I wrote a thing about my experience with Abortion on Facebook because I am having such a hard time wrapping my head around how people can behave in such bad faith. I don’t have much to add to it, but here it is:

Years ago, access to safe and legal abortion changed the course of my life. That might sound dramatic to some people, but I’m not here to care about that.

At that time, my partner and I had an unexpected pregnancy and decided that the best course of action for us was to end it. We were both too immature and too unsettled in our lives to be able to successfully raise a child, and so we made up our minds. Don’t get me wrong, had she decided that she wanted to carry that child to term, I would now be a father and we would be doing our best to take care of that child. We just weren’t ready for it – financially, emotionally, anything.

That decision was the beginning of the end of that relationship.

For years after we ended the pregnancy, I believed that the abortion was something that I did to her. That through some error of my own making, I caused her to go through the physical and emotional strain of terminating a pregnancy. Because let me be very fucking clear – in my case, and in what I can only imagine is many others, a woman’s right to choose is a choice between physical and mental anguish and setting your life down a path you were never meant to take.

I failed to see and comprehend the trauma that she was going through. I failed to provide her the support she needed to pull through and move on with our choice. I wallowed in my depression about what I had done and how I could be so stupid and totally missed the fucking picture; that despite everything that we had discussed, this was a burden that she has to carry with her for the rest of her life and all I could do was try to support her.

I chose to make the abortion about me. To make it about my pain and in doing so I fully denied the toll it took on her. It was never about me or my pain. It was and should always have been about her.

The conversation about the right to choose is not hard and it is not nuanced. It should never be about anyone else’s pain other than the woman who must make the choice. It should never have been about religion or the who/what/why of how she got pregnant. It should never have been about what the sperm donor wanted. And it should definitely never have degenerated into the timing of when an embryo can be counted as a human being. That makes everything too simple, too bite sized, too easy to use as a way to disconnect from the human element of the discussion.

My relationship fell apart after we made our choice, but she is now happily married and living her best life. A life that she would never have been able to live had she been forced to carry her pregnancy to term. She has always wanted children and I am so happy that she has found someone with who she can create her family with on her own terms.

I am also living my best life and have built a home with a partner full of more love than I would ever allowed myself to have.

People don’t support a woman’s right to choose because abortion is carefree and easy. A woman’s right to choose is not about hating life and killing babies.

A woman’s right to choose is a woman’s right to be the person she has always intended to be. Full stop.