Volunteering At An Abortion Clinic Made Me Lose Patience With The Abortion Debate
Watching the debate around reproductive rights is hard for me. So much of it happens between people who have never stood on a sidewalk shielding the body of a child from people who insist they are screaming at her out of love. So much of it happens in a volley of statistics. So much of it happens in the abstract, away from the reality of our bodies and the choices we have made and the stories we tell about our own experiences — 95% of which, by the way, are not about regret.
We talk and we talk and we talk and a bunch of people, many of whom who do not have the ability to bring life into the world, disregard what we have to say. They hang onto their beliefs with a tenacity that exhausts and sickens me, that makes me sure that the root of the beliefs is that we are not really people, that we cease being people the second a pregnancy test says “yes,” that our humanity is second-class, second-rate, silenced.