Kameron shares her adventures into subversive activity: getting her annual checkup:

I opened up the main door and found myself in an odd little boxed room with a door in front of me and a door to my right that was, in fact, locked. I peered in through the small rectangular window and saw a set of stairs and some office plants.

Weird.

Then I saw the call box by the door.

Did I have to buzz in to Planned Parenthood?

Ah.

I picked up the phone by the door and hit the intercom button, told them I had a four o'clock appointment.

I was buzzed into the building, and proceeded upstairs...

Where I found a woman sitting in a booth behind bulletproof glass who asked for my ID and verified that I had an appointment.

She then buzzed me into the waiting area.

I felt like I was there to buy heroin, or maybe get a child prostitute for the night.

What the fuck?

I suppose that the misogynist rights activists would say that these security precautions oppress men.

And I did a people watch, listened to all the women around me. There was one girl there with a guy who was most likely her boyfriend, a couple of women there with friends. A couple of friends were talking in low voices about abortion services, about women they know, about a boyfriend who was insisting a friend bear a pregnancy to term because, "He really wants to be a dad."

Sitting there, listening to these women, watching a room full of women waiting, another roomful behind glass sorting patient folders and scheduling appointments and handing over birth control pills, and having gone through the security checks in order to get in there, it really sort of hit me for the first time - not in an abstract way, because I've realized it in the abstract many times - but in a real, gut-kick visceral way, just how fucking terrified as all hell men are of women, of this power, of this choice. This is birth and death in this room, right here. This is where all the power is. And it scares the fuck out of people so much that they're willing to come in here and murder healthcare professionals and bomb us and our kids as we sit around waiting for a pap and some pills.

How fucked up is that? To live in a place where we live in fear of being killed for exercising power over our body's reproduction?

And that cuts to the heart of the matter, doesn't it? We're talking about power over the womb. When a man beats a woman, rapes a woman, kills a woman, or verbally abuses a woman, or trolls on feminist websites, isn't he really expressing his own insecurity, his own anxiety over not having power over the womb?

Thus all of our cultural and legal traditions that treat women like property, that lead to attacks upon uppity women who dare assert themselves....

What bugs me is that the fear and stigmatization of women's reproduction and control over it *is* so intrinsically tied to women's health that what's happening is that women's health, I feel, gets a similiar veil of fear and shame pulled over it. If you've gotta be buzzed into a building and feel like a criminal for going in, and if there's protestors outside screaming at you that you're a whore and threatening violence, you're less likely to go in at all - even if you're just getting a pap or an HIV test.

We like to flatter ourselves that our society's culture is much more enlightened and egalitarian than, say, traditional Islamic communities, and yet women here have to deal with threats of violence and attempts at control by men, too. They may look different, but fundamentally fundamentalist patriarchal attitudes in East and West are expressions of the same anxiety.

Control over the womb. After all, if he strays, he's just spreading his seed. But if she strays, she's potentially birthing another man's child. And men cannot seem to deal with that prospect.

But it goes even further, for now we have the conservatives fighting women's ability too even have access to birth control. They seem to see pregnancy as the punishment for a woman's sexual activity. If she can prevent pregnancy, then how can men control women? If she can prevent pregnancy, how can men control the womb?

It's a funny thing, reproductive power, and the fear of it. It finally really hit home for me, because here I am, in real life, trying to get out to these places, to get my shit taken care of; and you know, I'm lucky, cause it wasn't Abortion Day, and the protestors weren't out, and I didn't have to push through a crowd of hecklers.

Lucky.

Lucky.

How fucked up is it, that a woman's ability to choose whether or not to bear a life is so incredibly fucking scary that there's an entire formal and informal institution of fear and shame set up around her body to keep her from understanding it? How fucked up is it, that when I say that out loud, or here in a public forum, that people just dismiss it, pretend talking about women's uteruses is boring and unimportant and not worth thinking or talking about? How can they say that and then spend their time passing laws that directly affect me and my pesky uterus, and heckle me when I try and take control over my body's processes? How can they say that and then tell me that not only is my body not worth discussing (so long as I'm the one discussing it), but that having this body makes me bad at math, too emotional, weak and inferior and flippant and flighty?

I think we'd all like to think that we as a people are better than that, but who are we kidding but ourselves?

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