Since the earliest times… since women first realized what was growing in their bellies and decided they already had too many mouths to feed, or no room for another child in the cave, the tent, the hut, or the hogan, they have found ways to eliminate fetuses they either could not, or chose not to support. Before wire coat hangers were invented, they used sticks or twigs, or herbal concoctions to induce miscarriages.

My great-aunt, born in the late 1800s, used wire coat hangers or knitting needles. Her husband was a handy-man and an alcoholic. She alone raised most of the food her family ate. And she raised her daughter’s son, the one her daughter abandoned when she decided she didn’t want a baby after all. Shortly thereafter, the baby’s father, my uncle, abandoned him too, leaving my great-aunt with the full responsibility of another child, just what she’d risked her life so many times to avoid.

After Roe v. Wade, women no longer had to try to abort themselves or sneak off to some quack’s garage for an abortion, or have the procedure performed on a kitchen table by someone untrained and working in conditions that were neither clean nor safe and sterile. Many pregnant girls died from infections. Some lived until they got home, then collapsed and bled to death in front of their horrified families.

Then a law was passed that allowed women access to real doctors and sterile environments. If any of you were ever young, consider what you might have chosen to do when you were thirteen or fifteen and had to go home and tell your parents you were pregnant. Might you have panicked enough to do what you had to in order to keep from having that terrifying conversation, and possibly being forced to become an unmarried, teen-age mother?

What if, when you were older, your doctor told you that if you carried the baby to term, you would die, leaving your other small children without a mother (and maybe even a father, if you were already a single mom)? Would you tell the doctor that you would be happy to die so the fetus could be born, then raised by your ten-year-old son or stuck in a foster home, probably permanently separated from the only family he or she had? When faced with a life or death situation, our survival instinct almost always wins.

I learned a long time ago that—unless it was my life or the fetus’s—I would not choose an abortion. The one time I thought I might be pregnant, my husband told me in no uncertain terms that he would leave me if I was and didn’t abort it. I advised him to find an attorney and have divorce papers drawn up.

I do not accept that anyone else has a right to make that decision for me, or that I have a right to make the decision for anyone else. I respect the rights of the pro-lifers to practice what they preach, but will not give up what I believe in and submit to the demand that everyone must believe as they do. I am clearly pro-choice: no one but the woman involved can make such a decision, based on her own religious beliefs and ethical codes, and must allow others the same freedom. Anything less seriously infringes on our religious freedom, among others.

While I respect your right to believe as you wish, I do not accept your insistence that I must believe as you do, or do what you believe. I would prefer that you acknowledge my right to believe what my religion or my heart, brain, and experience tell me. The only way the fanatics on either side of this argument can win is to permanently eliminate those who disagree with them! Speaking of which, I find it ironic and almost unbelievable that the most vocal and radical Right-to-Life proponents are comfortable with taking the lives of those who do not share their beliefs!

Why is the life of a doctor with a family of his own to raise and support of less value than a few cells that may or may not survive in the womb to become a child? The fetus cannot survive on its own until it is born, then fed and cared for by others for fourteen or eighteen years, assuming that the mother doesn’t miscarry or die before the fetus is viable.

How do you know with any certainty exactly when a few cells in a womb has a soul or becomes a person rather than a potential person? If you tell me that God told you so, I would like to hear a recording of the conversation, assuming that you can verify the true identity of the speakers.

If you turn the clock back to before Roe v. Wade and do away with the religious freedom and other freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution of the United States, you will be forcing your sisters, daughters, mothers, and friends to seek out back-alley quacks who are likely to kill your loved ones, those who believed themselves to be in situations desperate enough to risk their lives to not be pregnant.

And tell me, please, if you would love a child born to your daughter if the father was a mentally deranged, genetically damaged, drug addicted, sexual predator as much as you would love the child born to your daughter and her husband, within a happy (or at least, legal) marriage.

My mother learned she was pregnant with me not long before she learned my father’s heart condition had worsened and he probably had not more than a year or two to live. In 1940, she went to a reputable doctor to have a ‘tumor’ removed. She believed she had let the doctor know the true nature of the tumor. In 1940, the great majority of married women worked only in the home. My mother had little education, virtually no work experience, and no marketable skills. She wasn’t sure she could get a job to support herself and my older sister, let alone a new baby. She was, in fact, quite terrified.

The doctor either misunderstood what she wanted or was pro-life long before that label existed. I am convinced that if he had complied with my mother’s wishes, I would not have known the difference. I’m happy he didn’t abort me, whatever his reason. And I’m not sure I would have made a decision different from my mother’s, had I ever found myself in the same situation.

I don’t believe the pro-life versus pro-choice argument is necessary or useful. For the fanatics on both sides, you should understand that you will never convert your opponents to your opinion, your beliefs. Don’t demonstrate your opposition by killing those who disagree with you. Not only is it the antithesis of what you’re preaching but, based on my understanding of religion, is the antithesis of what most of the hundreds of different religious denominations and sects teach is the path to salvation.

You cannot stop a practice as ancient as mankind itself. You can only force the desperate to once again—in the twenty-first century—resort to dangerous and primitive solutions. I believe that would be an even greater sin!