Joycelyn Elders Is So Sick Of Vaginal Politics She Could Just Vomit

When it comes to reproductive rights, seventy-seven-year-old former U.S. surgeon general Joycelyn Elders is pissed off. In an interview with The Root, she does not hold back. The entire piece is worth your while, but here are some choice words:

On Congress trying to cut funding for Planned Parenthood :

Any woman who has a congressperson who votes against women’s reproductive rights is headed back to the Dark Ages, when they were owned by their husbands.

And:

You bright young people — and I love you — but you don’t know what it was like for us old folk, when you couldn’t have birth control pills, when condoms were not as readily available and we didn’t have all the other contraceptives that are now on the market. I think if the women of this country — whether black, white, young, old, Democrat or Republican — cause the reproductive rights of any of our citizens to be lost, then we should never forgive ourselves.

On suggesting we teach teenagers to masturbate in 1994 — for which she was criticized:

If everybody in Congress who’d ever masturbated in their life would turn green, then we would have a green Congress.

On President Obama’s health care bill:

…Legislators are still out there trying to put riders on that so that the health exchanges in the states can’t offer and pay for abortions. I’m so tired of them playing vaginal politics that I could just vomit.

And last, but not least:

Reproductive rights are just an extension of every other kind of justice and right there is.