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Mike Peterson Published: October 27, 2012 1 minute 3 comments

Someone posted this Clay Bennett cartoon on Facebook yesterday, and a comment quickly came of how well it was done and that it needed no labels.

To which someone replied that maybe it needed labels because he didn't get it.

Which is a little like making a reference to "the back of the bus" and having someone not get it.

On the one hand, you've got to really work hard to be that ignorant.

But, on the other, it's been a while, and there is an entire generation growing up with no real sense of the impact these things represent.

That is, they've heard of it. But it's just kind of back there somewhere with hula hoops and cars you had to start with a crank.

And there are people old enough to remember but who never found out.

Not stupid. Just sheltered. 

After all, Emmett Till was just a teenager showing off for his cousins. Having grown up in Chicago, he had heard all the stories, but didn't really understand on a gut level what they tried to tell him about living in the Jim Crow south.

So, too, there are women who lived through the days of back alley abortions but never ran into the issue personally, unless, like Emmett, they did.

I guess you had to be there.

My own exposure was pretty limited: A hushed conversation with a professor who asked me if I knew someone (I didn't). I heard later that his situation resolved itself. A lot of situations resolved themselves in those days, and we all pretended to believe it.

And I once held someone as she sobbed out a confession about her experience, about her desperation, about her fear, and "if it weren't for all those jokes about coat hangers …"

She had been rushed to the hospital and would likely never be able to bear children. But before summoning help that night, she had disposed of the tool and then clung to the story of a spontaneous abortion.

The doctors, of course, had to have known better. Who else actually believed her explanation? Who knows. Noone else had known of the pregnancy to begin with.

But you can't tell anyone this.

Or, yes, you can tell them, but you can't tell it in a way that will matter to them, because they're not there, in that dormitory bathroom, pregnant and 19 and desperate and ashamed and frightened.

And they still believe that good intentions will rule the day, that you can make up your mind not to be put in that position.

Which, yeah, you sort of can. Much of the time. Probably.

Just as, if you follow all the safe driving rules, you'll never be in an auto accident. Probably. You hope.

What's strange is that, if you ask people about Prohibition, they'll quickly respond that it didn't work because alcohol was already part of society and people didn't support the law and that, no matter how hard you tried to enforce it, people would find a way around it.

But come on: Back when the ancient Babylonians were first learning to make beer, sex was already pretty well established as part of society.

And, no matter how many rules a society made to keep people from having sex, people had sex. Whether it was legal or not, whether it was sinful or not, whether they were encouraged or discouraged from having sex, people have had sex throughout the ages.

And if you think banning safe abortions will stop all abortions, I've got an 18th Amendment to sell you.

By the way, I understand what Rep. Mourdock meant about the "will of God." Paul Ryan has also said that a child conceived in rape deserves the same consideration as a child conceived in love.

For those who think of God as deliberately handing out good-looks to this one and deformity to that, riches to this one and poverty to that, life to this one and death to that, it follows that whatever happens, good or bad, is the will of God.

And, hey, it's a free country: If lightening strikes the barn, you're free to believe it's the will of God.

But don't go passing laws against putting out fires.

Maybe God's intentions are to find out how much he can screw around with us before we take control of our own lives.

And again, just as Emmett Till was a black kid who didn't understand Jim Crow, there are plenty of women who don't understand these issues and whose choices, accordingly, defy logic.

After posting that cartoon yesterday, Bennett posted this one today: