How We Become Parents

Today the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, ending a woman’s constitutional right to abortion, and thereby changing how millions of Americans will become parents. This devastating decision comes without policies such as universal health care or funding for childcare to support new parents, and will impact parenting and the responsibility that comes along with it for generations to come. We don’t need to explain any of this to you, but saying it anyway somehow feels necessary.

As anyone reading this newsletter knows, the idea of parenting and the actual experience have a great distance between them. 

Parenting involves the deep desire to care for another person’s physical, emotional, and social needs for the rest of your life. It means putting someone else before yourself most hours out of the day and most days out of the year. Parenting is wearing your heart on your sleeve, the acknowledgment that on any given day you may only be as happy as your unhappiest child. 

Parenting is a commitment and a gift. It is wonderful, joyful, hilarious, diverse, expansive, complex, complicated, confusing, challenging, confrontational, full of surprises, heartbreaking, and exhausting. 

Being able to choose how and when we become parents is a fundamental human right.

Also, to tell you another thing you already knew, but somehow Supreme Court Justices can’t quite appreciate, parenting is hard. Actually, it is not just hard; for those who do not have the necessary resources, it is agonizingly difficult. Asking a parent to choose, for example, whether they will eat or feed their child (it is always the latter), is inhumane. And the fact that this decision comes at a time when many parents–and many people in general–are struggling so deeply to provide for their own physical, emotional, and social needs is baffling and beyond irresponsible. This is yet another uphill battle after an exhausting few years of parenthood. 

Going forward we will focus on how we can be advocates for women’s health, particularly in states where trigger laws have already gone into effect, and especially in communities of color and other low-income, marginalized communities who will be most impacted by this decision.