Trisha Flynn Cheroutes, a former columnist for The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, wrote in 1995 that “in my next life I’m coming back as a witch.”
Flynn, who died last week at the age of 82, wanted to rejoin this world not to cast spells and curse wrongdoers but to continue the important work begun by women in the Middle Ages who were burned at the stake for possessing the secrets of fertility control.
“Since herbal birth-control was in the hands of women, for a long time it remained outside the sanctioned male medical system and was passed along from woman to woman in private,” Flynn wrote. “Back then “witch,” from the root word wica, meant ‘wise woman.’”
Modern medicine – controlled exclusively by men until Elizabeth Blackwell was begrudgingly given a degree in 1849 – striped women of control of their own reproduction and has been deliberately slow in using technology to help us regain our autonomy.
Flynn was honored in her time by the Anti-Defamation League, Big Sisters of Colorado and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. She was on the leading edge of advocacy for women’s rights.
But in a shocking turn of events we are headed backward. Flynn’s words of warning in 1995 may have been more prescient than she could have known. We may need wise women hiding from official medicine to help us control our reproduction in the not-so-distant future.
President Donald Trump ran in 2016 on his pledge to appoint justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, thus stripping pregnant women of their constitutional right to make their own decisions around pregnancy in the first 20 weeks. Trump won, his three appointed justices executed Trump’s demand, and more women in America today than when Flynn was writing her columns don’t have access to abortions.
Trump has made no secret of his plans to attack contraception if elected again. Project 2025, which Trump is now unsuccessfully trying to distance himself from, calls for gender equality, reproductive health, and reproductive rights to be “deleted … from every piece of legislation that exists.” The plan has an entire section titled, “Life, Conscience and Bodily Integrity.” It calls for insurance companies to no longer be required to cover contraception. It proposes defunding the non-abortion care provided by Planned Parenthood, which is family planning and routine gynecological care for uninsured women and teens.
Flynn wrote in 1995 about her fears of her teenage daughter going to prom — not because of premarital sex, but because of “Pregnancy, unwed motherhood, unwanted child, a young woman’s future nipped in the bud.” She said birth control could have prevented all her angst.
When I was a teen in 1999, I snuck to Planned Parenthood to get a heavy dose of hormones injected under my skin — the Depo shot — so my mother wouldn’t find pills or other embarrassing evidence that I was sexually active. Planned Parenthood provided me with birth control free of charge without billing my parents’ insurance (another sure way of getting caught).
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Today, women can insert a fragment of copper into their uteruses which is far more effective at preventing pregnancy than the hormone pills we used for decades as our only option – outside of celibacy which isn’t any fun, condoms which break and the rhythm method which can be effective for some women but leaves little room for error. Women who cannot tolerate hormones now have a natural option to prevent pregnancy. I use one for this very reason.
But copper IUDs are in the crosshairs of the religious right who consider them abortifacients because they can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting into the uterus. Christian extremists – and a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court – believe that fertilized eggs have an equal claim to government protection as a fetus at 20 weeks gestation.
I hope Flynn doesn’t have to come back as a witch to help my daughter and I navigate the complexities of prom in 10 years. After decades of advocacy, Flynn deserves a break.
Perhaps this is why Flynn’s family has requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains.
Megan Schrader is the editor of The Denver Post’s opinion pages.
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