How I Found My Voice to Support of Abortion

Photo by the author, Kimberly Crum

It was 10:45 AM when I heard the news. NPR’s Nina Totenberg, in her calm but authoritative voice, announced the US Supreme Court decision to revoke Roe v Wade. I wanted to pull my car to the side of the road, just as I had one morning in 1986 while listening to NPR’s live narration of the Challenger liftoff and explosion.

I had known a space orbiter might explode but never expected it to happen.

By 4:30 PM on the day that Roe died—June 24, 2022 — I stood at my very first pro-choice rally, lifting a ‘No Forced Pregnancy” sign, waving it at passing cars, and chanting, “Bans off my body!” I must have appeared out-of-place to the majority millennial women who glanced suspiciously or smiled benevolently at a chanting baby boomer. I restrained myself from joining the chant, “F**k You, Clarence Thomas,” though I do share the sentiment.

For fifty years, I’ve been sitting on the fence, my feet dangling on the pro-choice side. I believed abortion immoral in some circumstances and a moral necessity in others. I celebrated contraception and supported the right to safe abortion. Yet, I did not speak. Perhaps this was due to my Catholic upbringing. Perhaps it was the fear of airing my concerns with activists on either side of the abortion equation. There seemed to be no room for a nuanced view. I feared being accused of advocating…