Worlds Apart, Living Right Next Door
Chapter Seven. The Green Card Holder.
I am sitting in a cafe and I am waiting to talk with a pastor.
A woman approaches me.
“I hear you are a writer,” she says.
She is from Germany and she is a green card holder so she cannot vote in November. I ask her, in any event, what she is thinking about the upcoming elections and she answers, in a slow clear voice:
“I really hope that Kamala doesn’t win.”
Education, “uncontrolled” migration and healthcare are her top three issues.
She admits, apologetically, that she is not very well informed. Her life, she tells me, revolves around her daughter, who is five. She is her only child.
We talk about reproductive rights. She doesn’t think women should be using abortion as birth control even though the research shows that women are not using abortion as birth control. The notion that organizations like Planned Parenthood or “the Democrats” would find ways to help a woman cross a state line to have an abortion, when it is illegal in their own state? This is “just too much.” She screws up her face when she says this.
She believes that in some “liberal” states, women can terminate their pregnancies up to the 8th or 9th month. I say that this only happens in the rarest of cases, when the child is stillborn or the risk to the mother is life threatening. Otherwise, women do not terminate their pregnancies in the 8th or 9th month.
She doesn’t seem to take that in but instead says that us women need to be smarter about our cycles, and not get pregnant in the first place. She is into herbalism. Women have been terminating their pregnancies using “wild carrot seed” for centuries, she tells me. (Wild carrot seed is also known as Queen Anne’s Lace, and sure enough, a little time on google will lead you to articles about its apparent benefits both as an unreliable contraceptive and as an unreliable way to induce the menstrual cycle, and that it was indeed used as a contraceptive method in the middle ages.)
Her five year old daughter who is right now jousting with the pastor is being homeschooled. She won’t send her to public school because of all the “terrible” things that are being taught in public school. She doesn’t want her daughter to learn that way.
She thinks the reproductive issue is not the most important issue facing us and she believes that it won’t be “so bad” for women across the country. She says - and this I couldn’t quite believe - that if she was younger she might think differently about reproductive rights.
As if on cue, her daughter appears and tells her it’s time to go. “Goodbye,” her daughter calls out to me and the pastor as they walk towards the door.
Addendum: We did not exchange contact information, this woman and I, so I do not know how she and her family fared in Hurricane Helene. I am hoping that they are okay.
If you would like to support the people of Madison County as they rebuild from the devastation caused by Helene, please consider the Community Housing Coalition of Madison County. I am an absolute fan of their work in the community - people of different ages and social strata, coming together to help those most in need. You can support their work, here. Thank you.