Blogging for Choice

Today is, in case you didn't know it, Blogging for Choice Day. So usual despite my desire to keep this site relatively apolitical, I'm going to do my part.

I was never one who really had a strong opinion one way or another about the Roe v. Wade thing as a young woman. I was essentially pro-choice because I do not like the idea of anyone telling me what I can or cannot do. Stellar reasoning, no, but that's how my mind worked back in the day.

My attitude toward Roe changed in 1992. That's when I discovered that I was pregnant. I had always wanted to have kids and wanted to have six kids. Under the typical circumstances, pregnancy would have been cause to celebrate and rejoice, but the situation was not typical. For starters, I wasn't married. Not quite the taboo it would have been ten years prior, but in my world, it was unheard of. I didn't know a single person who was pregnant and unmarried in my circle of friends or my entire extended family (which is enormous). Second, I had been dating W. for all of about four weeks when I found out. You can do that math. Needless to say, I wasn't exactly thrilled with the prospect of telling my parents that the person they'd met ONCE and whose family I had never met was suddenly the father of their first grandchild. Classy, yes? Thirdly, I was in college and working as a waitress. Not exactly big bucks.

So there was a quandry. For W. and I there was no choice, really. As soon as we did the test, we decided right then and there that we'd be getting married. Talk about a relationship tester. We had to tell the families and there was much strife, especially from my side of the family. His mother, who worked as a public health nurse and counseled women on birth control took it much better than mine who hung up on me for the first time in my life.

After the initial shock, we move into overdrive and by December--after we'd met in late September--we were married. Seven months later, we became parents. It was not easy. The first couple of years were an almost constant struggle with all the adapting that we had to do as we both graduated from college, found jobs, bought our first house and in our spare time, raised a child.

So, where does Roe factor in? I'll tell you. See, when we got over the inital shock and started deciding what to do, we took our time and really talked about all of our options and what the consequences of our decisions would be. Since we were older--23 and 27--we ultimately felt that we could handle the situation. We'd already been talking about moving in together in January when the new semester started and I had no doubt that he was the person I was going to marry from the day we met, but still, we had to consider everything, which we did. And from that moment on, I understood what "pro-choice" meant. I understood the importance of letting those most affected by circumstances have the CHOICE of how to deal with them. I understood how lucky I was to be able to make the CHOICE that I did, but I could easily see how someone in a similar situation might have felt too overwhelmed and made a different CHOICE.

It's been over fourteen years since that fateful day when my life literally changed forever. I look at my child and realize that no matter how hard things were, I did the right thing for me. I did it because I had a CHOICE.