Katy

The first image that came to my mind when I thought about my womb and the way I choose to use it and, just as importantly, NOT use it, was a road. Specifically, a road that I can see goes far into the distance, but the end point is unknown. I don't know how long it is, or where it's going, but I'm on it. in the past, many women's lives were in a sense predetermined by the fact that womanhood centered around childbearing and keeping a family. I see this as a set path with clear steps that are in place for a woman to reach womanhood and thus validate herself individually and even more so, societally. I cannot speak to these women's experiences but I imagine they are vastly different from my own.

The road represents not only my movement through life, but also the direction and indirection that I face everyday as a woman in this would. I have chosen not to use my reproductive organs, on one hand, this has given me freedom and choice, I move through this world without (what I perceive to be) the burden or fear of becoming pregnant. I can go laces and do things on my own accord . I can have an education, a career, a life, that is independent of the attachments and responsibility that comes with motherhood. The road I'm on can go almost anywhere and be almost anything. I have no idea where it leads or what will happen along the way. This freedom and uncertainty in some senses depends on my won choice to disable my reproductive organs.

On the other hand, I haven't chosen a vast field or a blank canvass to represent my choice. It is a road, a defined path that directs me to certain places. While I have made a choice to not get pregnant, this does not divorce me of my femininity or the social forces that define me as such. Using birth control does not make me a man, it does not stop society from perceiving me as a woman. This (in some sense) determines what I do, now I act, what I want, and most of all, how I am treated by others. In other words, being a woman (whether or not I'm using my reproductive organs) creates and shapes the road I'm on. I have choices and my life can go anywhere, but there is a bath that will take me there.