Full disclosure, the majority of this post is not about my gremlins. Just fyi.

Summer off and running and I’m sweaty already. Less sweaty than last year of course when I was having to keep a little more giddy-up in my step at all times to make it to the bushes in time to spew vom, but still sweaty. I’m also up about 15 pounds from this time last year, partially due to not having 2 life sucking leeches churning around in my insides and also somewhat due to the fact that I am a disgusting piece of s of a slob kebab sloth right now and cannot find the motivation or energy to move my body in any capacity other than what is needed to sustain basic existence. I’m fried guys. Fried. I just want a long nigh-nigh, is that too much to ask for? Actually at this point I’d be thrilled with like 3 hours straight of zzz’s. Even like 2.5 hours. Anything. And yet despite our insane amount of awake time the babies emerge from the night into the pastel colored dawn with the brightest little eyes and the gummiest little smiles. It is only Gates and I that are stumbling around and forgetting things and looking every ounce like the half dead trash that we are. I’d like to get back to the energy of a 6 month old baby. While I’m at it I’d like to get back down to my birth weight too but if wishes were goats we’d all have a colony of them, wouldn’t we?

Besides being nocturnal little spider monkeys the babies are… fine. Blobby. Kinda boring. KIDDING they are great. Hilarious. Chatty. Actually yea kinda blobby though. Especially Spencer who, despite making some advancements with his head control, mostly can’t hold his big noodle up for very long and it will just unceremoniously bonk down onto the ground when he quickly exhausts himself after holding it up to peer around like a nosy owl. He also has had absolutely no interest in sitting up and will immediately slump forward and fold in half like a nimble gymnast if we try to prop him up to a sitting position. Cramming his rolls into the Bumbo seat kind of works and gives some torso support but after a few minutes he is tilting off to the side in a way that seems to be quite uncomfortable and he will start making little bleating sounds like a baby sheep and looking very offended and so we peel him out of there pronto. Sasha has none of these issues but she does sport a look of permanent offense on her face. She’s got the RBF mastered and that brings me joy. My kids are so advanced!

Gates and I both had kind of exciting months career-wise, with him landing a big new role and me receiving an award at work that was really unexpected and I am still blushing over. Not being one to like being in front of large groups ever since crippling stage fright plagued me in college all of the pictures of me accepting the award (in front of my entire organization, eek!) look like this:

Lol. Super humbled and embarrassed and overwhelmed. And so very grateful.

Speaking of the work that I do… this country is devastating me right now. I know the people making the laws and supporting the laws don’t have to actually have to look into the desperate eyes of the people who are being affected by what they are enforcing which is a true travesty because I would like to think that NO ONE could be so cruel after hearing even ONE heartbreaking story.

I’m jumping on my soap box for a second, come along for the ride if you want. If not, here’s a good place to stop reading. I am not looking to debate anyone on anything, just get a load off my chest and present some of the reasoning for my beliefs. I do not claim to be an expert on this subject, but as someone who has experienced pregnancies and is now learning to parent, and also as a health care professional who has worked in a family planning center in a major metropolitan city for the past decade, I not only bring personal experience to my musings, but also the experiences of thousands of people that I have interacted with within the context of my career who have encountered an unplanned pregnancy. So maybe I do bring a level of expertise to this narrative.

Here’s where I will begin, with a tale of my privilege. Privilege here refers to the fact that I fully understood how babies were made prior to taking a calculated risk by having intercourse without using contraception, resulting in my one unintended pregnancy, which ended in miscarriage. I was born into an amazing family, with amazing parents who gave us a sex talk that not only scientifically informed, but even bordered on explicit with facts, at an age when we were old enough to comprehend what we were being told, but before we had been exposed to anything truly sexual in the big bad world on our own. I am privileged in the fact that I was never abused, raped, assaulted, groped, touched inappropriately, or forced into anything sexual in nature as a child. I am privileged in the fact that as I grew and developed in a sexual being I was able to make the choice to not have intercourse throughout middle school and high school, and no one really tried to force me to make a different choice. Occasional whining and pressure, but never threats or acts of emotional or physical manipulation trying to change my mind.

This brings me to my first two points.

1) Not everyone gets “the talk”. So many young adults and teens that I have encountered in my line of work have a shockingly inaccurate understanding of how their bodies work. Here is a tiny taste of things young adults have told me about pregnancy:

• They only have sex with virgins because virgins can’t get pregnant
• They only have sex at night because sperm are asleep at night
• If you pour Mountain Dew “down there” after sex you can’t get pregnant
• If he “nuts” earlier in the day, he won’t have sperm during sex later that day
• If you get a STD of any kind you can’t get pregnant or get someone pregnant
• You can’t get pregnant if you are on top

I could go on. And on. And on. Some of these conversations occurred during a visit in which the individual found out that they were indeed pregnant. I imagine it is difficult to hear, comprehend, retain, and then apply new knowledge such as “Mountain Dew is not birth control” when you are in a situation where you are finding out that you are pregnant when you thought you were being safe. If you are reading this and rolling your eyes, or wondering how people could be so stupid… take a nice deep breath in… taste that? That is your own privilege. Lucky you, never having to be in the shoes of the reproductive heath under-educated and uniformed. If you had/have awesome parents like I do, who taught you about the birds and the bees – you should thank them. Or maybe you had a Sex-Ed class in middle school or high school that taught you the facts of life. If you did, you were lucky! Wisconsin once had something called The Healthy Youth Act, which required that sexual education taught in the public school system was medically accurate and comprehensive. It was repealed by good ol’ Scotty in 2012, so that abstinence-only education could be the way of the cheese land. This doesn’t mean that every school has to provide this education, it actually just means that if they are going to teach something, it doesn’t have to be comprehensive. So many schools just say, “eh”, and actually teach nothing. Is that act where the blame should lie for the woefully misinformed youth in this state? Or should it come down to the parents to talk to kids about sex? Does it actually matter who is to blame? Can we agree that it is a problem if each and every girl and boy, man and woman, and anyone in between – does not fully understand their bodies and how reproduction works? And abstinence sounds great doesn’t it? Just don’t have sex! How hard can it be to resist those crazy sexual urges that humans experience, especially during the hormone surging teen years? All I have to say about that is, if THOUSANDS of priests in the Catholic Church who had the strength of God on their side couldn’t resist their sexual urges how is it fair to hold every adolescent in the world to a higher standard?

One of the best parts of my job is the interactions I have with youth and teens where I provide some of this sexual education before they have experienced an unplanned pregnancy, STD, or even sexual activity. When I can talk to them about safe sex, refusal skills, sexual coercion, and yes – abstinence. We talk to EVERY minor about choosing abstinence. Bet you didn’t know that! So when you talk about “defunding” clinics that provide family planning, part of that actually means that for some individuals you might be eliminating their only chance at obtaining the understanding that “just saying no” is a choice that they have every right to make. Do you know how many times I have talked to a young person about sex and when I bring up the idea that they could tell their partner that they don’t want to have sex they are legitimately surprised that this is an option? While you were growing up did your parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, etc help you understand that you are in control of your body and you have every right to say NO to drugs, alcohol, sex, and anything else that made you feel uncomfortable? If so, you were, and are, privileged.

2) The world is a terrible place, and humans do terrible things to each other. Rape occurs, domestic violence is rampant, molestation is common (I’m looking at you, Boy Scouts), incest is not just a gross storyline for TV crime dramas (or if you follow the Duggar family, apparently one of the consequences of extremely repressed sexuality). Pregnancy DOES occur due to unwanted sexual contact. People opposed to abortion are quick to point out that these pregnancies appear to rarely occur, and perhaps of the limited data collected for these statistics, pregnancies due to rape, molestation, etc don’t make up the majority of the unplanned and unwanted pregnancies that occur. But even if pregnancies due to these circumstances truly do occur very rarely… does that matter? Isn’t JUST ONE person having to experience a pregnancy due to a terrible circumstance enough of a reason to make sure people have access to legal and safe services? Not just abortion services, but all family planning services. It is devastating that I have literally had young women in college coming in to start contraception, not because they are sexually active or planning to start having sex, but to be protected from pregnancy IN CASE THEY ARE RAPED. It is devastating that married women with children are desperate for something to prevent another pregnancy but need something discrete, because their husbands can’t find out they are using birth control, because they would be punished if found out. It is devastating that even when a victim of rape is brave enough to seek care she may not be offered emergency contraception – a medication that could prevent pregnancy -depending on where she seeks care. In 2017, 22 hospitals in Wisconsin were fined for not complying with laws regarding emergency contraceptive access for rape victims. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE.

History has shown time and time again, unequivocally, that decreased access to reproductive health care increases the number of unplanned pregnancies. More unplanned pregnancies = more abortions. Just like the party pushing to ban abortions is quick to tell you in regards to guns… making guns illegal does not stop people from getting them, the exact logic rings true for abortions. Making them illegal has never, and will never stop them. If decreasing abortions is truly the end goal, I don’t understand why those same people with their “pro-life” signs are not out there yelling just as loudly about getting birth control available for one and for all. Texas is a prime example of cause and effect: funding was cut to the largest provider of family planning services in Texas in 2015. Contraceptive use fell sharply. Medicaid paid births rose by 27%. Combined with the law passed in 2013 to restrict abortion access in Texas, it is estimated that 100,000 and 240,000 women aged 18 to 49 in Texas have tried to self-induce abortion at home. Prior to Roe v Wade estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s range from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. Even worse – prior to Roe v. Wade, as many as 5,000 American women died annually as a direct result of unsafe abortions. Why would we go back?! You can’t have it both ways. You can’t fight to prevent people from accessing family planning services used to control their reproduction, and then fight to limit their options when they get pregnant. We need to work together at the source – PREVENTION. Prevent unintended pregnancies, prevent necessity for the majority of abortions. And our work shouldn’t end there. Support measures to expand Medicaid and affordable health insurance plans, low and no cost childcare, paid parental leave, affordable housing, and for the love of God stop shaming people with a bunch of kids who are on public assistance and WIC because THEY CHOSE LIFE just like the signs you shoved in their faces said to. Take care of those babies you want born. Foster. Adopt. Otherwise it’s all a big sham.

Oh and here’s the second part of the secret – there won’t ever be an “end” to abortion. There are always going to be circumstances where abortion will save lives. I personally have never had to be in a circumstance where I needed to consider abortion, but I would like to think that the people who love me would support me in a decision to have an abortion if doing so would save MY life. Right? Actually, I have been in a situation where I want to abort something – I would like to abort religion out of politics. It is unfathomable to me that there are people who think that their God and their beliefs are somehow more important than the beliefs of others. Unfathomable.

Lastly, pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting is flipping hard. HARD. On its best days it’s hard – for me – a privileged, upper middle class, highly educated, fully loaded support systemed, disposable incomed, plenty of opportunity for “me time”, non single- parenting adult. Take away any single one of those descriptive terms and the role of parent becomes even harder. Take away them all and I can’t even imagine that reality. And that’s the reality of so many women and girls in this country right now staring at 2 pink lines on a white piece of plastic, who never wanted to be in the situation they are now finding themselves in and whose choices now are limited to what a group of old white men have decided for them. #freedom #america

Here I am winded, and disheartened and sad, stepping off my soapbox. Thanks for listening.