MOTHERS

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"In the wake of last year's twenty-forty-nine nation-wide abortion ban, and the near total restriction to healthcare for women, those who identify as female are protesting. It's not news, Jerry, is it? But this is: some are now pushing the limit and getting dangerous, underground operations to rid themselves of their reproductive organs. Their slogan? No vagina, nothing to control. This is, they say, to demonstrate that they only have a choice if there's nothing to be controlled over—"

"Ugh," said Lorelai, clicking the TV off as she patted her ever-growing belly. "Why can't people just leave other people alone? Back and forth, back and forth—the abortion ban is official, there's nothing we can do about it."

They couldn't turn it around thirty years ago when it first started happening, why would they be able to now?

She set the remote down and reached for her metal water goblet—a sleek, shiny cup that they'd given her in place of a glass one, since she kept dropping them. It was as if every time she tried to drink water, the baby kicked so suddenly, her reflexes messed up. Or her brain didn't know which limbs to control at what time. She'd shattered dozens of glasses before the staff finally decided to switch out to metal; which didn't break, but boy, did it get loud when it fell.

Stuck in bed while carrying this baby to term, there was little else for her to do but to drink water, watch TV, or read. Her options were limited—more limited than the options women claimed not to have, out there, in the real world. She couldn't get up, tubes were connected to her arms and taking her blood, giving her blood, and helping her relieve herself. She was attached to monitors beep-beeping at her twenty-four-seven and had counted all the tiles so many times that she questioned her sanity.

She was in a governmental laboratory, nestled away in a special room where she received no visitors and her only friend was the doctor who swung by daily to check her vitals, check on the baby, check on her. This situation had been her decision—to help the government-owned facility test new pregnancy medications and solutions to ensure having a baby was no longer as dangerous. That the possibilities for malformations or illnesses leading to abortions could stop.

Lorelai agreed with the protesters—her body, her choice—but she also appreciated that the government was trying, despite all the negative news saying it wasn't doing anything. She'd never had an abortion, and wasn't against them; but if there was a way to prevent them from happening, prevent women from being so afraid of having children, why not help?

By choosing this, Lorelai was sheltered from everything. At the end of the program, she'd be given a hefty sum of money, a new place to live, and a guarantee that she'd be left alone and never attacked for who she was now, and who she'd been before she'd entered the program. It was an ideal trade, to her—be impregnated, then lay in bed for months, pampered and watched over, while the fetus developed. She wouldn't be keeping the child, but then again, she'd never wanted children.

Why weren't more women aware of this project, and others like it?

"They'd stop so many of those protests if they were less secretive about it," she muttered to herself, picking up her latest book—some obscure fantasy about faeries and vampires. Not her typical read, but the months cooped up had broadened her reading genres, and she realized she liked darkness more than she'd expected.

So many women and female-identifying folk continued to march down avenues, to bang on doors, to call and text and start podcasts, to draw attention. They wanted to have abortions—some had gone as far as purposely getting pregnant, and terminating their pregnancy in defiance of the law. It was too much, Lorelai thought, and way too perilous for women to be doing to prove a point.