Abortion as a Right of Personhood
I’m someone who fantasized about pregnancy and adoption as a tween and teen more than I thought about what color of Manic Panic or which CD from Sam Goody I would buy next. With babysitting money I bought onesies and toddler overalls to hide in the back of my closet with my favorite stuffed animals and board books. I volunteered at my town high school’s early childhood center and borrowed child development books from the library. I longed to be a parent with a hunger that felt like it couldn’t wait.
When I was raped the summer I turned 18 and considered the possibility I could be pregnant, it was the first and only time I wanted the option of abortion. Flitting moments of excitement were awash with nausea and dread. In the weeks before I knew, I experienced life through the backwards side of a telescope — an out of body escape I learned through rape. The idea that I might have a child that looked like him or worse that he’d become forever entangled in our lives left me at an impasse.
I found solace at Planned Parenthood — in the anonymity I felt in the waiting room, in the flush no one noticed in my cheeks while I checked out the free bowl of condoms, in their candid questions about my sexual activity, in their diagnosis of a yeast infection that had run amock (no, I wasn’t dying of some horrible disease to boot), and finally in the negative pregancy test taken by their guidance at the appropriate time in my cycle to know for sure I wasn’t pregnant.
I still longed for motherhood, even felt a little sad at the loss of that possibility but overwhelmingly relieved that this was not my path into parenthood and that I wouldn’t have to be faced with the decision to carry the fetus to term or abort.
This is about an experience I’ve never considered through a political lens with this much scrutiny because it shouldn’t be about politics. And the conversation that is now political is not about what choice I would have made but the right to bodily autonomy. The conversation around abortion has become as politicized as gender and sexual identity. It has become charged with appropriating personal beliefs as policy for the masses. It has disarmed people with uteruses by making them property of the fetus, elevating the rights of the unborn above the rights of the gestational carrier, fueling gender inequity, and disregarding the life these fetuses might be born into.
As someone who longed for the experience of pregnancy, who grew up in a family with resources, who might have had support raising a child while in school or placed my infant for a private adoption, even with all of that stacked for me, abortion still felt like a lifeline.
How many young people are already in the world in need of families? If you believe in the sanctity of an unborn child, consider the holiness of childhood and community. Consider the timing for that spirit to break through into a life with the certainty of people ready to raise her.
This is about the right of personhood for all who experience pregnancy and it’s also about the right to be born into a life that’s ready to catch you.
