Unless you have suffered the agonizing and devastating emotions that come along with peeling open that purple wrapper and  peeing on a plastic stick and watching, dreading, the longest two minutes ever, as the little blue lines turned into a ” + ” sign, when what you were dearly wishing and hoping, and dare I write, praying for, was the ” – ” sign, you really can’t say with certainty what you would do.  Sure, you can say all you want that life is sacred, that a baby begins being a baby at the moment of conception, and that you would never have an abortion, or that you would never let your daughter have one or procure one for her…sure, you can say these things, but are you sure?  It’s all well and good to believe that life is sacred, but is one cluster of dividing cells MORE sacred than the actual human being that you are, or that you gave birth to or raised, and is about to start her sophomore year of college?  Is that little cluster of parasitic dividing cells more important than the girl who you raised into a woman who now finds herself un-wanting to be pregnant?

I do not generally write or talk about politics.  They are often divisive and I try to live my life in a harmonious, ‘peaceful easy-feeling’ way, but today I am writing about how I felt when I watched the news late last night and then again very early this morning and learned that Ted Cruz won on the side of the republicans in the Iowa caucus.  I don’t know much about him but what I have seen or heard on the news, and what I saw and heard during the two debates that I did watch & I learned that he does not believe that abortions should be legal and safe and available in the United States of America.

I don’t know ANYBODY who is “for” abortion.  Nobody I ever met at the clinic felt happy, or excited to be there.  Nobody I ever talked to in college felt joyful that they made the choice they made.  Not one woman I have ever talked to about this subject has NOT thought about how old that child might now be, had she made another choice…would it have been a boy or a girl…what my life would have been like if I had chose a different course of action…you see, from what I know for sure, nobody thinks it’s just terrific, oh it’s swell, no biggie, to have an accidental pregnancy and make the choice to terminate it.  In my opinion the people who prosthelytize the sanctity of life, the value of this cluster of cells,  would have you believe that those of us who have made this choice don’t find a value in an unborn fetus.  This is not true.  I cried each time for the “what could have been” and would cry again, if I had to make this choice.  What is true, what I believe to be true, is that we value our own lives, and our own futures, more.

When I hear people who are not pro-choice talk about these babies, these valuable lives, all I can think about is, “are you and your family going to adopt one, or three, or five of them?”  “Will every family in your congregation accept the responsibility of adopting these unwanted fetuses that grow into full term humans and  will each family who belongs to your church take at least one of these ‘precious lives’ and make it their own child, part of their family?”  “How about the church in the next town, or the bible college in the next city?  Will every one of those families take and adopt and support and raise these humans?”  I read several different statistics this morning and it seems that based on state-wide available data, in 2014 there were approximately 977,000 abortions performed in the United States.  So I ask, if abortion becomes illegal, if Roe vs. Wade is overturned and Ted Cruz is elected president and does as he is promising, to make the Supreme Court one of the most right-wing courts in history, to appoint the most conservative judges he can, to fill the spaces which might be open from the four judges who are expected to retire within the next few years, and to use the 14th amendment to outlaw abortion in all circumstances, basically to give an unborn cluster of cells the same “rights” as a living human being, WHO is going to take and raise and provide for these 977,000 humans???

It’s MUCH bigger than just me and just you.  It’s MUCH more important than you might think.  I know, I know, there are many issues that matter when it comes to politics; what we think is important for our own self, our family, the economy, the country…I understand there are MANY things that matter, but some things may seem unimportant to you because you think that they don’t matter for you…but that just shows how you are neglecting to see the big picture, to think outside of the tiny box that is your household or your town…It’s all well and good to say that you value life and that abortion is wrong, but tell me, if your 16 year old daughter/ honor roll student/ soccer star/ cheerleader finds that she is pregnant, and does not want to be, and wants to finish high school and go on to college and create the life she imagines without the emotional and financial burdens of being a young single mother, you are going to take away all of her dreams because she made a mistake and accidentally got pregnant?  What about HER life’s value??  What about your granddaughter, or your niece, or your neighbor, or your sister or-or-or…It’s so much more important than just what YOU think, what matters to YOU.  If all of your pregnancies were planned and wanted and you never had an accident or mistake, then good on ‘ya, you are a better woman than I.  I have made the choice more than once and I would make the choice again if I had to.  Accidents happen, we have to make choices in life that are sometimes sad, and sometimes hard, but we make them based on what is best; what is the best ending to this situation for us, for me, for you…if you don’t believe that matters FOR you, to have that choice, then at least believe that it matters for your daughter, or your son’s girlfriend, or the future women of this country…