Pro-Choice is Personal for Me

I'm 84 and male. I have a daughter and a granddaughter.

I’m 84 and male. The abortion issue is personal for me.  I have a daughter and granddaughter and a late wife who was passionately pro-choice.  But even if I did not, I would want Congress to guarantee the right to the full spectrum of reproductive health.

Reproductive health is not only a woman’s issue; it is a family issue and a public health issue.  Both family health and public health have been endangered since the Trump majority on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the right for women, their families, and their physicians to manage reproduction.

Abortion is essential healthcare, even with wanted babies.  The Center for Reproductive Rights tells the story of Amanda Zurawski, 18 weeks pregnant when her water broke, a premature rupture of the amniotic sac essential to the fetus’ survival.   “Doctors trained to provide obstetric care typically offer an immediate abortion procedure to patients like Zurawski to prevent a severe and possibly life-threatening infection, caused by bacteria entering the uterus through the ruptured membrane.”

“We ask them [women] what keeps them up at night,” Lupe Rodríguez, the group’s executive director, said. Answers to that question take the abortion issue past individual “rights” and connect it to “reproductive autonomy and bodily autonomy to the conditions that people live in, right? Like whether or not they’re able to feed their kids, whether or not they have money to pay the rent—like everyday concerns.” A family issue, a community issue.

Unlike Bernie Moreno, the GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate from Ohio, who thinks that abortion isn’t an issue for women over 50, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are clear in their support for reproductive freedom.  Donald Trump has repeatedly said he was proud to help overturn Roe v. Wade by appointing conservative justices during his term in office. Lately, Trump has tried to dodge the question.  J. D. Vance, his vice-presidential running mate, has said he favors a federal abortion ban. [For a straightforward presentation of the candidate’s positions.] 

Why is this issue personal?  I have two extraordinary children.  My wife and I loved them from the moment we first met them a month after their birth, when we said “yes” to adoption.  We were well-aware of the fact that they might not have been born if abortion had been legal in the 1960s.

Both my wife and I were passionately pro-family.  Leanne, who died in 2020, exhibited her seldom-revealed militant side, defending a woman’s right to control her body.  She was a quiet feminist; never burned her bra except the time it caught fire in the dryer.  She stood firm about abortion.

My view was more lodged in both a moral and political view of liberty.  The decisions that men and women make about reproduction should be between them, their doctor, and their God.  People of different religious affiliations have different beliefs about abortion.  They should be free to follow those beliefs, but there is nothing in the American religious or political history that the followers of one religion should have the right to impose their beliefs on another. 

Those adopted children are adults now.  My daughter works for Planned Parenthood.