Women's Liberation Can Kill You

Mrs. Linklater has been making predictions for years. Despite numerous requests, she continues to this day. For instance, way back in the 80's she realized that the hormones in birth control pills and HRT were causing breast cancer. Especially if you smoked. Mrs. L constantly annoyed her family and friends with admonitions about not taking those pills. But, like most women, they all wanted to prevent wrinkles and have sex without making babies, so nobody was listening to her at all.  

The NIH finally caught on to the fraud a couple of years ago. Not that the pharmaceuticals didn't try to keep the secret for as long as they could. For almost five decades, they have been making obscene amounts of money selling those horse urine pills to unsuspecting females. Women pop them daily with the promise of protection from pregnancy and unsightly pimples when they're young or wrinkles and unpleasant dryness when they're old. So a few of them die. Okay, more than a few. Why bring it up? That would only make the drug companies appear unprincipled, uncaring, and capitalistic.

Still, Mrs. Linklater wonders how many of the women in the original studies from the sixties died from breast and uterine cancer. And she's not even asking about the ones who died during the seventies, eighties and nineties. Somebody's got the numbers. And they're not telling.

Now it seems another one of Mrs. L's unholy predictions has come true. No not that one; it's still attached. This one:

During the years Mrs. Linklater was working as a fulltime single mom, she noticed that she was under an exhorbitant amount of stress. The kind that causes high blood pressure, irritability, exhaustion and eating food when you're not hungry.

She often remarked to herself as she passed out even before her head hit the pillow, that the experience of singlemotherhood would take years off her life. 

Apparently, she was right. Yes, Mrs. Linklater is a goner. Or close to it.

Since the people who track these things have been keeping tabs on longevity, there have only been two times that a woman's lifespan has gone backwards instead of forwards. It happened first in Africa when the AIDs epidemic hit. Not unexpected in a continent rife with third world countries, lack of healthcare and curious tribal beliefs that reject western medicine.

But here's today's shocker: the lifespan for women has dropped in the United States. This is stuff that only happens in places without running water and toilets. Not where people have closets with a thousand pairs of shoes.

I don't know how much sooner we American females are supposed to die, but I would think a year earlier than originally promised might be considered fairly momentous among people who monitor those statistics.

I think if they broke out the numbers, it's the single mothers who are wrecking the curve the most. I bet we're the ones who are kicking the bucket a whole lot sooner. As much as five to ten years if you askk me. Frankly, after working and raising children on my own, I feel so sandblasted by life that the thought of living to seventy-five or eighty makes me want to lie down and take a nap. Originally I think we were tabbed for 85 or older. Sheesh.

Most likely, the next group kicking the bucket early are the married moms with careers and kids. The gimme it all babes -- dead way before their expiration dates.

Right now no one knows the exact reason why women in the United States are dying earlier.

As usual, they didn't ask Mrs. Linklater. She knows what has happened to shorten the lives of US women.

We are killing ourselves. Perhaps with a little help from Ortho Novum and Phillip Morris.

But mostly we have been dropping like flies in the name of freedom. Freedom to make our own choices. Freedom to be ourselves. Freedom to have sex or not have sex when we wanted. Freedom to have a career that we liked. Freedom to raise our children alone. Live where we want. Drink all the milk and put the carton back empty. Oh, wait, we don't do that.

So chances are, over the next twenty years, not as many eighty year old American women will be playing shuffleboard on cruise ships in the Mediterranean with husbands who bore them to tears.

We got our freedom. And now it's killing us.

Fine by me.