Trigger Warning

I used to be pro-life.

Or at least that’s what I called it. I thought I believed it out of love. I thought “Abortion is murder” and believed my god above was proud. I wasn’t loud. I was quiet in my condemnation of the crowd of sinners who used the left-wing media to push their gay agenda. Trying to steal god from our country and constitution. Trying to open closed borders to criminals. Trying to take my rights away. I would say “Bad guys will still get guns.” and “we should not give assistance to the lazy.” It’s all hazy now. I used to sit in my pew and think “I won’t let them brainwash me” as the words of pedophiles and hypocrites put me into a right-wing trance. I believed I was superior.

I used to be pro-life,

without any life experience. I listened to hatred disguised as love. I had a hand placed over my mouth—a symbolic hand, at first. I pledged allegiance to a flag which wanted to strangle me. Well, not me specifically—I was exactly what they wanted me to be. Innocently judgmental. I used to say “reverse racism” and “manifest destiny.” Yep, that was me.

And then I got a lot smarter.

I taught a class of tots whose life experience had been hard work, whose parents were not criminals, yet could be arrested for trying to better their life—one border hop at a time. I pushed kids into corners and shut off lights so we could practice giving white men their gun rights. I held a twelve-year-old’s hand while she claimed she was being stalked, and she wondered about abortion under her breath. A man who knew better wanted to place a hand over her mouth.

I walked out of a church that had spent my life silencing me—telling me to be sweet, behave, be quiet, when I needed to be brave. I lie in my bed at night and cry for the child I used to be—the one who loved girls but refused to see how many women had betrayed me. White women who played me, and told me my place was in the home.

What home? America the free? The world power trying to steal all the power from me? My place is in that classroom where those children need a pillar of certainty. Where I can’t possibly make ends meet. Where my healthcare and mental health come secondary.

Did you think after I dismantled all the systems of oppression in my life—after I was assaulted, first by men, and then by truth—that I would settle down and become some little man’s wife?

I used to be pro-life,

but it was always a lie. It’s pro-conformity and pro-capitalism and pro-christian white. I’m pro choice now, because I believe in real life.