Mississippi splashed into summer with national news headlines awash with recent changes to our state’s abortion laws. Purported to protect women, and according to our governor help to make Mississippi abortion-free, the new law creates restrictions that effectively threaten to close the sole abortion-providing clinic in the state.
Prior to all this hullabaloo I didn’t know there existed even one single place in the state that performed this procedure. Furthermore, I’m embarrassed to admit that, given the proximity of Memphis to Oxford, I’d never stopped to consider if the necessity of interstate travel to locate a doctor to terminate an unplanned pregnancy constituted an undue burden or substantial obstacle in attaining the federal right to abortion, as granted to us almost forty years ago in Roe vs. Wade. But in the realm of non-pregnancy options, something else slid by this summer that I don’t want to slip away unnoticed, something relevant to the day-to-day efforts of women in Lafayette County who wish to wait, for the moment, on pregnancy.
Kroger no longer keeps the condoms under lock and key.
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, you read correctly. No more do you need to request a key from the pharmacy to open the cabinet containing contraceptives. No more are you limited to pharmacy hours to purchase a not-so-pricy pack of prophylactics. No more 1950s mentality turning you into an awkward teenager, fearful the pharmacist will fetch the truth to your folks of your carnal and consensual, but culturally criminal, coital conjoinings. Now you too can saunter into a grocery store at 3am to grab a dozen rubbers and a can of cheese whiz, just as I did the first time I bought condoms nearly twenty years ago.
In this contentious period of slick doublespeak glossing over the erosion of our federally protected female reproductive rights, I would like to commend Kroger for, literally, opening the door on the other side of the issue and providing us women (and men) with an easier option for unplanned pregnancy prevention. With an ounce of prevention rivaling a pound of cure, I’ll choose that little circle of latex over the angst-ridden, morally-muddled, life-altering decision brought by an unplanned pregnancy. I would like to have a baby, just not today. So thanks, Kroger, for making me feel less socially subversive and religiously reprehensible regarding my reproductive choices.