I got pregnant pre-Roe when I was 17, because as my only sex ed (from friends) assured me - "Virgins can't get pregnant the first time they do it." Ha!

I could never hope to raise the $300 needed to give the abortion ring run out of the VA hospital (yeah, you read that right) on the Old Post Road outside of Boston on my own, so a friend offered to 'help' me.

He 'helped' by inserting a catheter and pumping me with epsom salts.

I hemorrhaged and almost died in the emergency room I ultimately landed in - but they refused to do a D&C. Packed me up with gauze and sent me home, in pain but still pregnant.

Finally I told my mother. After much sturm und drang (and borrowing the money it would take my parents a year to repay) - she took me on the 3 a.m. red-eye on American Airlines to Puerto Rico, where it was quasi-legal. The plane was stacked with mommas and crying teenage girls.

Got to a clinic (where we met those same moms and girls), 4 months gone, and hemorrhaged again but survived.

NO woman should ever have had to go through what I did. And by the Goddess, no woman ever will again while I still have an ounce of fight left in this aging body.

To any young woman reading this: Your mom never had to fight for the right of bodily autonomy. That's because we grannies did the fighting for her, to give her the gift of freedom and equal citizenship. But she didn't fight to keep them, because "I'm busy, and politics is so depressing ..."

Well, newsflash: the Abortion Fairy didn't deliver that right to you one morning. Neither did just voting.

We did Sit-ins to stop classes, politics, traffic and business, Boycotts, and disruptive Acts of Civil Disobedience. We made Good, Good Trouble daily. We were loud, we got in their way - and boy did we make them pay.

For years of our lives!

Now you have to fight, not just vote - and win. And make sure your daughters and sons never forget that the political is the personal - and that the fight to keep a democracy never ends.