[[@else:
I suppose it's time to tell my abortion story. Of the abortion that didn't happen, that led to me.
A lot of anti-abortion people put words & thoughts into the mouths of the unborn.
Well, I'm one that was recommended to stay unborn, who got born, and here's what I say.
My mother found our very early in her pregnancy that there was an extremely high risk to her if she continued.
Terminating the pregnancy was floated by one of the doctors. It would have been legal due to the risk to her, but heavily stigmatized.
Her family was deeply Catholic. She was deeply Catholic.
She did not terminate. The risk became a reality.
So I'm here, and she's not.
It is hard to put into words the gratitude you feel to a mother who sacrificed herself entirely for you, and I'm not going to try here.
Because I'm also very angry.
Without in any way taking away from the courage and selflessness with which she bore her situation and which she showed in all aspects of her life
I don't believe she ever really felt like she had a true choice.
The stigma, the religious dogma, the judgement - everything she'd ever known - told her she could not save her own life.
Her parents would have, however sadly, believed she'd go to hell. Her family and friends and community would have judged her.
Everyone she'd ever loved believed it was wrong. And so she believed it was wrong.
I don't know what choice she would have made if it had been a true choice.
Maybe she would have chosen me anyway. Maybe she would have chosen to stay for her two already-existing children and for all those who loved her so deeply.
But she should have had a real, true choice.
Would I trade being here for that?
In a heartbeat. Without hesitation.
My siblings could have grown up with their mother.
My grandparents could have seen their beloved daughter live out her beautiful life, instead of mourning her every day until their deaths.
Her brothers and sisters would not still thirty years later feel the pain of losing the sistre they loved so much.
She could have continued to bring the light to the world that she had always brought, that I have heard so much about.
My father perhaps would not have descended into the grief & guilt that destroyed him, our relationship with him, the innocence of our childhoods.
Now, I think about how my young nieces & nephews will grow up without her, without the kind of grandmother I had. That pains me too.
I grew up in the devastation of her death.
I've watched the consequences of it play out for thirty years.
I can see what might have been differently if she'd had a true choice and it snatches my breath away, to see the suffering that didn't have to be for the ones I love most.
I know that it is not my family, but it is also profoundly difficult to know that it is because of me.
Or to be more exact, because the world did not allow my mother her right to a true choice, and my being here is perhaps a result of that.
It's not a burden I'd wish on anyone
I wish that I could have told her. It's okay. Stay. Live. Be happy.
I wish I could know that she knew that that was more than ok.
Don't I want to be here? Don't I want to be alive, aren't I glad to live??
Now that I'm here, sure. But had I never been, what would I have lost? Nothing.
You can't miss what you never had. Can't lose anything when you never existed.
There's no pain or loss in not existing.
I didn't exist then, to want anything. I didn't exist to hope or wish or fear anything.
I didn't exist back then. Not me. There was a possibility. An idea, a hope maybe. Some cells, a process in her body. Not me, any more than a sperm was me or an egg was me.
*I" didn't become until much later. Til I was born.
My mother wouldn't have taken anything from me or cause me any pain by living for herself, because I didn't exist to lose anything.
There was so much pain, so much loss in losing her. Loss that will ripple down generations.
So I will say to my dying breath, as the person who only lives because she didn't abort, that whatever she thought or chose or did not chose, she should have had a real choice to abort.
That she should have felt that aborting me was valid and good a choice as not.
Everyone should feel that, and have real access to enact that choice without obstruction or shame or question.
Whether it is their actual life at risk, or not. A forced pregnancy can be the death of many things, not just the end of ther person's life.
Having me took away from the world everything that my mother could have given it.
Forcing someone to have a child against their will can take away what that person could be and bring if they had their choice, whether they live through the pregnancy or not.
Most of all it takes away their right - their inalienable right - to choose how they live their life in their own body.
A non-person, a hypothetical future event, the birth of someone who doesn't exist yet, doesn't have that right.
Other people, who claim to speak for the unborn do not have that right.
We all lose so much by it. It can cause such pain and suffering, for child-bearers, for children, for everyone.
Do not pretend to speak for the unborn.
Do not pretend to speak for the children born against their mother's will.
Do not pretend that you care for them while you hide misogyny behind dogma.
My mother deserved her right to a real choice.
Everyone does. Unconditionally.
As the child who could have been aborted, I tell you - to oppose that right, let alone work to criminalize it, is unforgivable.
I'd like to emphasize because I didn't say it loud enough in the original thread:
There doesn't need to be a tragic story or a threat to life to make abortion ok.
It can be simply because you don't want to have a child. That's all. You still have the right to a choice.
I told my sad story because:
a) it is important to me to counter the rhetoric of anti-choice folks, that claims that if the unborn could speak they would be anti-choice
b) forced pregnancies can really f*ck up lives in many ways and that needs to be recognized.
There shouldn't have to be a tale of woe to justify bodily autonomy.
It's a right. An absolute right. It should be protected by law.
Last thingL I want this point to be heard, but I don't particularly want to deal with blowing up on twitter.
I will probably lock my account down at some point, but I would like this still to be shared. Maybe use an unroll app and share from there if you would like to.]]
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