Abortion on demand

No exceptions. Here's why:

I don’t think I can say this better than the meme above, but let me tell you a story:

For a while, on the rare moments our parents would go out, my brothers and I were watched over by a teenage girl who went to our church. She was the kind of sweet that even we Campbell kids respected. We could be a handful, but we never gave Patti a hard time.

And then Patti showed up pregnant, and she babysat us no more. I remember seeing her at church with her maternity dress stretched over her bulb — a child herself, really — and then she was gone. Did she move away? Did she enter motherhood? Adopt? I do not know.

Years later, I learned that her father had raped her, that he was the father of her baby. Like so many of us, she, too, was the victim of incest, though my abuse stopped when I turned 13 because I suppose my abuser only wanted to rape little girls. God’s own joke is my abuser, when I confronted him, could not remember anything, and now he breaths through his mouth, and has a hard time remembering his own address.

He’ll die, go to hell, and the world will keep spinning.

And Patti? A few years ago, I went looking online, but didn’t find her. I hope she had a better adult life than she did a childhood. I know that motherhood at her fragile age was a ridiculous thing to ask of her, even if there hadn’t been the trauma of rape beforehand, and that while her Bible-thumping father could justify raping his own daughter, he found abortion to be a bridge too far.

Patti had agency over her own body — or she should have. She should have been able to mature, and choose her own sexual partner, her own birth control, and then, she should have been able to choose whether to become a mother — or even if she would become a mother.

That’s true for any one with the ability to get pregnant, past or present. It shouldn’t take a traumatic violation before a pregnant person (and if you have a problem with “pregnant people” as opposed to “pregnant women,” get over you and read this) into the realm of full-grown person capable of making his/her/their own health care decisions. Had Patti acquired a boyfriend, had they had sex, had she conceived, she still should have had the opportunity to get an abortion, if that was her choice. We don’t want to be Queen for a Day. We don’t need pity. We want the laws of our own goddamn country to acknowledge that we have agency.

Henceforth — and if you haven’t already made this decision, I hope you join me — I pledge to only vote for candidates who support abortion on demand, and I won’t make an exception on that, either.