when I say I am pro-abortion
when I say I am pro-abortion, I mean I celebrate abortions.
as a disabled person, I have been asked twice if my mother should have aborted me — once by an anti-choice protester outside a planned parenthood clinic on a cold saturday morning; once by a pro-choice professor in the lecture hall of one of my abortion classes. our bodies - disabled bodies - are considered undesirable at best, disposable at worst. as a disabled person, a pregnancy would be harder on my body than on other people's bodies, in ways that my surgeons wouldn't dare mention. as a disabled person, half of any biological children will be disabled too, and maybe anti-choice protestors and pro-choice professors will ask them if their mother should have aborted them. it's a question I have considered over and over again — it was her choice, as it will be mine. as a disabled person, I know how anti-abortion rhetoric will be used as a tool of eugenics against them, as it has been against me.
as a sexual and reproductive health expert, I know every possible way of dying from pregnancy and postpartum. I know maternal deaths in exquisite detail — how many pints of blood, where the embolism will travel, how many minutes between incision and time of death, how many decisions will happen in those minutes, how hormonal shifts and identity shifts wreak havoc on brain chemistry, what the contents of a suicide note might be, how dramatically the domestic violence will escalate, how the social media posts will grieve, which chilling details the autopsy will lay bare, where the body will be left (in an ER, in a morgue, in a grave, in a dumpster). I know how an M&M or MMRC will categorize and sort, how epidemiology and policy will turn deaths into numbers and talking points and forget the people behind them.
as a doula, I know the wild strength that labor demands, the animalistic mammalian effort of growing and birthing and nourishing a human. as a nanny and a neuroscience researcher, I know the intricacies of healthy brain development, the lasting effects of trauma in early childhood, the fiercely protective instincts around all of it. as an auntie, I know the ridiculous joy of watching an infant discover what kisses are, the bittersweet responsibility of protecting a kiddo's identity and autonomy.
I know the giddy relief of a negative or positive pregnancy test, or when the bleeding arrives too quickly or too slowly. I know the veil between birth and death is thin and unyielding. I know — deeply, profoundly, intimately — that pregnancy, birth, raising children are not to be undertaken lightly.
when I say I am pro-abortion, I mean I celebrate abortions as I celebrate births — fiercely, unabashedly, jubilantly.