June 24, 2022

Take Back the Story

Good morning. Today is my birthday, and the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe Vs. Wade, which makes this birthday even *more* disheartening than the one I spent in 2016 on the day after the Brexit Vote, if such a thing is possible. But perhaps the Supreme Court timed it to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the birthday when I was pregnant by accident, but didn’t know it yet. The birthday I spent imagining myself on the cusp of incredible new horizons as I’d just graduated from university and was set to venture out into the world with just a giant backpack, but then all those dreams were derailed by faulty birth control, and it was all such a nightmare, so stressful and unbelievably sad, and I don’t remember these emotions at all, but I happened to write them all down in a diary that I was flipping through last night, so there’s evidence. The list of things to do I’d scrawled down around that time included, “Stop crying all the time.” And I eventually did, because I was able to choose my own destiny, to own my own soul, my life. How fortunate was I to be pregnant at a moment some were still describing as “post-feminist,” when it literally never occurred to me that my right and access to an abortion was something that was up for debate. That my reproductive healthcare was anyone’s business except my own.

From my essay, Doubleness Clarifies: It is essential for my purposes that you be able to imagine the desperation of being pregnant when you don’t want to be, of what it is to be staring into that gaping black hole with everything you’ve ever worked and longed for lost inside it.

Here’s what you can do: If you have had an abortion, learn to talk about it so you can speak up and advocate for people like us, even quietly and privately. If your partner had an abortion, speak up and demonstrate that this matters to you. If your ex-partner had an abortion, speak up and demonstrate that this matters to you. Tell your story, and break the stigma that permits abortion stories to remain in the dark, obfuscating the reality that most adult women will have an abortion in their lifetimes. Obfuscating the reality that abortion is normal, and that so many of us have the lives we do because abortion was a gift.

If you’re Canadian, and you have an anti-choice representative in government at the Federal or Provincial level, write them a letter. Campaign for pro-choice candidates in these ridings. Support Abortion Rights organizations in Canada by donating funds. Learn more about why this isn’t just a fringe issue, and why it matters so much—start listening to @aborshpod because it’s wonderful.

If you think this story isn’t about you, your kidding yourself. If you’d like to learn how you might be brave enough to speak out (it took me more than a decade!), DM and I’d be happy to talk.

Don’t be quiet. Don’t be silent. As Ali Smith wrote, “Whoever makes up the story makes up the world.” It’s time for so many of us to take the story back because it belongs to us, and it’s a story that’s proud, and brave, and hard, and real. And I’m so grateful for it.