Tonight I had the great honor to celebrate the 1st birthday of my first grandchild. It was a long road getting him here and I shared updates from the time of his premature birth at 26 weeks to this very sweet day.
Many of you were so kind as to leave well wishes and birthday kisses to him and I was touched. All but one of you. One person took it as their chance to be so crass as to use my grandson’s birthday to publicly call me out and shame me about my pro-choice stance, on my own page.
Well first of off Vicki, what sort of horrible and sad person must you be to leave such a comment on a thread dedicated to my grandson. Possibly the least BadAss and possibly the most classless thing I have seen anyone do in a while. So kudos to you for showing what sort of person you really are.
Next, yes I am Pro-Choice.
I am perfectly comfortable being a person who is capable of holding feelings and thoughts of great contradiction at the same time and within the same body. Anyone who has been hellishly angry and yet deeply loved a teenager at the same time can identify this duality of emotion. I am not Pro-Abortion, I am Pro-Choice. I am also Pro-Comprehensive sexual education, Pro-affordable birth control, Pro-family Planning. And Hell-yes I am pro helping women afford babies that they might not have planned but choose to bring into this world anyway.
I am pro-choice because of, not despite of my experiences losing multiple pregnancies to miscarriage, or even losing our beautiful son not even 72 hours after his birth. I am the Pro-Choice mother of 6 children each wanted and loved as all children should be.
I am Pro-Choice because no woman should be a victim of their circumstance most of all a woman who due to a fluke of evolutionary biology bears all the pain, danger, physical and emotional fallout of pregnancy.
I am Pro-Choice because the lack of safe reproductive care has never had any reductive effect on abortion rates and I will not be party to a time when women had to resort to back-alley procedures, coat hanger abortions and the risk of dying themselves in order to have final say over what happens in and to their bodies.
I am Pro-Choice since my body is my own and when I give up say to what I can do to it, and with it, I give over the choice to say what I can’t do with it and I am not willing to let a group of people who know nothing of my life and my choices say how few or how many babies I can have. We can’t have it both ways..so I choose to land on the side of choice in order to best uphold our freedoms.
Afterall who am I to second guess another woman and her choice even if it is not the choice I would make. Until you are at that very moment you have no way to know. I know women who have always been Pro-choice make the decision to carry a baby that was conceived by rape to term and love that baby fiercely. I have also known women devoutly opposed to abortion make the choice to abort in the face of insurmountable circumstances.
I am pro-choice because I have faith in women to know what they need and to make the difficult decisions about what is right for them in their circumstance.
We don’t have to agree, in fact I welcome people of diverse opinions to find their place in the BAQS world but when someone chooses to leave a shitty, out of context comment on such a special post they really should respect a response…and this was it.
*Please note – we will be back to an abundance of quilty/ sewing /sassy talk this week.. so don’t worry this will not be the norm. You will also notice I have turned off the comments for this post. This does not mean I am not willing to talk further about this subject, since I think it is important. What I am not willing to do is do it in response to a comment from someone who obviously posted in order to try to shame me for my beliefs using my grandson’s birthday to do so.
Of course you can still contact me by email Maddie@badassquiltersociety.com
