We'll be at war soon. My family was opposed to the Vietnam War. I remember my father taking us to anti-war protests. I wore a black armband to school on Moratorium Day in 9th grade. I was worried that I'd get hassled for that. But no one said a thing. I came to believe that this was because no one in my class knew what wearing a black armband on that day signified.

I remember Vietnam vets coming back and some of them being not quite right in the head anymore. A couple of them in our town were like that. They came back home and drifted in and out of the bars, had that look, walked around with their bodies scrunched in on themselves, got minimum wage jobs they didn't do so well at.

Remember how as the protests against the war escalated, returning vets would be met at the airport and pretty young girls would shout, "Babykiller! You're a babykiller!" at them? It was the worst thing you could say to someone. That was right around the time that the Roe v Wade decision was handed down.

There are men and women in our society who experience death when they are late teens, young adults, who are right there when a death happens, and it changes something in their head and heart.

Sometimes abortion seems like a gender payback. It's as if men thought, "We went off to war, unwilling for the most part, and certainly immature. Some of us came back and those of us who did were never quite the same, but that's just the way it is. It's just reality. It's just the price you pay. Now women can find out, by having a war in their womb."