With the spineless dems recent refusal to filibuster, I think we can all see the anti-choice writing on the wall. Even though they haven't acheived their holy grail of overturning Roe, they've made tremendous progress in making abortion and emergency contraception difficult, and in some places, near impossible to obtain.

One of the big reasons they've had so much success is that they use emotional language to push their agenda. And for the last twenty years, the pro-choice movement has let them.

Before Roe went to the Supremes the pro-choice movement had already won. And they won not just because of reasoned argument. They won because they won the emotional argument with the public. They did that by talking candidly about secret abortion providers, leaving the country to obtain an abortion, botched abortions. Women came forward and shared how (and more importantly, why) they went to such measures to get an abortion. And other women spoke about how they would have had an abortion, had it been available to them.

We have to remind people what's at stake here. Most pregnancies are unplanned. Which means that most women who have an abortion never thought they would need one. Just think about that one for a minute.

We have to stop allowing the debate to be framed as adoption v. abortion. Those two things are apples and oranges folks. One ends the responsibility of parenting a child, the other terminates a pregnancy. Big difference.

No more calling them "pro-life" either. A truly pro-life person would never place the value of a potential for life over the current healthy (mental, emotional and physical) life of another. This crowd is anti-choice and it's time to start calling them on their bullshit.

Everytime they start yapping about women who use abortion as birth control (an absurd notion, as any woman who's had an abortion can tell you), we need to get right back in their face and point out that it's their actions that have made birth control and sex education almost non-existant in some places, thus increasing the demand for abortion in those very spots.

When they talk about waiting periods, we need to walk them through the way the thought process works when deciding whether or not to abort. And use small words if necessary.

When they use words like "shame" we need to hold our heads high and talk about how we felt before, during and after we made our choices.

And when they talk about spousal/parental notification we need to bring the smackdown, and bring it hard, because we are no one's property.

When I first decided to give in to this impulse, I thought to myself "Who the hell are you kidding? You're no feminist scholar." Well, maybe so. But I am a human being who happens to be female. One who, despite her feminism, has spent most of her adult life doing what is tradionally defined as "women's work". And feminism, like any other rights ideology, grows out of experience, not the ivory tower.

When I first started lurking in the 'sphere I was surprised and delighted to find so many feminist blogs. I don't claim to have come anywhere close to reading them all, but those I have read seem to be mostly written by twenty-something men and women for whom feminism is almost something they were born into and where Susan Faludi's Backlash is a history.

These men and women (proud third wavers all) have done so much to keep the "feminist agenda" alive and growing and I am constantly in awe of them.

Yet I have found that for me, something has been missing from these communities. It wasn't until I read the primer/brief history of feminism in *bitch* magazine's 10th anniversary issue that I figured out what it was.

Second wave feminism (a.k.a. women's lib) has pretty much taken on the tarnished patina of ancient history and third wave feminism is in a constant flux, so edgy that it's often hard. And often missing is the brigde between the two that so many of us walk back and forth on.

When I was a twenty-something I didn't have the luxury of talking about feminist theory. I was too busy just being one during the Backlash, trying to raise my son to be/believe all those things that third-wavers take as given. All while I was proudly saying "Oh hell yes I'm a feminist!" in a time where even Ms. magazine was flirting with make-up ads. I didn't talk about dismantling the patriarchy because I was too busy living in it, trying like hell to change the small world that I lived in. I assumed that by the time I became the age I am now (rapidly closing in on 40) that I would be less liberal, less progressive, less on the edge because by this time the basic prinicples of second wave feminism would have become the status quo.

Instead I find us fighting the same battles as our sisters did before us, while at the same time we fight amongst ourselves. And men have been (with a very few notable exceptions) excluded from the discussion, as if they were the enemy. We seem to have forgotten that in order for us to move forward we must reach back and offer a hand to those behind us.

It is critical for us to remeber that most people come to feminism in the same way anyone comes to a rights movement; as a reaction to basic unfairness and the desire to change it.

Our second wave sisters knew this. Through consciousness raising, teach-ins, marches and protests they told their stories over and over. Reminding themselves and each other of where we came from and where we want to go. And while much of third wave feminism seems like a rational, reasonable outgrowth, it's damn hard to be sex-positive when you're still sufferering the "problem that has no name".

The conversations we have about rhetoric and theory are wonderful. They are so important and necessary. But those stories were our soul. And unless we start sharing them again, start telling our truths about misogyny, sexuality, work, life then we can win every single battle and we will still lose the war.