This is a story that I think only two people on this side of the ancestral plain know: it’s my story of abortion. In the spring of 1982, before I was 20, my first love, the woman I believed I was going to spend the rest of my life with, had an impossible choice to make. At 19, back then before the internet and social media with no easily accessible information about reproductive health. Before having to make this choice, neither of us ever thought about whether we were pro-life or pro-choice. In retrospect, in our immaturity we would have thought of ourselves as pro-life. I remember talking about our options, dropping out of school, me getting a job, and mostly about how scared we were. I remember the discomfort of even saying the “A” word and instead saying “getting it taken care of.” Sparing you all the details and the mental anguish that we as a couple never recovered from, here’s my point; we would have been terrible parents! Sure, we would have loved the child and raised it to the best of our abilities but neither of us had the maturity/life experience to give a baby everything it needed. Ultimately, as it should be it was her choice, the woman’s right to choose. If she had said she wanted to have the baby, I would have supported her decision and done everything to be the best dad possible. Her right, her choice.
Our child would have been about 42 years old; nobody knows what that child would have become, from drug addict to candidate for president, whatever they would have had to overcome the burden of having teen parents. They would have been loved; most parents love their babies, but love may not have been enough.
Thirteen years later I became a father. Was I ready? Maybe. At 32 maybe I had enough but surely not all the ingredients to be a father. My sons turned out to be amazing young men.
I was pro-choice back then, my parents instilled in me respect for womanhood, as I mentioned before the benefits of being surrounded by strong Black women. Today, I’m pro-choice because woman have the right to choose. I’m pro-choice because the pro-life people still support the death penalty, their 2nd amendment rights allow the babies in schools to be killed, and they are not going to stop at women’s rights, mine are next.
