My mother never thought she wanted children. She did however want a company. She started one. It was a lot of work, non stop work, but the work worked and after a few years she decided to step away for a week or so, to spend a vacation with her young husband in Mexico. They did. They rested for the first time in years. They looked at the sunset. She got pregnant. My mother wasn’t ready to have a child. She’d only just come to meet herself as an adult. So, after a great deal of consideration and conversation, she ended her pregnancy. I asked her about it and she said “the thing that no one will understand unless they’ve had a baby, is that when you’re first pregnant it’s not a child, it’s part of you, it’s your body, it’s your exhaustion, your discomfort, it’s your heart pumping the blood. You can’t force anyone to feel that way.” She knew, not without sadness, that she did the right thing. (And still does.) A few months later. (Five.) She wanted a child. Why? Because she did. Suddenly, desperately, she wanted a child. Shortly thereafter, I was conceived. (Before my mother’s previous pregnancy would have come to term.) So why am I pro choice? Partly, of course, because I wouldn’t be here without Roe v Wade. But mostly for my young mother or anyone else who, for whatever reason of their own, would like to be able to choose for themselves. When I asked her about it today, she said, “when a woman is pregnant and she doesn’t want to be, she will find a way not to be. I know that because when my friends were sixteen and things happened, they found a way. It just wasn’t easy and it wasn’t affordable and it wasn’t safe. We don’t want that again.” (Thanks mom. For having me and letting me share. This picture of the two of us, in other news about futures we could not have predicted at the time, is at the base of the World Trade Center in 1993.)