I am pro-choice because I am pro-life. I believe in protecting the living—mothers, children, and families—not just the idea of life.
If your stance on “life” ends the moment a baby takes its first breath, you’re not pro-life. You’re pro-birth. You’re pro-control.
The Choice That Isn’t Yours to Make
It is insane that anyone other than a woman and her doctor are involved in the most personal decision she can face. The right to choose was recognized by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1973), which held that the Constitution protected a woman’s liberty to decide whether to continue a pregnancy before fetal viability. When Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) overturned that precedent, the decision was thrown to individual states—stripping millions of women of bodily autonomy and medical privacy (Rosenbaum, 2022).
This shouldn’t be up for debate. Medical decisions belong in exam rooms, not courtrooms.
When “Pro-Life” Ignores the Living
The same government demanding that women give birth is simultaneously threatening the very programs that help families survive afterward. SNAP, WIC, and Medicaid have been hanging in the balance all month, with millions of Americans left wondering if their basic needs will be funded—or used as political leverage.
That contradiction became impossible to ignore in November 2025, when families went without SNAP entirely during the federal government shutdown—not because food insecurity vanished, but because Congress stalled. Benefits were frozen while grocery prices kept climbing, and parents were told to “wait it out” as if hunger were a scheduling inconvenience. SNAP was eventually restored only after a small group of Democrats caved and voted for a stopgap bill that preserved funding at the expense of other protections and long-term priorities. The aid came back—but the message was clear: families are bargaining chips. If access to food can be suspended to force political leverage, then this was never about protecting life. It was about control, dressed up as compromise.
Affordable childcare remains a dream. Wages still don’t match the cost of survival (Pew Research Center, 2023).
So let’s be honest: if this country wants to demand birth, it needs to fund the lives that follow. Otherwise, it’s not a “culture of life.” It’s a pipeline of control, pain, and poverty—disguised as virtue.
The Children Left Behind
In states with abortion restrictions, foster care entries rose by 11% compared to states without those restrictions (Donohue et al., 2023). There are already more than 370,000 children in the U.S. foster care system—and far too many of them are not being adopted, not being cared for, and not being seen (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2024).
And yet, I once had an acquaintance confidently share a video that argued even a child raped by a family member should be forced to carry the pregnancy—because “they can always give it up for adoption.” The idea being: just birth it, hand it off, get therapy. As if trauma is transactional. As if the body, mind, and soul of a child can be patched up with paperwork and prescription pads.
But here’s the problem with that sanitized fantasy:
- Therapy isn’t free.
- Adoption doesn’t erase a destroyed childhood.
- And the foster system is not a haven.
The truth is, the child welfare system is underfunded, overwhelmed, and cracked wide open. Children bounce between homes. Siblings are separated. Abuse goes unnoticed. Social workers are burned out. Foster parents are stretched thin. And the children—the actual children—are the ones who suffer.
Where is the pro-life movement when those kids are aging out of the system at 18 with no family, no stability, and no safety net? Where are the marches for them?
Because adoption is not a magical fix. It’s a trauma response system, and it was never meant to bear the weight of political ideology.
So when someone says, “They can just give the baby up,” I want to scream: And then what?
What happens to that baby? What happens to the mother? What happens to the foster family drowning under the weight of ten other placements?
The truth is, they don’t know.
And worse—they don’t care.
My Fire Started Generations Ago
If you’ve read my other blog today, you’ve already met her. Lucia—my ancestor, an early female doctor—risked everything to help women in need. She performed abortions when it was illegal, was arrested for it, changed her name, and kept going. Not because she didn’t value life, but because she understood that a woman’s survival is life.
Lucia wasn’t just practicing medicine—she was practicing resistance. And now, generations later, I carry her defiance in my chest as I raise my daughters in a world still trying to control their bodies.
This isn’t politics. It’s bloodline.
Where Did Freedom Go?
America was supposed to be founded on freedom. That’s the myth we all grew up reciting—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Freedom of religion. Freedom of privacy. Freedom to live without government overreach. But somehow, that idea got warped into something unrecognizable.
Because what kind of freedom is it when women are surveilled for miscarriages, their medical data picked apart by prosecutors looking for “signs of abortion”? What kind of liberty is it when pregnancy losses trigger criminal investigations—as if grief isn’t already punishment enough? What kind of country forces a woman to hold a funeral for an embryo, but offers no funeral for her autonomy (The Guardian, 2024)?
We’re not protecting life.
We’re criminalizing pain.
We’ve replaced compassion with control.
And when the state begins to dictate how you grieve, how you birth, and how you heal—freedom is no longer a founding value. It’s just a ghost we keep pretending is still here.
The Real Meaning of Pro-Life
Being pro-choice is being pro-family, pro-healthcare, pro-dignity, and pro-justice. It’s not about dismissing life—it’s about demanding better for it.
It means recognizing that real life is messy, complicated, and sacred. That every pregnancy carries a story, a circumstance, a human being who matters. That some pregnancies are miracles, some are traumas, and some are simply not sustainable—and that the people living them deserve care, not condemnation.
To be pro-choice is to believe that families thrive when they are built on choice, not coercion. That healthcare decisions belong to the person living in the body, not politicians playing morality theater. That dignity means trusting women to know what’s right for their own lives, their own children, their own futures.
If you want fewer abortions, start with support, not surveillance.
Start with resources, not religion.
Start with compassion, not control.
Start by seeing women as full humans—not vessels, not symbols, not battlegrounds.
You can’t shame people into parenthood and then abandon them to survive it alone.
You can’t call it life if you refuse to nurture it once it’s here.
Being pro-choice means refusing to settle for survival—and fighting for a world where families are wanted, supported, and free.
References
Donohue, J., Levitt, S., & McKinney, T. (2023). Association between restricted abortion access and child entries into foster care. JAMA Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.2811533
Pew Research Center. (2023, August). Inflation, wages, and the struggle to afford essentials. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2023/08/14/inflation-wages-and-the-struggle-to-afford-essentials
Rosenbaum, S. (2022). Roe v. Wade and the right to privacy: The medical and legal consequences of Dobbs v. Jackson. New England Journal of Medicine, 387(8), 713–715. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp2207416
The Guardian. (2024, September 24). Women are being prosecuted for miscarriages after Roe’s fall. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/24/abortion-prosecutions-roe-v-wade
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families. (2024). Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) Report. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/data-research/adoption-foster-care
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