I Was Uninvited to a Wedding Because I Am Pro-Choice
Let me rephrase: I am pro-abortion and anti-Texas
It’s 2016. I was living in my first apartment with some friends. I had just woken up from a nap. I was taking 19 credit hours for the semester and also working 25 hours per week at my job. It was Saturday afternoon and I was beat. I had spent most of the day scrolling through social media and watching TV, but passed out in the early afternoon.
When I woke up, it was dark outside and genuinely thought I had slept through until Sunday. I picked up my phone to see the time, and saw a series of Facebook messages from my then-boyfriend’s (now husband’s) aunt. I don’t have the messages anymore because I have since deleted my Facebook (and I blocked her right afterwards) but the gist of the messages were that I was disgusting for daring to share my pro-choice views on my personal private Facebook.
She said that I was no longer invited to her wedding, which was in a few months. She said she couldn’t have someone like me celebrating with her family on that day.
My heart stopped when I read her message berating me. The post in question was something that I had shared from another page with a picture of chewed up bubblegum on the sidewalk with a short paragraph underneath expressing that an embryo does not have any rights nor does it have bodily autonomy. The idea was that the bubblegum represented what a 6 week old “fetus” looked like.
I admit that it was a jarring image and maybe the language was a tad strong. But I was twenty years old and in a long term relationship, amidst one of the most life-changing elections I would ever see. I was feeling angry at the right-wing media appealing to everyone’s emotions by saying that a first term pregnancy was a human being that deserved more rights than the fully grown human woman carrying that clump of cells.
I shared it because I agreed with the sentiment. I wasn’t even friends with my now-husband’s aunt on Facebook. I have no idea how she saw the post. All I know is that I was heartbroken that this woman, who I had always really admired and cared for, was speaking so horribly to me.
I immediately called my boyfriend, crying and shaking, and told him what his aunt had said. He drove over to my apartment and said if I was uninvited from the wedding then so was he.
“We are a team. We are a unit. If you aren’t invited, then I’m not going.”
On September 1st, 2021, Texas Republicans passed a law that essentially bans abortions in the state if a “heartbeat is detected.” The woman carrying the fertilized embryo apparently cannot be fined or arrested, but providers, family members who know about the appointments, and even the taxi driver who drops her off at a clinic can all be convicted in violation of the heartbeat bill.
The law is written in such a way that the Supreme Court can not intervene. They did this on purpose.
This is a direct human rights violation and also a huge loss for women’s rights in our country. I’m 25 years old and I have never been pregnant, but I can say with full certainty that if I were to get pregnant today I would get an abortion. I am not financially stable enough nor emotionally ready to have a child. I love my nieces and nephew, I love by baby cousins, but I cannot imagine having to take on the burden of a child right now.
I don’t care what your view on abortion is. I don’t care if you believe that life begins at conception, I don’t care if you believe that abortion is murder, I don’t even care if you think that abortion should be illegal. It doesn’t matter. It is a constitutional right to have bodily autonomy. Dead humans have more bodily autonomy than a live human with a uterus. That’s absurdity.
I’ve been extremely outspoken on my personal social media and have been openly pro-choice since high school. I walked to school for my first three years of high school and one morning I encountered some anti-abortion protesters on campus. My stomach turned as I saw their wildly ethos-provoking images. I was disgusted by the photos — which is obviously the idea — but I wasn’t disturbed by the images themselves; I was disturbed that these images were being used to scare 15, 16, 17 year old girls into having babies even though they were not physically or mentally ready for it.
These people who call themselves “pro-life” are anything but pro life. These conservatives do not give a flying fuck about what happens to the mother or what happens to the child once it is born. They do not care.
You are not pro-life for being anti-abortion. You are pro-birth and anti-human rights.
