When I write, I'm very deliberate with my words. I'm painting a picture with vocabulary, invoking emotion through little squiggles on a screen. People regularly thank me for my rawness and honesty. They tell me I am strong and they are grateful for my words because in some ways they help them love others better.
My friend circle, my faith circle, they fill my bucket with words of affirmation. I will always be thankful for this safe place to share my real-time raw feelings as we go about this journey of grieving half of our children. Always thankful.
I wrote the most vulnerable piece I've ever written last Friday.
I read many of the comments. Not all, but many. Some got pretty ugly...and I had to skim right on by. Other comments and shares, I saved. Not to be creepy, not because I know them.
But because they'd experienced healing because of my words.
Some were forced to take a step back from the black and white that paints their worlds.
...and acknowledge the grey.
It's a scary place, isn't it? The grey. It's a place where we're sometimes right. And sometimes very wrong. We don't like to live with the thought we could really ever be wrong.
I know that I don't.
I do know that after Sam died, I couldn't identify with women or families who would ever choose to terminate a pregnancy for any reason whatsoever. I loathed the people who didn't take the opportunity to truly love their babies like I did. I put myself on a pedestal, mostly because others put me there first. I liked the knowledge and the feeling that I did the best thing.
The right thing.
I always said that given the chance, I would have carried Sam to term again if it meant to hold him and to know him. That if I could go back, I know what I would do. I never imagined I would be asked to do exactly that just 6 years later. It was easy for me to look back and tell the world, "Oh yes. This is what I would do again. Not even a question."
I never anticipated those words would ever be tested. And I'd be a liar if I told you we didn't consider ending our pregnancy last year. The one question I made sure to ask with both boys was, "Is he in pain?" If doctors had ever answered yes, our decision may have been different than what ended up being.
With this law in New York, my mind keeps drifting to the parents who get caught in the middle. The parents that are quickly labeled murderers. Parents who have been in rooms anticipating to find out if they're having a boy or girl and instead learn their baby has no functional kidneys. No brain. Severe birth defects for which there is no cure. Parents who have to make end-of-life decisions before birth. They're lumped in with the group that uses abortion as a form of birth control.
But why?
Terminology.
I looked up the definition of abortion. And I'm astonished at how it varies between the medical, legal, and lay communities.
When certain communities define or think of abortion, they imagine a live, viable baby being ripped apart and murdered. It's an image that brings me great sadness; however, this is not the only definition out there.
Did you know that a miscarriage is (or can be) considered an abortion in medical terms? Did you know that a late-term induction can also be considered an abortion? From what I found, there are three types of abortion: spontaneous (miscarriage), therapeutic (performed to save the life of the pregnant woman), or elective (performed at the request of the woman for no medical reason).
I also found that the definitions vary by state.
And therapeutic abortion (terminating for medical reasons) is not as uncommon as you'd think.
When I write, I write with as much love in my heart as I can muster. I am not trying to be "right" or to win an argument here. I'm not trying to convince you to be pro-life or pro-choice. Those terms have become horribly divisive, creating an "us vs them" mentality that I never want to be part of. I avoid using words like "left" and "right," "conservative" and "liberal," because I don't identify with any of them.
I'm not a conservative, pro-life Christian woman.
I'm Kaila. An independent, loving, capable, intelligent person. I'm not perfect at loving others, but I do love people in the best way I can. And for me, loving others means asking more questions than releasing opinions.
This law has made me realize that I have not asked enough questions. I have not spoken to enough mothers who have faced the same decisions that I have and made different decisions. I haven't asked lawmakers why they disagree on definitions or why they've written certain laws the way they do. I fully plan on writing to the authors of this new bill to ask why they wrote it the way they did.
It's not up to me to assign motivation to action.
It is up to me to ask questions.
And I want to help make changes to the definition of abortion, or release the stigma that all abortion kills perfectly healthy, viable babies.
I know my heart hurts over this subject, and I am not alone in that. My grief is still very raw for my own sweet boys. When Sam died, I didn't understand and carried so much anger for women who did not carry to term.
When Gabriel died...I understood more.
Read into this what you wish. People had no problem reading into what I didn't say last Friday. They drew conclusions about me, my family, and my faith that were pretty impressive given the tiny bit of information they had to work with.
Or read what I am saying. That my heart grieves with every parent who loses a child. Every. Parent. That terminology needs to be changed to help define what is abortion and what is not. That all is not black in white.
And for the many of us who have been forced to live in the grey
--I am sorry. I didn't want to be here either.
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