J Victoria Sanders, on why she had an abortion at 15:
“I was just a confused black girl in the Bronx, but I was smart enough to know I couldn’t care for a child then… No one on the corner had swagger like Bronx girls, but it had to be shitty to push a baby carriage around alone. I could barely take care of myself.”
She describes how had once sympathized with the prolife position but changed her mind when she became pregnant.
“In the 1980s and 1990s, pro-life propaganda was hard-core. Sometimes it was just a glimpse of a pink fetus against a black backdrop on a commercial with the loud sound of a beating heart. Other times, protesters carried rosaries, like my mother’s, making it clear: abortion is murder.
When I was younger and more serious, before I got pregnant, I agreed with these people. Because I knew Jesus and I thought they were doing God’s work, saving the babies. What kind of woman killed her child?…
I was given a choice to choose myself over my mistake, this unwanted baby. What would God have me do? To bring a baby to term and leave it at a firehouse was not an option – we did not have Baby Moses laws then. If I became a teenage mother, I feared as a girl that I would always be a statistic, I would never leave the Bronx, and I would never leave my mother. I would always be tethered to the needs of my mother and the needs of my child…..
Later she says:
I follow Jesus’s example, basically…”
J Victoria Sanders “Grown-Up Woman Swagger” in Kim Wyatt, Sari Botton Get Out Of My Crotch: 21 Writers Respond to America’s War on Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health (South Lake Tahoe, California: Cherry Bomb Books, 2012) Kindle edition
Why Sanders thought that the only way to give a baby up for adoption was to bring him to a firehouse is never explained.
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