Becoming Pro-Choice
This is my story of how I went from brain-washed Catholic school girl to full-fledged feminist.
Pictured above is my best friend, Casey, marching like the liberal feminist we all know and love. I, unfortunately, have been to a very different kind of protest. My high school sent students to the annual March for Life, better known as the protest against abortion rights and the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that gave us these rights. Every year, students and adults of all ages march through the snow and cold air of D.C. to advocate for the pro-life movement.
I remember the day I decided to go to this gathering. My religion teacher took us outside on a surprisingly warm late autumn day and sat us on the steps of our school. She told us that for the first time, our school was going to allow sophomores to attend the D.C. trip. I didn't actually know much about abortion or Roe v. Wade, but I loved the idea of getting to spend a few days away from home with my friends. I had never been on an overnight school trip before, and it was the only one my school sponsored. I knew I had to go.
Plus, we got to skip our midterms.
Yes, you read that correctly.
The protest fell during midterms week, so as a reward for going, we could skip our exams and have our final grades count as our midterm grades. Midterms were typically harder than finals, and the idea of studying once appealed to so many of us. In fact, the year they offered this was the first year our school filled a coach bus full of students.
Yeah.
I grew up in a Catholic, church-every-Sunday family. I attended CCD every year, even when it wasn't required for the Sacraments (But could I tell you what CCD stands for? Nope). The week before I was due to depart for D.C., the priest of my church made an announcement at the end of the mass and shared that I would be attending the March for Life this year. Everyone in the room stood up and cheered, and a man I had never met before walked up to me and handed me forty dollars. I hadn't thought that my school trip was this big of a deal, but clearly it meant so much to so many other people.
The group of students attending met a few times with our teacher beforehand. We heard stories from upperclassmen that had gone before, and were reminded time and time again that it was a "pilgrimage, not a vacation". We were told to dress warm and learn to love pizza (because apparently that's the only food available when you're "protecting the unborn").
I got up at an ungodly hour and headed off to school to catch the bus. After a few hours of napping, our teacher put on the movies we were supposed to watch. Our school was just one group going with the Archdiocese of Boston, so even though my teacher was our chaperone, she wasn't the one calling all of the shots.
The videos were something else.
There was one comparing abortion to the Holocaust. There was one starring Justin Bieber's mom (which of course I gushed over, as JB was known as my "boyfriend" to my friends at school). There was one "based on a true story" about a girl who was born after her mother had tried- and failed- to abort her; she now suffered from seizures.
Not everyone chose to tune in, but I wanted to save my phone battery and my curiosity got the best of me. So, like any Type A teenager, I watched. And I listened. And I ate up every word they told me.
I won't bore you with the rest of the details. The trip had its fun, innocent moments full of pranking friends and fooling around during mass. We were just kids after all, some of us away from our parents for the first time. But attending the actual protest was mind-boggling. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up, and with every step my frozen feet took that cold January day, I was told that I was making a sacrifice for those in need.
And when you're fed images of an aborted fetus on a giant billboard, you might start to believe it, too.
The one's that ingrained in my head is of a little hand next to nickel, to show they're about the same size. (But did I ever get the context, or even how far along that pregnancy was when it was terminated? Do I even know if it was real? Nope.)
The adults kept telling us we were "countercultural" and made us feel like rebels for standing up for what we believed in. I felt like such an activist, someone so ready to take on the world. I heard stories of people terminating their pregnancies because doctors told them they'd have special needs; I thought about my older sister, who is autistic, and wondered if that could have been her. I fell for this movement just liked I'd fallen for every floppy-haired boy on Disney Channel.
I attended the trip the following two years and I encouraged underclassmen to go, too. I even went when my friends decided to skip it. I truly believed I was doing what was right.
I attended the March for Life in 2013, 2014, and 2015. trump running for president was still a meme, and it was a lot easier to believe that by joining the pro-life movement, you were upholding the "dignity of life".
Now, as a 24-year-old feminist living in New York City, I'm here to tell you that propaganda is a very powerful thing, and the pro-life movement has nothing to do with human life and dignity.
My teacher would always tell us that in order to be pro-life, you had to respect people after they're born, too. She was a huge advocate for adoption and helping struggling mothers get what they need. My close friends who were also under this spell advocated to end bullying and promoted accepting each other the way we are. We were pro-life, but we were also for gay marriage and gun control. The friends I kept were kind. We just wanted to be kind to the unborn babies we thought were in danger, too.
I was a freshman in college when donald trump became a candidate. I always have been (and always will be), an unenrolled voter; I vote in every election I can, but I am not registered in any political party. I thought it was important to vote pro-life, but I thought trump was anything but, so I voted in the republican primary against him. I didn't want him to get the candidacy, but of course he did. By the time he was up against Hillary, I voted for her, because I knew that his sexist comments and mocking of a disabled person were hardly pro-life. trump didn't fit the image of pro-life person that my high school had me striving to be.
As time went on, I became increasingly frustrated with the cause. So many people I knew in the pro-life community were huge trump supporters. I kept posting time and time again that he was NOT pro-life, and I felt like no one was listening. I truly couldn't understand how he became the poster child of the values I had been taught.
I think the Kent State gun girl is what really did it for me.
I stopped calling myself pro-life because I didn't want to be associated with these cruel, sick, and idiotic people anymore. I didn't want to see another person holding an assault rifle telling me that human life was so important. The divide in our country was more prominent than ever, and I found myself torn between the majority of the beliefs I held and the one I couldn't let go of.
Do I think that college is the only way to expand your mind and expose you to the world? No, but it sure can help. I took an online American Government class over the summer that bored me to death. The final paper, however, really got me thinking. We had to write an essay on whether or not we thought abortion should be legal after presenting both sides of the argument.
This was the first time I really sat down and looked at the legal side of the argument. In high school, I was taught to fight for the rights of the unborn. But what about the rights of the women carrying the unborn? In my paper, I wrote, "it would be impossible to both protect the fetus’s rights and the rights of a woman, because one contradicts the other. The argument boils down to who the government has to protect first, and it is only logical that the wants and needs of the mother are top priority". I was finally starting to get it.
What it really came down to was the science. I had been shown images of aborted fetuses. I had heard from doctors that performed abortions, had heard them say it was inhumane. I had heard women say how depressed they were after the procedure. I'd also heard scientists explaining that an abortion just removes a clump of cells, that it's not really destroying human life at all. My mother is a biologist and my dad is a doctor, so I was raised to trust science. The only problem was, I didn't know which "science" to believe.
As political unrest in our country got worse, I grew increasingly frustrated with the pro-life movement. Locking immigrant children in cages didn't feel pro-life to me. Making fun of a disabled person didn't feel pro-life to me. Valuing gun rights over school children didn't feel very pro-life to me. Denying that Black lives matter didn't feel pro-life to me. Denying access to sex education and birth control- proven methods of preventing unwanted pregnancies that are more likely to end in abortion- didn't feel pro-life to me.
I determined that the figureheads of the pro-life movement don't value human life at all. I only had one toe still dipped into the movement at this point, hung up on the idea that abortion is morally wrong. I had already decided that it needed to be legal in order to protect women's rights. It is possible to believe that abortion is wrong and be pro-choice. Being pro-choice just means that you believe that each person has the right to make that moral decision for themselves. If that's how you feel, I don't judge you. But for me, the final step in going from one end of the spectrum to the other was abandoning the science that I'd been taught in high school. The same people that told me that abortion was murder also told me that climate change isn't real and that being gay is a choice. I finally questioned the evidence that had been presented to me, and started evaluating their sources.
It dawned on me that these men that will yell about abortion being murder are holding on to the one thing they have left to control women with. They use their inability to get pregnant as leverage and as a way to guarantee they stay in power. And I don't want to be controlled by men. And I don't want anyone else to be, either.
I am proud to be pro-choice now. I am proud to stand up for women's rights. I am proud to advocate for young girls that need a way out in order to go on to achieve their dreams. I don't want some man to decide what's going to happen to my body.
I hate that I once felt otherwise, but I'm compassionate towards my past self. And I'm still compassionate to other women that haven't drawn the same conclusions as I have. I know what it's like to be fixated on what you're being told about this issue. But there's so much that the pro-life community leaves out when they preach (most importantly, what valuing human life really means).
My friend Melanie sells these really cute stickers on Etsy!
Be sure to pick one up if you want to support a local business and a good cause!
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