In honor of the 32nd anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, I want to highlight a Words of Choice. While on the road in such states as Missouri and Florida, Virginia and Minnesota, she encountered surprises, and gained important insights about the state of the politics and culture of the right to choose.

“At a church in suburban St. Louis,” she writes, “a young woman in a hip pink poncho offers me one clear insight when she strides up to the front of the community room after the ‘Words of Choice’ performance. The play weaves together a dozen diverse writings about true-to-life experiences, comic and serious, with contraception, childbirth and abortion; my role is guiding the post-play discussion.

‘Can you come to my college in Kansas?’ presses the young woman. ‘This made me realize that I’m pro-choice and I want my friends to see it.’ she says.

Another woman, whom I soon learn is her mother, steps forward. ‘Just a minute,’ the 40ish woman interjects. ‘You grew up in a pro-choice household.’

‘But we never talked about it,’ the student says in a tone of exasperation best known to mothers and daughters.

‘I told you about your grandmother’s illegal abortion, didn’t I?’ the mother continues.

The daughter’s unblinking stare indicates otherwise. Within moments, we hear the decades-old story of a frightened Midwestern girl willing to gamble on outlaws and dangerous conditions to procure an abortion in the time period before the U.S. Supreme Court said, on January 22, 1973, that the government cannot criminalize abortion in all circumstances–the decision known simply as Roe to many.”

Everywhere she goes, people are eager to talk:

“People do not slot themselves into pollsters’ glib categories of ‘abortion should be legal under all circumstances,’ Cooper writes, “or ‘abortion should be legal only in cases of rape.’ People don’t cogitate about the future of the U.S. Supreme Court or grind their teeth about the exact moment when life begins.”

“What they are eager to discuss,” she learns, “is close to home. Sexual relations. Complicated lives of love and loss. People and circumstances that do not fit into check-off boxes on forms. One audience member in Virginia turns out to be the cashier at a college snack bar and while punching out our orders of chicken nuggets, describes, rapid-fire, an abusive marriage, an early abortion, a remarriage, children, grandchildren, a turn toward fundamentalist religion and her continued devotion to a woman’s right to make her own decisions about childbearing.”

“The play seems to open people up, Cooper continues. “One story in “Words of Choice” is of a father describing his feelings after his daughter is raped. Another is of a teenager who constructs an extensive, if familiar, rationale about why a single sexual encounter should not have made her pregnant (“think of all the times I didn’t do it,” she says.)

“It is so much more complex than I thought,” says a Southeast Asian immigrant in the courtyard of a Minneapolis theater. “I never heard these stories. They’re not like what you hear on the news. They make me think. Especially having a teenager, they make me think.”

Cooper goes on to tell more of the experiences of ordinary people, and reports that the experience of Roe, “is far from the world where policy analysts describe Roe’s wrinkles and sagging losses to hundreds of state anti-choice laws, or explain that one or two anti-choice replacements on the Supreme Court could make Roe into an historical artifact.”

“Roe,” Cooper asserts, “is living unseen, unheard, underground.”

She believes there is a need for “many more safe spaces for strangers and neighbors and even mothers and daughters to talk. Spoken word cafes. Church basements. Dormitories where five friends sit down and discuss; Tupperware-style house parties. Art galleries, bookstores, after-hours groups at doctors’ offices.”

And, tellingly, she observes: “our leaders need to sit in. Away from polls and focus groups and message-makers, they need to open new conversations with the people who need Roe, even if they don’t know about it. No one owns the subject of reproductive freedom, and we are all immigrants to this strange new landscape where no one talks.”

Cindy Cooper’s remarkable story was published in one of those places where it is safe to talk about such things. Women’s eNews is a four year old, non-profit, free online daily news service that rightly describes itself as “the definitive source of substantive news–unavailable anywhere else–covering issues of particular concern to women and providing women’s perspectives on public policy. It enhances women’s ability to define their own lives and to participate fully in every sector of human endeavor.”

Women’s eNews publishes a news story or commentary, mostly by freelance writers from around the world, every day. Stories are simultaneously emailed to subscribers and posted on their web site. The topics are the full range of topics — politics, religion, economics, health, science, education, sports, and perhaps more than any mainstream news outlet, stories about all aspects of reproductive rights.

One excellent way to celebrate the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, would be to support the news service that publishes great stories like Cindy Cooper’s. Make a contribution to Women’s eNews.