Want to know why I’m pro-choice? Walk in my shoes
Navigating life as a low-income single parent changed my view on parenthood and sacrifice
Iwas pro-life once. Growing up in coastal Alabama, I had heard my mother tell the story of her abortion publicly with great shame and grief, had seen her on her way to a pro-life rally, had been told that my life was an amends for the pregnancy that had ended prematurely. I had mourned this imagined older sibling and wondered what might have been. I had argued with internet strangers that any woman should be prepared to accept the consequences of her actions, should be prepared to sacrifice herself in grand Christian fashion should there ever be a situation that pits her life against the life of her child.
My pro-life beliefs were not merely internet talk. I lived them as well.
When I got pregnant at age 20, there was no question for me what I would do even before I stepped into a crisis pregnancy center. Of course I would have the baby. Sure, I had no college education and was technically a high school dropout, but I had gone to private schools for most of my young life, had a new car, owned a nice starter home and a little pizza shop, and the baby’s father loved me and wanted to be a father, so we got married. Faith, I thought, would be enough to carry us the rest of the way. I was more privileged than many young women in my situation, obviously. I was also naive. By the time our child was 9 months old, his father’s addiction problems were so apparent and so unsafe for our family that I had to get out of our marriage. I would spend the next 20 years learning the hard way what it is to be a single mother in this country, and, even worse, what it is to be one of those women with multiple children from multiple fathers. I would also come to understand that you cannot disentangle the welfare of a parent from the welfare of the child they are raising, particularly not when that parent is going it alone.
How is it possible that someone like me, who was raised to believe in the sanctity of life from conception, could change her mind? Put yourself in my shoes. Imagine the sanctity of life extends far beyond birth.
Guilty by proxy
When I first got married, my husband’s addiction wasn’t apparent to me, but it quickly became dangerous. An armed drug dealer had shown up on my porch looking for him. My husband told me he had woken up with a pistol to his forehead over some drug deal gone wrong. He later broke into the house “to use the phone” when I was not home, leaving broken glass and a broken back door. He pillaged the business bank account entirely, leaving nothing, and wrecked the new car twice. I sold the restaurant, the house, the car — all at a loss, barely escaping foreclosure and
repossession — moved into a tiny apartment, and went back to school. His family blamed me for his addiction, told me I had not loved and supported him enough, and cut me and our child more or less out of their lives. He would disappear for months at a time, then years. Eventually, he would go to prison for manufacturing methamphetamine.
I would put myself through college and raise our child with no support from him, only intermittent visitations that, I would find out years later, were deeply traumatic for our child, though he remained legally entitled to the visits. I could not afford a major legal battle. The child support would never be paid, and when I finally consulted a lawyer in our child’s teenage years, I was told that Alabama would never allow a termination of parental rights.
A few years later, I married again, this time to someone who seemed stable. He was in recovery for addiction, had been sober for years, and had won awards for his work as a fine dining chef. He was good to my child and wanted a family. We moved to Massachusetts, where I had gotten into an elite private college with a phenomenal financial aid package. He continued to grow an impressive portfolio in fine dining, eventually being offered a position as an executive chef in our town’s nicest hotel. We had another child. And then he relapsed. Our relationship ended when he threatened me physically, and I went to the police to file a no-abuse order.
When police arrived at our on-campus apartment, they found an illegal firearm and ammunition, plus enough illegal substances to charge him with multiple felonies. Even though I had been seeing an intervention specialist, attended 12-step meetings, and had not participated in any of the illegal activities myself, my school’s honor board found me guilty by proxy and ruled that I needed to vacate student housing with only a month and a half left until my graduation. A social worker came to my apartment and checked the children’s bedrooms, the refrigerator and interviewed me to assess whether I was fit to be a parent, given the circumstances. I was lucky to be allowed to graduate at all, but I did — into a deep economic recession that left so many graduates of my generation underemployed, cobbling together multiple low-wage positions. My ex filed for divorce and successfully kept me from leaving the state of Massachusetts for a year. I had a pro-bono attorney paid for by a local domestic violence shelter, and she helped me win the right to return home to Alabama.
In the intervening years, I was so afraid of ever having another child that I went to the health department and had myself sterilized. I worked for a mental health agency, driving disabled clients to doctor’s visits and grocery stores; I waitressed; I cleaned houses; I got up before dawn to serve biscuits and gravy in a steel mill cafeteria; I managed a barbecue joint and a public outreach library. None of these jobs paid more than $12 an hour, and many of them would not offer more than part-time hours, so I spent every off hour I could muster applying for better jobs, applying for food stamps, trying to get on waitlists for government housing subsidies. At times, we were food insecure, without transportation and homeless.
Taking responsibility
The most dehumanizing moments were during what should have been everyday life, like the grocery store checkout.
One of the grocery store clerks at a store I frequented had a habit of scanning coupons at the register when she saw me coming, which, on the surface, seemed like a nice thing to do. The problem is, when you’re paying with food stamps (and she knew I was paying with food stamps), you have to pay the tax on coupons with cash, and I didn’t have cash. Repeatedly, this cashier chastised me for not having the few pennies in cash, loudly, while other customers scoffed or raised their eyebrows behind us in line. My two children could only stand there with me, small and confused.
I knew what people were thinking behind those raised eyebrows, because there were plenty of times when people opened their mouths and expressed their judgments out loud.
My customers at the steel mill cafeteria, mostly male engineers and administrators, loved to meander and make small talk on their breaks; often, this meant coming into the room where I stood behind the serving station to wait on them. We’d get into political debates, particularly around things like poverty and social safety nets, and they’d tease me, saying things like, “Maybe if you couldn’t afford to have kids, you should’ve kept your legs closed,” and, “Maybe you should learn to take more responsibility for your life.”
Funny thing — I was the one who had taken primary responsibility, nearly all responsibility. Throughout my kids’ lives I have been told, repeatedly, that a father’s willingness to financially support his children is an issue separate from a father’s right to standard visitation. My children’s fathers have remained in child support arrears for the duration of our kids’ childhoods. My younger child’s father is also responsible, legally, for half of our kid’s medical bills. How this actually plays out: I have to pay the bill out of pocket, then send a request for reimbursement within 30 days. If I’m too busy and miss that 30-day window, the other parent doesn’t have to worry about it at all. If I make the window and succeed in sending the bill, he still might not actually pay the reimbursement. So if I can afford to pay the bill, I have to decide whether to then pay my lawyer to try to get a judgment from the courts for the reimbursement. If I can’t afford the bill, my credit is ruined and his is fine — for bills that should legally be a joint obligation. I have legal judgments against my ex for these arrears, both the child support and the medical support, but I know I will never see that money. Meanwhile what would have happened to me had I opted not to feed and care for my children? Tell me again that I’m the irresponsible one.
Unimaginable circumstances
Now, with grown children of my own, the full story of my mother’s abortion also rings for me as the story of a woman taking full responsibility for herself and her life. She had been 19 years old when the man she was dating told her, “If I find out you were pregnant with my baby, I will find you, and I will kill you.” She had already missed a period when he had beaten her for the first time. Then she discovered he had also beaten his former wife. She ended the relationship, and then took a pregnancy test that turned out positive. She had an illegal abortion, $300 paid, in a room with one table and no nurse, and then an emergency trip to the hospital not long afterward; 4½ pints of blood lost. The doctor who saw her told her that she might never be able to bring a pregnancy to term after such trauma to her body.
Her voice welled up as she told me, “I wanted that baby; I really did. All I ever wanted was to be a wife and mother like my mom. And when I got pregnant with you, I wanted to do everything perfectly. I only ate healthy food, I walked, I was so careful. I prayed and prayed. I would have done anything to have a healthy baby.”
I still think there is no work more vital than caretaking and raising the next generation. Yet, the experience of navigating life as a low-income single mother changed how I understand parenthood, sacrifice and choice. My children and I saw firsthand the ways in which our country lacks the social support to accommodate even the children we already have. It is a brutality to think you can legislate your ideals and force them on those whose actual circumstances are unimaginable for you. Only those of us who can give birth should be deciding how and when birth happens. We are, after all, the ones who bear ultimate responsibility for the children born.