The Burden of Choice

I am sitting in a concrete classroom. A young professor with thick dark hair and sharply tailored pants stands before the chalkboard. She is smart and beautiful and terrifying. She is everything I hope to be someday, but I am just a bright-eyed freshman, barely eighteen, barely formed. And I am arguing my point.

“Never. It should never be legal in any situation.”

The room is quiet, and the professor stares at me, eyebrows slightly raised.

I have dissented from the crowd, daring to regurgitate that which I’ve been trained to say, things that make sense within my small and simple world. Right now, that world is black and white. I have not yet traveled through the gray.

I am still three years away from choking on a morning-after pill, convinced that I am swallowing both my present salvation and eternal destruction.

I am four years from hearing my friend sob into a pillow after an early morning visit to a clinic, her silent accomplice dropping her off to sit in the guilt alone. Seven years from watching another friend cover her pain with shots of vodka and heartbroken jokes slurred into a laughless dawn. A decade away from birthing my first child and finally beginning to comprehend all that women are forced to sacrifice.

Yes, sacrifice. No one sets out to make such a choice. These women and girls stuck in the middle are not pondering some casual selection. This is not breakfast cereal. This is flesh and blood and joy and death. This is the beginning or the end or both.

But I do not understand these things as I count the concrete blocks of a classroom wall, formulating my next argument on a great big thing that I still view as obvious, simple. I believe I have a right to speak on issues of which I have no personal knowledge. I think it noble, in fact, to direct the path of a stranger’s shoes in which I have never walked.

“What about rape?” the professor asks.

“The cause of conception doesn’t change the existence of life. That child is blameless in how it was conceived.”

“So, that woman should be made to carry the blame?” My professor’s voice tightens.

“Sometimes we have to make sacrifices,” I say.

I utter these words having been assaulted just months prior. I say them because I cannot yet name in the light what has happened to me in the dark. That will take another seventeen years.

“The mother could still put that child up for adoption,” I assert, a universe away from understanding what that means.

I have not yet held my own child. I have not yet looked into his face and imagined the anguish of handing that child over to another mother. I have not endured the trauma of such a sacrifice, yet I suggest that some stranger should.

“And what about those children forced to be born just to be unwanted, neglected and abused?”

I have not yet met these children or held them in my arms. The fervent prayers I will shout into the sky for a child I cannot envision while sitting in that classroom – those prayers are nearly twenty years down the road. I have not yet witnessed the consequences inflicted upon these children, birthed only to be discarded and forgotten by the same people demanding they be carried by someone else’s body.

“It is then our responsibility as a society to take care of those unwanted children,” I answer, believing this is how the system works. Two decades later, I will see that this system, our society, fails these children every single day.

At eighteen, I know nothing but the talking points. I do not understand how these talking points dictate the very existence of actual people – babies and their mothers, fathers, siblings, extended families, entire communities. These debates held in a Moral Problems course are not just a question of morals. They are an acceptance letter and two pink lines. They are women with abusive husbands and other children to protect. They are three part-time jobs, no sitter, and one wrong move away from homeless. They are teenage girls with teenage minds and adult decisions to make.

These moral dilemmas we carelessly tossed back and forth were people’s lives – someone’s daughter, a best friend, the quiet girl who made our coffee that morning. We chucked them around the room, placing judgment and blame often prescribed by our faith. Faith should lead us to volunteer inside the clinics, not admonish those who find themselves trapped within them, women needing someone to hold their hand not a sign outside the window.

Women’s lives should not be up for debate in any college classroom or political stage. They should not be used to pluck at our heartstrings by the same politicians who then vote against funding for contraception, pregnancy prevention programs, and free clinics, tools that have proven time and again to decrease abortions. Isn’t that the goal here or are our heartstrings just being used to tie our hands?

Our bodies cannot be left to bright-eyed 18-year-olds at a ballot box or handed over to politicians and judges who’ve never had to make such life-altering, irreversible decisions for themselves, politicians who do not understand that while no woman wishes to have to choose, that does not mean our government should make that decision for us.

Ashley, Woman of a Certain Rage