Of course I stand with Planned Parenthood. I’m female.

I was born at the tail end of the Baby Boom, and I missed most of the exciting things. I wasn’t there for the birth of rock & roll, and I was too young to March on Washington, and I never got to sit-in, love-in, or peace-out. I turned 18 in the late 1970s, and came of age in a sea of seriously bad fashion, Nixon, fat Elvis and the dawn of disco. (Oh yeah, we thought John Travolta was sexy in his shiny white Saturday Night Fever suit. We were very wrong.)

But I didn’t miss the women’s movement. I lived the women’s movement — although I think it’s more accurate to say that I was in the first big wave of women who benefitted from the women’s movement. I went to law school un-mocked by the professors and classmates who belittled my older sisters; I got a job at a prestigious law firm whose recruitment committee did not even consider offering me the secretarial job that former Justice Sandra Day O’Conner got; I got my birth control pills from Planned Parenthood without filing a lawsuit.

Planned Parenthood, and those pills, gave me the ability to make choices about the person I was going to be and the person I was not going to be. Planned Parenthood gave me the choice to decide when I was going to be who I wanted to be. Planned Parenthood is the reason I am a mother now and not then.

What is it about a women’s body that makes men think they have a right to decide how she gets to use it?  To those who would defund Planned Parenthood, I say: How about we de-fund prostate cancer surgery?  It’s a slow growing cancer, and you’ll most likely die of something else first.  #StandwithPP