I was lying awake thinking about this last night. There was a book I read in the midst of our infertility struggles that really changed my perspective. Bitter Fruit: Women’s Experiences of Unplanned Pregnancy, Abortion, and Adoption. It’s when I realized that it’s not infertility that’s so awful — it’s not being able to control your fertility. I realized that most of us can’t get away from that and that my infertility was no different than the woman staring in horror at the double lines on her pregnancy test.

Women are so tied to our ability or inability to get pregnant and it dictates the course of our lives. Men don’t have these same constraints. (I used to make it a habit to ask boys (back when I was dating) whether or not they had any kids out there. Usually I got a startled, “I don’t think so.”) But we women, we can’t get away from our mind-of-their-own ovaries.

Whatever our politics might be, I think we can all understand why a woman might make the choices she’s made when faced with an unplanned pregnancy.

This is why I’m strongly pro-choice and became even more so after having Noah. Parenting is hard and if a woman knows that she’s not ready to take it on, she should not then be forced to make an adoption plan.

Did you know WIC was created out of Jimmy Carter’s pro-life convictions? I didn’t know until I heard his interview on NPR. He felt that his duty as president was to uphold the will of the people, which was (and is) support for Roe v. Wade but he also felt it was his duty to help women NOT choose to have abortions. I support this kind of policy-making. WIC takes nothing from women seeking abortions but does give them more options and thus more control over their lives. That said, it doesn’t address the needs of the woman who is pregnant and simply does NOT want to be.

It’s so tempting to look back and say, “If she had kept that baby,” “If she had had that baby,” and even “If she had stuck with her adoption plan,” and pretend like we know what her life would look like. We can’t. Even she can’t. Hindsight has its limits. What women need is honest information and the space to make her own decisions. She needs information free of politics or profit. She does not need to be coerced into abortion, adoption or parenting.

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