The Ever-Turning Tide of Rights
It’s 2022, I’m 20 and on top of the world earning £12 per hour at an esteemed private
members club in London. In my casual, Summer role, I’ve never felt more free. I fill my
lunch plate with the usual selection of pastas, varying greens, and head to my favourite table
to tuck in. As my knees bend into my seat, my head glances up to the just-big-enough TV
screen and my legs buckle straight. Only five minutes ago I was confiding in a colleague
about the scare I‘d thought to be having. She was an American citizen, on a student visa and
working every one of the twenty hours she was allowed to work per week. Eyes wide and a
mouth agape, I look around the room at the women I work with. We span over half a century
in age and experience, and we do the work our mothers, grandmothers, ancestors weren’t
allowed to do.
It’s 2022 and Roe vs. Wade didn’t quite make that half century mark. How is it that
the news from halfway around the world induces a loss of appetite on my one
twenty-minute lunch break? I think of my American friend. I think of my mother and
grandmother. I think of the friend I met at the station after she called me in tears, having no
idea I might cry like that just half a year on.
It’s 2024, I‘m turning 22 and finding my voice. I’m in Leeds and finally gaining
confidence looking through a lens I’d bought as a child. On the Leeds-Liverpool canal walk,
that same friend from the station and I plan out our lives, discuss hopes, and talk of exes we
wished we’d never met. I pick my phone out of my pocket to pencil in our summer plans as a
BBC alert startles us both to stillness. France becomes the first country to enshrine the right
to abortion into their constitution. I think of my girlfriends, my mother and grandmother,
and myself just one gestational period ago. One shared sigh and we pick up our steps again.
Anything can happen.