I was born and raised in a high demand religion that forbids abortion, but I changed my mind before I ever left the church.
In 2022 it really seems like a woman’s right to get an abortion if she needs one should be obvious. In a poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 67% of respondents said they would not support Roe v. Wade being overturned–a reality that reiterates that our democracy is hardly democratic at all. Still, progress requires us to convince a specific population that women do, indeed, deserve to have bodily autonomy. I can speak to this subject because I used to identify as a pro-life person, but I changed my mind.
I wish I could tell you that, in the comments section of a Facebook post or the replies of a Twitter thread, I was converted by nothing but the witty repartee of a humble activist. I wish I could say that my mind changed in a day, or a week, or even a month, but that’s not how ideological shifts usually occur.
There are a lot of things that changed for me several years ago when I started deconstructing my faith, a lot of beliefs about morality and the definition of right and wrong sort of disintegrated, but one thing that didn’t change much was my stance and feelings about abortion.
No, my stance on abortion started changing long before that.
I was married young, and raised with the notion that having and raising kids would be the most important thing I could possibly do with my life, and while my innate practicality kept me from even attempting to get pregnant while my husband and I finished our undergraduate education, I was enthusiastic to start trying for a baby as his graduation date began to approach (I was a year into a teaching career).
But I didn’t get pregnant, not even with fertility drugs. Other treatments would be costly as well as emotionally and physically draining, and I was already feeling devastated and exhausted. Parenthood, I believed, was something I was entitled to. I was told it was my destiny, God’s plan, and in the culture of my high demand religion, it was the only way I would be fully accepted as legitimate with the other women at church. I was also sure I would be good at it, and I wanted to be a mom so badly. This was the only failure of my young life that I couldn’t come back from with a plucky attitude and a lot of dedication and hard work. I couldn’t make my body conceive a child and I didn’t want to endure fertility treatments, the outcomes and odds for which were far from encouraging.
At the time, I was firmly anti-abortion and anti-choice, except maybe in special cases. I was also naive enough to think sensible laws would make way for those special cases, and they’d be clear cut and obvious to anyone with common sense.
Before I was old enough to rent a car, I began the process of getting an adoption home study. After all, nobody deserved to be a mom more than I did. The fact that Snooki was able to get pregnant and I wasn’t had to be a cosmic mistake. I’d done everything God told me to do–I’d stayed chaste until I got married, and I found a husband who’d raise children to believe in God the same way I did. At this point God owed me some babies, and I was sure I would be a better mom than at least half the people I knew who already had kids. There was no one more committed than I was to doing a good job of being a mom and raising some more foot soldiers for God’s army.
So when the adoption agency assigned us some reading and online training, I took everything right to heart. It was clear that what would be best if we adopted a baby would be for them to have some kind of contact with their birth mother, if we could keep up a healthy and safe relationship. It was also clear that it would be in the best interest of said baby for me to speak positively of the birth mother regardless of her background and circumstances. My entitlement was checked, to some extent. Obviously no one would want to be having a difficult enough time to feel like they needed to have someone else raise the baby they carried. I was young, naive, and entitled in a lot of ways, but I could hold space and compassion for that reality.
Then when baby arrived and the storybook idea of birth mom at birthday parties and school plays evaporated, I sought out online communities where other committed parents were fighting hard to do what was best for their kids in circumstances where “best” wasn’t always an available option. I stumbled into a forum where birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees were all able to post and comment, and the experiences of the adoptees and birth parents were centered and lifted up as the important voices adoptive parents should be listening to. This made sense to me. My baby was everything to me, and her well-being was primary. I was thirsty for answers to my questions and information about how I could help my kid, and this forum provided a place for adoptees and birth moms to give insight about what my kid might be going through and what I might be able to do to convince her birth mom to show up for this little baby that wasn’t quite mine and wasn’t quite hers.
Reading and hearing about the experiences of birth mothers helped me open my mind to the idea that there are people in the world whose experiences are so far removed from my own that I couldn’t possibly presume to have any kind of moral superiority. I know it seems basic, like anyone who is an adult should be able to understand that, but my church had a pat answer for everything. It claimed it knew what was best for everyone, and I was indoctrinated in a system where if you just check the right boxes, make a specific set of choices for yourself, you’ll be happy and your life will be relatively free from pain.
These womxn helped me see that a lot of people are making decisions from a place of having only terrible options available to them. They couldn’t just “close their legs” or “make better choices” as I was taught they should. During the process of adoption itself, I was aware that there were people in the world who, instead of proudly posting clever baby announcements online, were living with abusive partners, had debilitating mental illnesses, or simply didn’t want to and were not prepared to be parents, putting faces and specific stories to those experiences changed me.
This group also taught me that adoption is not a replacement for abortion. Some people in the group had placed children for adoption and also had abortions. Some adoptive parents had abortions and then experienced secondary infertility and adopted a child. They showed me that not everyone is able to or should carry a baby to term, and not everyone is able to or should be forced to deal with the specific trauma of placing a child for adoption.
The reality is that adoption and abortion solve different problems. Adoption only solves the problem of being unable to parent, but abortion solves the problem of being pregnant. There is no one more qualified to find solutions for a problem than the person who is experiencing it. There is no one more qualified to understand the needs of a crisis pregnancy than the person who is experiencing it.
Adopting a child got me to the point of believing that there should at least be a significant leeway in access to abortion, but there are other factors that brought me to the point of being fully in support of giving all people full access to abortion. These include the #MeToo movement that gave me the opportunity to participate in discussions about bodily autonomy, consent, and power structures that affect women and AFAB people, as well as a deconstruction of my faith and a reconstruction of my sense of morality and what constitutes goodness.
In a way, I’m still against abortion, but I’m also against adoption (which is always, always trauma). In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need either one of them. If I were faced with an unexpected pregnancy, I don’t think I would make either of those choices for myself, but I recognize that comes from a place of great privilege.
I believe that people should be in charge of their own bodies, though. I believe that women and people with the ability to bear children know better than any legislator when their circumstances merit the termination of a pregnancy. After all, who can understand the nuance and intersections of trauma and oppression in a crisis better than the person who is experiencing that crisis? I trust people to know what’s right for themselves.
When I was entrenched in the ideas of a conservative religion, there wasn’t anyone who was going to talk me out of believing what I believed. When I was compelled, by a desire to do right by my daughter, to consider the stories of other people, especially marginalized people, in a new way, I began to learn from their stories.
In a way, all of our beliefs are formed by stories–the ones we hear around the dinner table or at the salon, the ones we read in storybooks when we’re young and novels when we’re older, the stories, the ones we hear at church or read in religious tomes, the stories that draw us in on television and in movies, and the ones that we hear or read about on social media, blogs, and other public forums. My own mind changed a single story at a time. If you want to change someone’s mind about aborition, share your stories. Share the stories from your own experience and from the lives of the people close to you.
Sometimes it’s easier to believe that people’s minds won’t change. To some degree, that is true. Most people’s minds won’t change because you debated them on the internet, or because you yelled an epithet at them while they protested your neighborhood Planned Parenthood. But when we hold space for the fact that humans are capable of great compassion, of great empathy, and when we keep talking and sharing our experiences, then some of them will eventually arrive at a more compassionate stance. It might take months or years for them to get there, but they can get there.
