Photo by Maria Oswalt on Unsplash

As the news continues to swirl around the topic of the supreme courts decision to overturn Roe V Wade and the topic of abortion is widely being discussed here in the US; I’ve been hesitant to dip my toes into the pool of public discourse.

Actually, I attempted to sit down and write a post that I was proud of on this topic back in September, and again in May…. but my words wouldn’t come out right. Why back in September? Well, that is when the state of Texas instated an anti-abortion law. In fact, on September 1st 2021, 666 laws all went into effect on the same day! Yep, you read that right- 666 laws. Most of which had to do with or impacted healthcare and human rights, both directly and indirectly. You can read more about ALL of those laws here: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/01/1032894148/in-texas-666-laws-take-effect-sept-1-including-many-conservative-priorities#:~:text=In%20Texas%2C%20666%20new%20laws,more%20than%2029%20million%20residents.

“September 1st 2021, 666 laws all went into effect on the same day”

Bella L

In light of the leaked Supreme Court Roe V Wade Documents, I attempted to write this post again…

One, because I had some really passionate thoughts behind how all of this was going to and already affects women’s health care (and thereby, myself) and two, because so many of my friends, family, followers who grew up with me or have read through the archives knows that this area is where I first started engaging in activism. But, try as I might, the words came out better but my heart was too heavy. I started realizing that even outside of this topic… I was tried and tired from trying to appeal to other peoples empathy, goodness, and understanding. I had been finding this difficult and was caught feeling like doing so was proving mostly futile. I’m still struggling with that.

So here’s the current situation: I am a multiethnic (read: mixed race & black) millennial woman who is a pro-life follower of Jesus, who got my start in physical acts of activism and pursuing social change with a pro-life protest that I attended with my politically conservative yet charismatic evangelical church youth group as a teen… And I ultimately don’t agree with whats been happening in the state of Texas, nor with the supreme court ruling, and certainly not with the comments made by Clarence Thomas!

I feel the need to write this post in an attempt to share my story and write out how I came to hold my beliefs the way I do now- not for validation or views, but to offer a perspective that lands in a very uncomfortable grey area for many modern day American Christians, especially those who say they are pro-life. I’m still hoping I can reach some of that empathy, goodness, and understanding with those who know me regardless of whether they say they are pro-life or pro-choice, but ultimately my goal is just to share and the reader can do with my story what they will.

FROM OLD POST ATTEMPT 09/21: “I’m a pro life Jesus follower- here’s why I don’t support this new law.“

Bella L.

About My Roots:

Outside of my mom teaching me at home about the civil rights movement, and hearing stories from my great grandparents and grandparents about things they experienced, my rural Vermont raised self had no real practical idea of what activism looked like. I’d heard about activism, but never saw a protest.

At the age of 11 I started attending my church youth group. A few times a year, we’d here from certain ministries, missionaries, or from people in the church who were considered to be practically living out their faith in more difficult circumstances in the day to day. One of the men who would always offer to come and speak to us headed up “right for life” protests and campaigns. He would bring us wristbands and stickers and talk to us about how God loved us all so much that he carefully knit us together within our mothers womb. He would show us videos about abortion and how it was wrong to kill innocent babies. We’d hear people read out of the Bible about Pharaoh killing the Hebrews baby boys, and how later king Herod did the same in an attempt to murder Jesus before he was even old enough to defend himself. The emphasis was always on the innocence of young lives, and the evilness of the killers.

It would then be explained to us that this evil had infiltrated our country. The man that would come to speak would tell us about the importance of voting / protesting / demonstrating and having conversations with everyone we knew about how abortion was evil, killing babies before they had a chance to take their first breath outside of the womb. Anyone who was complicit, from having or performing an abortion to simply allowing abortions to exist in our country, was a part of this deep seated evil that was trying to tear apart America and American families.

As a preteen and teenager, I took this as the black and white issue that was presented to me: babies were the blessings of deep love or consequence of our extramarital sins, and abortion further opened the gateway of impurity, was a part of the capital sin that is murder, and was an evil being painted as a new and popular form of birth control.

This was my introduction to the idea of abortion and an issue that I was urged to take a stand on. One time when he came to speak, he asked for volunteers to come silently protest and pray in front of the state capitol. We were urged to stand on behalf of the unborn whose blood was crying out unheard.

I was moved. I’ve always been on the side of the underdog, from my earliest days of remembrance…. How could I not stand in the face of evil and injustice? So I went to the capital, stood silent on the sidewalk, all while wearing red tape on my mouth that said “LIFE” in black letters.

I went to a few life rallies and protests outside government buildings. I stood strong against this evil, debated others and always “won”. I ate up all the stories coming from local Christian pregnancy centers about how they had saved babies and mothers from lives of eternal damnation and the sin of murder.

I took a gap year between graduating high school at 16 and going to college. During this time I went with our prison ministry to the prison. Teen Challenge came to our church to speak, and some of the stories I heard between these two events caused me to start asking questions… questions like: If God can save someone who has committed murder and entirely change their life around, can’t God forgive those who have had an abortion? If all sin is the same in the eyes of God, what makes an abortion so much worse? If someone is raped or assaulted or groomed, would God really force them to suffer the consequences of someone else’s sin- for the bare minimum of 9 months?

Still holding onto my deeply rooted faith and being told by many elder Christian’s that anything less then opposition to abortion meant I was no longer truly a Christian, I went to college strong in my beliefs, willing to be a source and catalyst for social change in this area.

During my time in college, I began to become passionate about several different areas of social justice. I spent a lot of time with those experiencing homelessness in the city of Philadelphia. I joined some demonstrations and helped get signatures to approve new assistance programs. I volunteered at the Salvation Army and spent time building relationships with people a lot of the world had forgotten.

It was around that same time that I started wondering why people do the things they do, and I began asking more pointed questions about the injustices I observed. I realized then that no one had ever presented me with the reasons why a woman might be willing to give up her unborn child, or why some folks might pursue having an abortion. I found that the answers were not so black and white- nothing I heard from anyone having had or considered one was a straightforward “good” or “evil” decision, there were many nuances. I was still politically pro-life, but I had a deeper understanding and new found compassion that I hadn’t had before.

After college, I ended up going to this Life Conference. The conference was extremely eye opening for me, and completely changed how I thought about being pro-life. I was expecting everything to be centered around abortion, mothers, and babies. The conference was about much much more than that! The first speaker was a man who had been saved from his original death penalty sentence, and was instead given life with parole. The second speaker was a man who had been given a life sentence for a crime he had not even committed, and who had been let out when that came to light- after serving 20 years!

There were tables for Christian pregnancy centers and anti-abortion advocates, but there were also advocates who worked in prisons and people trying to abolish the death penalty. There were people advocating for ethical adoption practices, people advocating for better medical services for underserved communities, people talking about the school to prison pipeline, and more.

That was the first time that being pro-life was presented to me in that way- and sparked a deeper movement in me to seek out justice and breakdown unjust systems. It sparked in me a new interest in learning about the foster care system and how that has ties to terrible immigration situations and the privatization of prison systems. It ultimately brought me away from being pro-birth, and brought me to where I am today- Pro ALL life, truly pro-life for every human. Much like my Anti-Violence stance, it’s an active choice I have to and strive to consistently make through my everyday choices and the way I interact with others.

Finding God In The Grey

My journey from anti-abortion advocate to a truly pro-life position is only one of the areas in my life that has pushed me out of my comfort zone among black and white answers and into more grey and nuanced areas. As someone who has experienced a lot of grief, racism, sexism, sexual assault, and infertility- some of which has been roughly dismissed or “solved” by the church (generally speaking) with such black and white answers… I’ve asked God my fair share of questions. I’ve questioned my faith and come out realizing that God is with us in the grey, maybe even more than in the black and white. If everything was so black and white, we wouldn’t need God because humans would have all the answers. I’ve learned to be accepting of things that feel foreign or uncomfortable long enough to determine what is comforting to my personal bias and what is actually discernment and wisdom. My experiences have taught me that it is not bad to challenge or decipher such things.

My Infertility Battle & Struggle With Reproductive Health Issues

“So Bella, this is great and all… but if you are Pro-Life, why do you oppose what’s happening now? That seems a little contradictory and confusing….”

I promise, I’m getting there. Let’s talk about woman’s reproductive health for a minute.

I’ve been struggling with reproductive health issues since I first got a period in the 5th grade. My periods would be so heavy I was anemic, would throw up every morning, and could barely eat through all my cramps while bleeding. A menstrual cycle is not meant to be erratically inconsistent. Mine was not regular and sometimes came too often, that is until birth control came into the picture.

Birth control can be used to help regulate your menstrual cycle, and for a little while it helped me immensely! No more crazy bleeding, not as much sickness. It was great! …until it wasn’t. I went through almost every kind you can imagine just to help control my cycle, but I was either allergic or it made things so much worse. Soon after getting married (about 4-5 years of terrible birth control experiences and hormonal roller coasters), I found out that I have something called PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome), and I have something called HS (Hydradenitis Supperativa). I found out that I have had signs of both since I was 11 years old, and that both conditions deal with my hormones. Along with my PCOS diagnosis came information about fibroids, cysts, hormone imbalance, and infertility. For about 6 out of 8 of my married years, I’ve struggled with infertility. This has driven me to learn way more about women’s health and many aspects of my body that I hadn’t really had to think about before.

I’ve learned from books, videos, and friends and family who have experienced things like endometriosis, adenomyosis, miscarriage, stillbirths, ectopic pregnancy, molar pregnancy, C-Sections, home births, hysteroscopy, hysterectomy, amniotic fluid embolism, etc… all of which has encouraged me to study like I’m already becoming a doula! While learning about these things I started to find interesting facts about medical terminology and how certain procedure are prohibited in certain states.

What Is An Abortion?

In learning about all this, I distinctly remember reading a book with a section on ectopic pregnancies. An ectopic pregnancy is when the fertilized egg implants itself outside of the uterus, growing a pregnancy in an organ not meant to carry a pregnancy- most often the uterine tubes / fallopian tubes. In this case, it is a fact that the pregnancy will not survive. If allowed to grow and gone untreated, it will cause the loss of an organ and eventually loss of life due to loss of blood.

At the end of the section, the book talked about treatment. It said that treatment could be a D&C or Vacuum Aspiration, and depending on what state you reside in this could be considered an abortion.

This was news to me, as abortion has always been presented to me as the killing of an unborn baby or removal of a live fetus. I told myself “That is not an abortion!”

Soon, I started to read through the laws legally defining abortion in the states I had lived in so far at the time. I started looking up how different medical facilities in my area that provided abortions defined them. It was then that I realized that it didn’t matter what I or any other individual thought of as an abortion- what mattered was how these terms were legally defined by each state- and they were indeed defined differently!

This was a frustrating and scary realization to me. I hadn’t been a part of a pro-life protest in a long time because I didn’t agree with how some demonstrations were being carried out ambush style and I felt some were too aggressive towards already hurting people. What further terrified me about all this was that the things my younger self thought I had been fighting for by joining others in protest were not as I had thought they were. I felt tricked, bamboozled, into fighting a fight I didn’t believe in. I didn’t know that in my fight for a right to life I was also asking to remove necessary emergency medical procedures that very from state to state. Some of which I personally knew people who had had to have amidst already difficult circumstances.

Fast forward to last year when many states began enacting strict abortion bans. I began reading about Texas restrictions, and found that women could be investigated for miscarrying. If the hospital / state could prove you did something to cause the miscarriage, you could go to jail. Seems completely ludicrous right?

But then it began to happen. Last year it came out that a woman in Oklahoma was sentenced to four years in prison for miscarrying. A few women in Georgia and Louisiana were handcuffed to their hospital beds and later arrested because they couldn’t prove they DIDN’T cause their miscarriages.

As someone who already suffers with infertility, and who knows that it’s plausible I may miscarry if I ever am able to get pregnant- I can’t imagine being jailed while grieving the loss I am being jailed for, simply because my body didn’t do what legislators and lawyers think all women’s bodies should do without hesitation or complication.

I also began to hear stories from friends whose fertility doctors were refusing to help them anymore due to the high risk nature of them miscarrying and/or possibly having complications with their pregnancies… because the doctors didn’t want to be held liable and possibly face jail time. This has brought up questions for me internally, like: Will this affect me being able to even try fertility treatments in the future? Will I ever be able to actually have my own children, or will the option of carrying a pregnant myself be fully removed from the table? What if I ever need a procedure that is legally or medically classified as an abortion and my state won’t allow it? Do I just die?

It definitely feels like and appears like rights to my own body and bodily autonomy are being taken away. I don’t want to abort a baby if I get pregnant, but I don’t want to go to jail if I miscarry because my body struggles to carry that specific pregnancy to full term.

When The Government Targets Civilians But Won’t Care For Us…

The Roe V. Wade ruling frustrates me for so many reasons. First off, it came during another wave of the pandemic in the middle of a baby formula shortage, and a menstrual pad & tampon shortage…. While knowing full well which states said they would buckle down on harsher womens health laws, including access to abortions and birth control. Kinda feels like the government wants to bring the hammer down on women.

To make things worse, this “win for life” also comes on the heels of a series of mass shootings and the further broadening of gun access. Remember those 666 laws that were enacted on the same day in Texas? Well, these southern Christian’s and good ole boys didn’t seem upset by the devils number one bit when it came along with stricter voting laws and abortion laws, the right to open carry without a license over the age of 21, and the right to openly or conceal carry knives under 5.5 inches or longer weapons like swords and machetes. Kinda seemed like Texas doesn’t really care about life as much as they claim too- especially not after all of the lives lost in Uvalde to an active shooter after government employees decided not to do the jobs they claim are so necessary to protecting the community.

If it was truly about life, and not about further supplying our broken systems with more victims, Texas would be supporting access to birth control / contraceptives in light of the ever growing Foster Care System overload. Children are consistently dying within the child welfare system here in Texas, with the highest sex trafficking hub being in Houston, and 424,000 children and counting within the foster care system country wide- including roughly 11,000 who have experienced child abuse at the hands of those within the system that are supposed to help them. Our system for caring for children is broken… and yet we want to restrict access to responsible tools like contraceptives to keep fueling our systems with more children to be traumatized within them.

The systems are so broken…. And yet all intertwined.

I want to but can’t even think straight enough to get into the topic of private prisons and incarceration and how it ties into all of this. You can read more in this article about how women are becoming the largest group of incarcerated people, which leads to more children in the foster care / child welfare system. If it was truly about life, the problem wouldn’t directly feed into the mouths of our monstrously broken systems. People wouldn’t be trying to rope adopters and adoptees into the abortion conversation as acceptable collateral damage that doesn’t deserve to use their own voices and tell their own sometimes less palatable stories.

Returning to those 666 laws (that all specifically target poorer families, Women & Children, BIPOC & Immigrants), they seem rather insidious in light of the Roe V Wade ruling and the Governors vow to get rid of abortion. If it was about life, black and brown women wouldn’t have higher mortality rates during childbirth than in any other ‘ well developed country’.

I’m tired of expecting politicians and government officials to actually listen. I’m tired of trying to actually fight for human rights and equity and adequate affordable healthcare. I’m tired of words losing meaning and pro-life really just becoming a catchphrase for anyone who is only pro birth and could care less what happens after womb and through to tomb.

I care. I really do. What happens when your country continues to march on with their freedom and say “oh, but not for you!”? “you’re too Different / Black / Brown / Colored / Female / old to have a right to life!”

I don’t really know how to end this post… so I’m going to end it here. I wish I had something positive to end with, but I’m not at that point with any aspect in this journey right now. If you’ve read until the end, thank you for sticking this through with me!