In our house, politics is not a hushed topic. So, it’s not out of the blue that the young teen is particularly engaged in politics (and of course, cooking). He started a Save the Earth club in third grade. He got into the birthday party as fundraiser of his own accord—at ten. He’s protested Vermont Yankee, attended a vigil regarding Troy Davis’ death penalty verdict, and he’s marched for Pride, walked for the women’s shelter and held signs for progressive candidates from Obama to Dwight to Sullivan to Narkewicz. For a few years now, he’s read the newspaper in the morning. He’s added the New Yorker to his reading, too (as well as Brain, Child Magazine).
So, we talk about reproductive justice and feminism the way some people talk, maybe baseball. That’s to say it’s a very usual topic, not a loaded one. Morals—are pregnant teens making better choices by not parenting than parenting, say or what happens if there’s a birth defect and you know it—surrounding pregnancy come up in conversation. Rather than pronounce from on-high a right or a wrong, I try to bring out this point: unless you’re in someone else’s shoes you really can’t know whether a decision this personal is right or wrong for that person.
This is not to say that I don’t have opinions. I agreed, for example, with my third guy when we were in the throes of Teen Mom together that Catelynn and Tyler, the couple who opted for adoption, made a mature and ultimately wise decision for themselves and their baby girl. But I digress.
Having spent some of my twenties as an abortion counselor, I really do believe that the whole walk a mile in my shoes thing is at the crux of a shift we need to make about women’s agency over our bodies, from abortion to contraception (really? In 2012, we are worrying about this? Yes, we are.). Before sitting in a small counseling room I might not have believed that sometimes you sleep with your fiancé’s best friend or some women use every form of birth control and still get pregnant or a large, stressed, breastfeeding mother whose husband is unemployed might not realize she is pregnant until she’s well into the second trimester. I believe all these things, though. And I believe that regardless of the why, every single woman who feels she needs—or wants—an abortion should have access to one.
Saskia tries on her brother’s ski boots.
This is why I’m enjoying the notion that for the National Network of Abortion Funds’ National Abortion Access Bowl-a-thon when you go bowling, you have to wear someone else’s shoes. You may not walk a mile, but you are taking some steps at least.
Despite not wanting to take on a big organizing project, I do want to encourage my friends—and my friends’ kids—to bowl for this essential cause of fostering empathy for what it might be like to walk in someone else’s shoes. I am officially on the team for the Abortion Rights Fund of Western Massachusetts. Here’s what I don’t want: I don’t want any woman to have to choose between paying rent and paying for an abortion. I don’t want any woman to have to choose between paying for food and paying for an abortion. Choice isn’t choice if you can’t access the choice. That’s the whole story, one that’s been muddied by “conscience” clauses and legal ninja maneuvers on the part of the right. It’s every Senator voting against access to contraception last week. It’s a message I’m entirely comfortable talking about; I hope you might be, too, but even if you’re not, it’s bowling. And bowling is fun.
