Guest Post: Pro-choice means so much more

This post was written by a friend of mine with a long and challenging history. She had a beautiful and precocious little girl about a year ago. She is not the only friend I have in similar circumstances, and I am proud to be learning from them. As a pro-choice woman, I fight for access to safe and affordable abortion and contraception so that women can choose not to become mothers. But pro-choice is so much more than choosing not to become a mother. Pro-choice means fighting to ensure that women are free to choose to become mothers without also becoming impoverished. It means ensuring that women who choose to carry a pregnancy to term are not exposed to abuse from those who project their own moral failings on others. It means fighting to protect women who have been raped or are trapped in abusive relationships from the whims of the "father" whether that is in choosing abortion, choosing to adopt out, obtaining child support, or even just living safely. It means fighting to affordable child care and housing and job training. It means fighting for nutrition assistance and cash assistance because just raising a family is valuable labor. So, that's enough from me. I'll let her speak for herself now. The moment I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, I was a bag of mixed emotions. I was thrilled, and wanted my baby so bad after having a miscarriage 7 months prior. I was also terrified, the timing was horrific and I knew there was no way I could provide for my child what I wanted to. This tends to be the case with most unplanned pregnancies. I was on birth control when I got pregnant, I wasn't planning on having a child anytime soon at that time in my life. I was torn. I then faced the first hurdle every woman with an unplanned pregnancy faces: should I abort? For me, I couldn't choose to abort. I had just lost a baby, there was an emotional need to see this pregnancy through. I had a rough pregnancy with my daughter, and because of medical complications there was doubt that I would get past the first trimester without a miscarriage. I made the conscious choice that I was going to see what happened, and if I lost another child so be it, and if the baby survived I would make take the next step from there. That was my choice, and I took comfort in that if I had decided otherwise I would at least have that right to decide in my state without punishment, and I would have access to a sterile and professional abortion if I had chosen that route. Amazingly my daughter did survive the first trimester, but because of complications I was still at risk to lose her. Regardless, I had to face the next hurdle: should I keep the child after it's born? There were bad circumstances when I found out I was pregnant, the father and I had just split up a week prior. I had just left my job, I had no vehicle. The father was only interested in getting drunk every night, and I had no family support that could take me in at the time. Adoption immediately came to mind, but could I do that? It was a really hard choice that I went back and forth with quite a bit and my thoughts on it changed throughout the pregnancy many times. I had decided initially that I would just try to raise the child by myself and if I couldn't do it or felt I couldn't give her the life she deserved I would give her up for adoption. In my opinion that was the right thing to do. There were two times during my pregnancy that the issue of finances, and not having anyone around in a physical manner to help me, made me think there was no way I could even try to raise my child. Those two times I felt that maybe adoption was the only thing I could do for my baby. This is when I learned with horror that my state has no idea what they are doing as far as birth mother's rights. I had started looking at child support laws, adoption laws, what rights I had, and what rights the father had. I discovered a GIANT fatal flaw in my idea of how to handle this pregnancy from the start. You could not give your child up for adoption without the consent of the father. I was shattered because now my daughter's life was at the mercy of an irresponsible person who is looking only to hurt me for his own emotional gain. An even bigger flaw, he already knew I was pregnant, and in my state so long as he verbally stated he was a the father there was nothing I could do to revoke his rights. When I confronted my daughter's father about adoption he refused to take any part in the idea. He also refused to take any responsibility for our daughter in the same breath. He was not willing to raise her on his own, and he was not willing to help out with buying anything that I needed to raise her myself. His mother was supposed to put together a baby shower for me, but I knew early on that her downward spiral into alcoholism was going to put a kink in those plans. I remember being in my last trimester begging the father to please either consider adoption or commit to helping out with this child. I remember feeling sick to my stomach knowing that somehow my choosing not to have an abortion was becoming a trap for myself to become a welfare mom if he didn't get his act together. I never did get my baby shower, and with the help of a few precious friends I was able to bring my daughter home, when she was born 3 weeks early, and have enough supplies to provide for her. But it was only right after bringing her home that my roommate at the time decided to drop the bomb that she was not going to stick around for the end of the lease, she was going to be leaving in two weeks, with 80% of our kitchen. This is where programs like food stamps and WIC saved my ass. Because you know there are actually people out there that legitimately need the help, we aren't all a bunch of sorry slobs trying to get a free ride. Some of us genuinely get screwed over in life, and programs like food stamps and medical assistance are meant for people in those situations. Since I didn't have a vehicle, I started taking my daughter with me on the bus when she was 4 weeks old. We traveled like this every day, for everything. Sometimes it would be an 8 hour trip just to go to the doctors office because of how inconveniently laid out the bus system is here. I would sit and listen to the other passengers talk, a lot of them in similar situations as me. I started to see more and more how a corrupt system had made for a perfect breeding ground of single mothers forced to survive on the system. Try to get ahead, and pay the price causing you to end up back at square one. Women who like me had no local support system, thought they could try to raise their child, only to be slammed with a harsh dose of reality. I had originally set a goal to get a job as soon as possible after the birth of my daughter, but even today when she is a year and a half old I'm still on the waiting list for daycare vouchers. In order to work right now, I would end up essentially PAYING to work because the wages wouldn't even cover my child care costs much less the transportation to and from work. I'm limited to where I can apply because it needs to be on the bus route. When my daughter was around 10 months old I finally obtained sole legal and physical custody of her. This finally set a turning point for me and opened a few new doors. My daughter's father finally got the message and started pitching in more. But until this point he had me completely under his thumb. Before gaining legal custody of our daughter I had tried to get child support established. But the DSS office closed my case almost as soon as I opened it because the father stayed at my house so much. I even called them after they closed the case and asked them how would a woman who is trying to get away from an abusive spouse ever succeed with the way their system was set up? They didn't even put us in separate rooms when they asked how often he stayed at my house. If I had been being beaten I surely would have never had the chance to even say a word to help my case in order to get child support to afford getting away. In my case I went over their heads and went straight to court where they had to enforce the court order for child support. But what about the women who are being abused? How do they get help? Now I am raising my daughter with her father, and we are constantly in a borderline emotionally abusive relationship and only recently are we not completely struggling to get by financially. We are on and off again, and many times I find myself trying to work things out with him simply because I have no other choice but to try to make the best of what I have. Or because I just can't afford any other way of doing things and provide for my child. Even recently, I have many times thought that even though I love my daughter more than anything, this isn't the life I would have chosen for her. I wouldn't have chosen to put her in a family with parents that are in such a damaged relationship, who are so poor, and so off track. I can't help but think about all the women out there who decide to not to abort and find themselves in similar situations, completely unaware that there are laws designed specifically to keep them at home, raising children they can't afford, and on the system. If they have abusive spouses they are even worse off. I can't help but think that there must be countless abortions that happen simply because the women can't give their child up for adoption without the consent of the father, and they don't want to be in my shoes with their lives dictated by how much a man they don't trust is willing to help them. I think of how many welfare moms must be out there that are on the system purely because of the way the system is set up in the first place and not because they ever intended on having to utilize those programs in the first place. You see there are a lot of women just like me, who are just plain stuck. We aren't monsters, we aren't bottom feeders. We are people who were put into tough situations and tried to make the best choices possible. But because of the laws out there working against women, we are forced into a type of single parenting that nobody should have to face.