Quick hit: Back the fuck off

From the blog Speaker’s Corner, whose creator is also responsible for the brilliant Keep Your Boehner Out of My Uterus, comes this heartbreaking story of a woman who terminated a intended and very-much-wanted pregnancy when she discovered that the fetus had dire developmental problems.

We went home. I called my parents. We were supposed to meet them the following weekend for a vacation. We were going to show them photos of their soon-to-be-grandchild. Instead, they canceled their plane tickets, switched to come into our town the following day. We canceled ours. My husband had to fight with the airline to get a refund credit, while dealing with his own grief. I have no earthly idea what my husband told his parents. My parents told my sibling, and other relatives, that we miscarried.

I couldn’t sleep that night. At all. I sobbed, body-shaking sobs, the entire night, on the couch. We both held each other in our arms, sobbing. This was the most pain I have felt in my entire life. And there was no end in sight to the pain. It is still there. Covered, but always there.

As Maya mentioned earlier today, there are a whole lot of people saying a whole lot of untrue, unfair, unhelpful things about reproductive healthcare and reproductive rights. There are a whole bunch of people talking about women who get abortions. It’s high time we heard from those women instead. Everyone else – especially those who depict women seeking abortions as selfish or unfeeling or who call abortion “the easy way out” – can, in the indelicate but entirely justified words of this woman, back the fuck off.