you were put in by birth, to find ‘happiness’ in only a narrow slice of the grand adventure of human experience – and if you’re not straight, and cis, and contently popping out a quiver of children to be good little workers and soldiers, too bad.

I have a lot of feelings about Mother’s Day, generally summed up as ‘one day of recognition is not compensation for a complete lack of support on the broadest societal level’, but it feels even more insidious this year. It doesn’t feel right when the thing I’m being celebrated for has been twisted horribly, used as a weapon by religious zealots to control anyone they see as a woman. There shouldn’t ever be duress behind the joy and the power of bearing a child.

On a lighter note, in researching this comic to see if justices on the Supreme Court of Canada wear the silly little white ties as well, I discovered something amazing. You’re welcome.