When I was in my mid 20s my two closest coworkers, one “pro-life” and the other “pro-choice,” pulled me into their discussion, expecting me to pick a side. Both of them considered me to have a position of authority since out of the three of us, I was the only one who was ever pregnant since I was the only one with a uterus.
I told them my honest belief based on my values. I thought the debate was stupid and unhelpful. Instead of focusing on the law, I wanted to focus on the root causes and wanted a world where people had access to birth control to reduce unwanted pregnancies, families had access to affordable healthcare to carry the baby to term safely and delivery safely, kids had safe daycares so parents could work, and any other financial and community support needed too be a happy family.
Both of these guys laughed and told me I was naive. That world would never exist. For almost 20 years, I still believed in the possibility of that world. This week, I painfully accepted my naïveté and am grieving the loss of my hope and the loss of the possibility of us supporting women through pregnancy and parenting with the leak of the Supreme Court opinion striking down Roe.
I’ve mentioned before to people how Roe was irrelevant to me because as a Catholic abortion wasn’t a known factor in my life, but I was wrong, very, very wrong. After the news break about the decision, I thought of my mother and how if she lived her circumstances in a post Roe world, she could be charged for multiple murders for her miscarriages. After the trauma of losing a child, she could be forced by some politically or religiously motivated individuals to relive the loss and the grief as she was forced to prove her miscarriages were an act of God and not intentionally induced abortions. While I was too young to now what happened at the time, I still remember her sadness and deep grief with the loss of those pregnancies, and to think of how cruelly woman will be treated in these moments makes me angry.
Roe’s presumption of privacy is also foundational to other parts which do greatly impact my life, up to and including my interracial marriage. Ending Roe is also an affront to religious freedoms. This decision is the imposition of a narrow Christian religious view on others and the codification of religion in a nation founded on religious freedom. To my Buddhist mother, those babies she lost would be reincarnated in a hopefully better life. Their short time with her was part of their journey. She grieved her loss at not knowing them, not the loss of their lives. I worry about my Jewish friends who will be forced to choose between following their religious laws or the laws of their locality because their religions defines life differently than mine. I worry about neighbors spying on their neighbors instead of being neighborly. As we watch the Supreme Court, for the first time take rights away instead of expanding them, I worry about the degradation of the American community as certain groups want tighter and tighter controls over others. I worry about our maternal mortality rate getting worse than its already dismal level as more moms die in childbirth because we refused to expand Medicaid coverage to them in Republican leaning states. I worry about the increase in child poverty levels, and domestic violence as women are forced into precarious situations by communities won’t fund the services they need. I worry.
Determining the beginning of life is hard. Seeing the life of the people in front of us shouldn’t be. So what comes next. Is this really what we want? Is this really how we want to show we care about life?
Adventures of a knitter 